Imovie Project

LINK TO VIDEO

 
Artist Statement:

For our project we looked at the issue of sleep deprivation amongst college students. Sleepassociation.org reported that 39% of all adults aged 20-39 suffered from sleep deprivation and “100,000 deaths occur each year in US hospitals due to medical errors and sleep deprivation”. We specifically examine the different activities (computer screens, exercise, drinking) that can keep students from getting a good rest and prevent them from being active participants in their classes. We compare the different approaches students can take such painting relaxing water colors to shredding guitar and banging back fourth bottles of Jager. In the end we show how students who practice good pre-sleep activities can stay awake in class, Jake cannot because he was up late drinking fire water and having a good time which led to nightmares.

Our main method for achieving our goal was the use of a green screen to create serene beach dreams, magic carpet rides, massive cats and jagermeister hair metal party nightmares. We also speed up and slowed down the videos to focus on certain things. Dreams are played at more slow speeds to focus the audience's attention. Scenes outside the dreams move at faster speeds to show more time passing by. The faster scenes also create the illusion of doing more activities before bed. Video transitions like “ripple” and desaturated color schemes also add to the dream like effect.

Unlike most movies, our video didn’t have a script. We chose to communicate our story completely visually with addition of some background music. It also gave us the freedom to go home and shoot our individual scenes how we wanted. We used a storyboard like a script to plan shots and the general direction our video might take. Our storyboard also helped us know what order we wanted events to go in.

Dana was our group leader and formed the initial concept. We all worked together to shoot the initial scenes in which we leave and return to school as well as drew up the outline. For the individual parts, we broke it up evenly. Dana did the storyboard while Becky wrote our concept map and edited the scenes in which we leave and arrive. Christina did the majority of the editing and put everybody’s videos together for the final piece. She also did our title scene and the credits as well as being the group notetaker. Christina also posted everything to her blog page. Jake wrote this incredible artist statement. Additional roles included Simba the Cat and Terrence the Penguin. All of us edited our individual pre-sleep scenes as well as our going to bed scenes before Christina put them together in the final piece.

For the music, Christina wanted to do her dream to “A Whole New World” from Aladdin which lead Becky and Dana to do their to Disney songs as well. Jake found a fitting song for his dream. The rest of the music was added to fill out the rest of the video.

Some of the challenges we encountered included the camera auto-focusing and shooting in a public place like the Calder hallways. Jake had trouble filming his individual scenes due to his lens and had to enlist the help of his roommate. These were minor issues though and the video came together fairly easily.