After getting some feedbacks from my lecturers and classmates, I have made some edition on my moving images, such as making the type smaller, put my name gradually of the title, more fade in and out effects for the transitions and also to put a quote at the end of the moving image to strength the concept of sense of belonging.

Below are the screen grabs of my moving image, I have also removed the previous adjustments layers because they were not matching with the mood of the video. Therefore by creating a sad and cool grey tone, I have toned down the saturation, brightness as well as the vibrance for the first part of the film (Before I arrived Macleans Park with my friend), and by creating a happy, shiny and positive tone, I have toned up the vibrance, saturation, greens for the Macleans Park scene. I hope the audience can discover the contrast between two moods by seeing the colour grading.

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Reflection:

Producing a moving image seemed easier than producing a publication when I first knew about the tasks that we had to do, but after putting the footages into Premiere Pro, I found it actually much harder than I thought to create a good quality of video. I realised that there are quite a few things that I have to improve on my moving images, they are:

• Choose a right typography to represent the mood, poetic of my video
• Some of the footages are too long and tells too much information
• The background music of the Sad part could be sadder (?)
• Need more close up shots to show the detail to the audience

Next time if I get to create a video, I will pay attention to these improvements as I don’t want to make the same mistake again.

It was a fun, precious and interesting experience to have the opportunity for doing a poetic-approach project for my location, it does not just valued up my knowledges of the adobe software, I have also gained much more sense of belonging of my location as I have been there quite a lot of times since I have chose it to work on my projects across two semester in 2020. This paper has enabled me to explore the beauty and nature of New Zealand, although the sudden attack of Cover-19 has made everything harder to us at the beginning, I am so grateful that we all have finally made it to this step as well as the guidance from all the lecturers and classmates!

After finished the filming part for my moving image, I now will move on to the stage of deciding the colour grading, background music as well as importing videos and editing on Premiere Pro.

Colour grading:

• From cool/ dark blue grey tone to warm and sunny vibrant tone.
• Represents my mood from lonely, sad to hopeful and joyful.
• Watching sunrise alone at the beach -> Having fun with my friends in my location.
• Shoot from night time until the morning -> shoot in the afternoon.

However, I think the color grading needs to have stronger contrast between darkness to light, otherwise the ideas will not be portrayed strong enough to the audience.

Background music:

• Lonely, sad -> Hopeful, inspiring -> Upbeat, happy.
• Bringing the development of my mood by using sad and negative background to happy and positive background music.
• Sad background music will be used when I was walking at the beach alone and looking at the good old photos.
• Inspiring and hopeful background music will be used when I was inviting my friend and we went to my location together.
• Upbeat music will be used when I found out that my friend gave me the surprise and brought a bunch of friends to play with me, picking up rocks and forming the words “Sense of belonging.

Footages:

• Deleted the unnecessary and failed footages
• Rearranged the order of the footages

Importing videos and editing on Premiere Pro:

• Started adding subtitles (keywords from poem), background music, footages, and adjustment layers (colour grading)
• However, I am still not very familiar with the functions in Premiere Pro, I only know about the basics.
• Some of the footages are too long, they tell too much about the unnecessary contents of the story, I am aiming to make the entire video from 3:30mins to 2:45-3:00mins.
• Typography needs to be chosen considerately, as the current type is not very relatable and suitable for my moving image.

This is a title sequence trial I have produced for my moving image but I am not going to use this as my title sequence, because I will go to my location to take some more proper footages for my moving image including the title sequence.

However, I don’t really like the text and the colour grading of my title sequence, it looks too dark and the typography is looking strange and not well-matched with the mood of the title sequence, in addition, I don’t think this footage is representative enough for my moving image.

Therefore, to re-make the title sequence, I will consider thoroughly which footage I am going to choose, how I inform the message/ idea of my location to my audience by choosing the right colour grading. As well as choosing the suitable typography to use for the whole video.

This is my final storyboard of my moving image, I have made some changes of the storyline as I think the original story was a bit strange and too short, that I don’t think I will be able to tell the audience about what I exactly want the story to be.

I have redrawn the storyboard with more details and and perhaps narrations, before this I was thinking about doing voice over and read the poem out, but then I realised it is better to leave it with background music only, to make the whole video less complex.

Below is the proposal of the filming process:

1. I as an international student went to New Zealand for my studying, but then sometimes I feel lost because I have homesick and was missing the good old days in Hong Kong, therefore I went to Bucklands beach to walk alone and I opened my photo album, looking at the pictures I have taken in Hong Kong with my friends in 2016.
2. Then I left backhands beach and was walking to Macleans Park from night time to sunrise, I opened my photo album again and accidentally click into the photos I have taken with my friends in 2020 in NZ, by looking at the sunrise I started to have some hope and sense of belonging. (Bring the contrast of darkness and brightness by shooting from night time until sunrise)
3. After I went back home I invited one of my friend to go to Macleans Park with me again.
4. The next day when I nearly arrive Macleans Park, I saw a bunch of friends surprising and welcoming me there, and I was so surprised and happy.
5. And then we started to play around there, during the time we play, we discovered some rocks with letters on their top.
6. We mixed and matched the rocks, we formed a word “sense of belonging”.

In this semester break, I have been to my location- Macleans Park to do some filming tests, and making some footages that I think would be helpful for my own moving image. However, there were not so many people, therefore I have just produced some videos of my friend or some strangers playing with the facilities.

The weather on that day was not very nice and perhaps this is the reason why there were only few people playing there. Although these circumstances did not allow me to make some nice footages, I have had a sense and idea of how I can film my moving image better with different camera angles and camera movements.