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I was super overwhelmed at first with the lack of specificity and all the infinite possibilities, but I think I have a pretty decent idea already (day 1) which surprised me because it usually takes me a while to come up with a solid idea for normal projects, much less this massive, open-ended one.  I want to create a map/model of the section of campus that I went through on my route.  I’ll map out everything flat, but for the buildings that I entered, I want to create models so they stand out.  I also want to include a can, water bottle, and toy police car since those were the main focuses on my original journey and didn’t involve buildings; plus, they can serve as a tactile factor.  I also want to include little notes in certain places to show my thoughts, and if I can find it, a business card about the Book of Mormon from when some girls tried to recruit me while I was sitting to sketch in the south oval.  For the other sensory piece, I think I might play the playlist that I was listening to at the time, or maybe even record my “thoughts” and play them out loud (e.g. “this is so weird, I’m just stopping in random places to take pictures of random things with my phone, people are gonna think I’m so creepy,” “Wait, what bus stop?  Does it really matter, I know the general area I need to get to, it’s not a big deal if I go a little bit off the directions.”)

ANALOGY EXERCISE

Thinking about all the things I have to do in a day and when I’m going to do them is like a puzzle with way too many pieces. Some things are bigger pieces that require more time, like working on studio projects. Some things have to be left out so more important pieces can be used. In this puzzle, I included the pieces that I usually (try to) get done every day, and left out the pieces that often get neglected (don’t worry, I shower most days). Some days, I might swap out pieces, like relaxing instead of reading for my psych class. It’s kind of like that saying where you get to pick two of three options: sleep, social life, and academics. You can’t have everything.

MIND MAP

When I first went on the journey, I wasn’t really focused on sensory aspects, but more so just looking for things that I thought I would be able to draw for the project.  I didn’t want to try to fabricate or imagine what the senses were (e.g. smell of fresh grass) because it didn’t feel authentic, so I focused more on thoughts, feelings, and ideas.

There were a few points that I wanted to focus on:

1) How places are connected/located in relationship to each other.  I took a couple classes at OSU through CC+ last year but because I didn’t live on campus and only visited a few buildings, I’d always take the bus from the Buckeye Lot to whichever stop was closest to my class and didn’t navigate a lot of campus so I really didn’t understand where buildings were in relation to other buildings.  Over the first few weeks of classes and going on this journey, I really started to understand how everything was connected and it was kind of a revelation for me; it made campus feel a lot more familiar and personal.

2) Anxiety/overwhelming qualities.  When I went on this journey, I decided to take pictures of the things that I wanted to draw for the assignment instead of stopping and drawing them right there.  I was very self-conscious about the fact that I was just stopping in random places and taking pictures with my phone and I knew I looked super weird.  I tried to ignore other people and just stay in my own bubble by putting in earphones and listening to music.  It was also a little overwhelming because I had a lot of things to think about at once: reading the directions, navigating, making sure I wasn’t stopping in from of people, looking for things that I thought I would be able to draw, worrying about how creepy I looked, etc.  I can be a pretty high-strung, anxious person and sometimes it feels like my mind is going faster than I can keep up with.  This chaotic, fast-moving quality eventually became something that I really wanted to incorporate into the project, so the high speed and shakiness of the video, although a little off-putting, doesn’t feel like a detriment; I think it helps reinforce the intent and the feelings that I want to evoke.

IDEA DEVELOPMENT

I started shifting more towards the recording aspect and away from the map/model.  I still wanted to have some sort of map to show how things connected and where I was going, but I decided that sketching a really detailed map or physically creating the buildings would take up a lot of time but not add enough substance to the project to warrant the effort; instead, I wanted to focus my energy on creating a video- something I’ve never done before.  A video would help add context about what was going on, rather than just where I was.

Creating the map with something to show where I was on it at any given time was really difficult; I had a bunch of different ideas about how to approach it. I wanted to use the time lapse feature on Procreate, but I needed to use a screenshot from google maps to reference and that would show up in the time lapse which ruled out a few ideas (e.g. drawing the actual map as I went through it – I would draw Hayes, then part of the oval, then Hagerty, the union, etc. as I went through the journey).  Another problem with the time lapse was that it didn’t take a picture every x amount of time, but every stroke.  So, if I drew one long line, even if it took 20 seconds, it would just show that line appearing all at once. Before figuring that out, I tried a screen recording app, but that would record exactly what was on my screen, so I couldn’t zoom in or move the canvas around.  After I figured out how the Procreate time lapse worked, it was a lot easier because I just used very short strokes to create my path instead of only using a few longer ones.  Once I had a good video of the map with the moving path on it, I used an app to overlay it on top of my time lapse; it ended up working pretty well, but during one of the initial critiques someone commented that it was kind of confusing and suggested that I try making the map a thumbnail rather than overlaying it over the whole screen, which I ended up liking better.

The next step was to make the map match where I was in the video, so I had to speed up and slow down parts of the map.  I’ve never used iMovie before, so the first way I tried to do this took forever and wasn’t perfect.  I had the time lapse in iMovie and split it into sections.  I then tried to add the map by selecting teeny tiny little clips from the thumbnail in My Media window, which was obviously pretty difficult.  After I finished doing this, I had an idea that I thought might work better.  I made the map video its own project, marked on my iPad the locations where I needed to split the video, and split it into different clips that I then dragged into iMovie and adjusted the speed.  I used the picture in picture setting to place the map in the lower right corner.  Then I added in background sounds of wind, walking, traffic, etc that I recorded and music from my playlist.  The song that I chose was Life Goes On by Quinn XCII.  I wanted to use a song from the playlist that I was listening to, and I thought this one fit well.  The idea behind the music was that I put earphones in to put myself in my own bubble and not focus so much on other people, and I think this song is something I’d listen to if I was trying to focus on myself.

My next step is to record a voiceover of thoughts and then edit the sound clips to fluctuate the volume and bring different parts forward at different times.

UPDATE – DEC 10

I watched the video all the way through and wrote down notes for the voiceover, then recorded it in VoiceMemos.  Most people don’t like hearing their own voice on recording, but I really hate it which is why I pushed that part off for so long, but I finally did it and added it into the video.  Now there’s a ton of sounds going on at once and a lot of the time you can’t hear my voice at all (great for me, not so much for the viewer).  Before I started to edit the sounds, I met with Emily to get some feedback.  The biggest thing was that there were some parts that were really shaky and some parts where not much going on, so I need to speed up the boring parts and slow down the shaky parts.  It doesn’t sound like too big of a deal, but that means I’ll also have to edit the map and probably redo the voiceover.  Then I can finally get into editing the sounds, which I have no idea how to do. Yay, Google!  Gabe was there and showed me how to save the video and how to make it loop for the gallery on Thursday.  I’ll be able to submit the file for this assignment, but I still need to figure out how to include the final video in my portfolio because it’s too big to upload directly to this site.  I can try YouTube, but there are copyrighted songs in the video so that might be a problem.

UPDATE – DEC 11

I am so happy I talked to Emily and Gabe! My video is looking so much better.  It was a ton of work – I literally had to start over – but totally worth it.  I tried editing what I already had, but changing the speeds got the map and audio off track with the video, and it was super confusing so I decided to start in a new project.  The video that I was using for the time lapse was originally taken in real time (~16 minutes), but I had sped it up in an app on my iPad to about 4 minutes, then sent it to my laptop to edit it with iMovie, so when I tried to slow down certain parts it got all wonky.  I got the original full-length video and started breaking it up into clips and speeding them up various amounts depending on the context and what I said in the voiceover.  Then, instead of breaking the map up into clips in a different project like I did before, I dragged the whole thing into the same project and broke it up and stretched it to fit right there – so much easier!  I had recorded some background sounds just walking between classes which I used in the first video, but I found out that I could separate the audio from my first full-length video.  I chopped out certain sounds that I wanted to use (leaves crunching, footsteps, buses, doors, etc.) and placed them where I wanted so the sounds made more sense in context, rather than just using one long clip of random sounds that might not match the content and had a lot of wind sound.  Finally, I laid in my super-bootlegged music (I played the song from my phone and recorded it on my iPad – credits to Quinn XCII) and broke it into chunks as well so it would be quieter when I was talking and louder to fill gaps.  When I watched the whole thing through, there were some parts that were too fast and shaky, but I had cut the video down to like 3 minutes so I slowed some of them down.  I had to readjust the map and audio but it wasn’t too bad.  There are still some parts that are shaky, but that comes down to the way I initially recorded it and if I tried to slow those parts down any more it would be awkward and too slow.  Again, I don’t mind the shakiness because it works with my intention – lots going on all at once.

My video is by no means perfect, but I am really proud of myself for tackling a whole new media and teaching myself how to use it.

Here’s a link to the video before I met with Emily and Gabe:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tNkTmM3FYlF7bUkm3VSkZhh-K0g6MMPr/view?usp=sharing

And here’s the final: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oC9DJjQpE_CpJkiQ-6aH6N56AkYW9PsL/view?usp=sharing

Song Credits:

Quinn XCII. “Life Must Go On.” Spotify, 15 Feb. 2019, open.spotify.com/track/3vmsnZF4KPLjbDgZEqwTdL?si=JJ-kC-mgTsa8RF_7cOYaPQ.