End of MP3 Blog Post

 Intention Definition & Exploration of Ideas

When doing blog investigations at the beginning of the year, a contemporary artist who caught my attention was Feng Mengbo, who is well known for his works of art relating to retro gaming aesthetics with personal memories from the Cultural Revolution. When I saw his artwork, I instantly got inspired by it because video games played a big part in my life, so I wanted to create something similar to Feng Mengbo's art pieces.

After completing my first video project, I was pretty satisfied with the outcome of it and wanted to move on to creating something that was fairly similar to it. While I was coming up with ideas, I remembered working on a horror-inspired video around Halloween this school year but I wasn't able to finish it because my after effects file corrupted. After that, I got pretty demotivated because I spent a lot of time working on that project so I decided that it was best for me to move on to something new. 

The theme for this project remains the same as my previous project, which is fantasy. The reason why I chose this theme is that there are many different ways that a person can display fantasy since it is a super diverse genre.

Planning:

While brainstorming on ideas and video games that I could recreate, I remembered enjoying watching YouTubers playing horror games in my free time as a kid. One of the games that I really liked playing was Five Night's at Freddy's: a horror game where your goal is to try and survive five nights at Freddy Fazbear's pizza while tracking the animatronics movements through the security cameras. Like FNAF, I would set my stuffed animals up in areas of my house to portray this.

First, I started off by writing the script. In Five Night's at Freddy's, there is a phone guy who gives the player instructions on how to survive the night. To gain some inspiration, I looked up the script for the phone guy from Five Nights at Freddy's and wrote my script based off of it. Then, I had my older brother record himself reading my script as the phone guy from Five Nights at Freddy's.

Producing:

After finishing the script, I searched up photos of the scenes from Five Nights at Freddy's and took inspiration from them to design my overlays. To begin, I started by designing the security camera which looks a little something like this:

At first, adding just black and white didn't give me the grainy security camera effect that I wanted, so I used an effect called "Night Vision" in after effects and applied a little bit of vignette to create the nighttime effect. 

I also used the same effect for my title screen:

Another scene that I recreated:

Then, I moved on to working on the set for my office. I decided to work on this in after effects by using 3D layers. Since after effects does not have preset 3D shapes like blender, I had to manually connect the individual faces together to create a shape. 

Evaluating:

As of now, I am only halfway done with my project and there are still a lot of things that I would like to incorporate into my video such as making a stop motion clip and creating sound effects from scratch. I feel like I overestimated the amount of time that I had because I wanted to finish this before the end of this marking period, but I ended up not having enough time to do the other things that I wanted to do. I also wish that I did more planning prior to making this video because I kind of just went with the flow and created whatever came to my mind at the moment, which was a problem that I had with my last project as well. 

Integrating:

After reflecting on my work, I feel like I rushed a few things in the beginning because I wanted to finish this before the end of the marking period, but I realized that I wouldn't have enough time so I decided to take my time by taking things slow. Now that I have a bit more knowledge about 3D layers in after effects, I can definitely use that skill to create something 3D in the future. I would also like to work on a smaller project because I've realized how I lose a lot of motivation to do things when I work on one specific thing for a long time because I end up thinking about new ideas that I want to do while working on my current project.