For my final project I created a video depicting my morning routine (or what I wish it were if I’d wake up in time).

The inspiration for this project initially came from a video we watched in class that was basically an animated infographic that told the story of Little Red Riding Hood. It was pretty minimalistic visually but full of information. I thought it was so cool.

So after that I knew I wanted to do some kind of infographic type thing. I just wasn’t sure what.

Then I recalled a scene in the movie Stranger Than Fiction starring Will Ferrell. The whole premise of that movie is that Will Ferrell is a character in a book that a popular author is writing, but he doesn’t know it. She narrates his life and it begins to affect his work, love life, and death. It’s an alright story, not a great movie. But none of that stuff is that important, but the part that really stuck with me was the graphics that were used.

This Missouri based graphic design firm, MK12, created the graphics for this movie as well as lots of other ads, movies, and TV shows. The animation they created for this movie is kind of hard to explain. It’s basically like words and graphs and lines laid overtop of video of Will Ferrell going about his business, with the voice of the “author” narrating what is happening. The whole thing can be best explained just by watching it.

After realizing that I wanted to create something along the lines of Stranger Than Ficition, I got to work filming myself. I had my friend, Casey, help film me going about my daily routine and we experimented with different angles and shots. We used my digital camera, which is a Canon Powershot Elph, and I think the quality is pretty good. Probably not as great as if I’d borrowed Alan‘s Flip camera, but it got the job done.

Once I had the footage, I got to work using Final Cut Pro and I experimented a little with the title options to get my video looking the way I imagined it. It was actually pretty difficult and I really wish I’d taken more time to really understand Final Cut Pro before beginning on this. If I’d been more confident with it I think I could have added a lot to my video to make it really interesting. However, I was kind of stressed about time and I kept getting frustrated and confused with the different editing tools that Final Cut Pro offers (there are sooooooooo many).

I tried to do some cool like graphs or at least lines pointing to things. Like I wanted to make more interesting visual elements, but I couldn’t figure out how. Alan showed me how to create lines or arrows or whatever in Photoshop using the checkerboard background layer and then it would show up by itself with nothing behind it but the video, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to do that in Gimp. It made a lot of sense when he showed me how to do it with Photoshop, but on my laptop I only have Gimp because that’s free. And with Gimp, I was completely lost on how to do what I wanted to do. That’s my big regret with this project, not fully understanding the software and not being able to make it work to my advantage.

The audio I used came from a video I saw on YouTube. It’s just instrumental. It’s by this guy FSbeats17.

I don’t really know how to explain how this is a story. I guess there isn’t like a real exciting plot, but this video does tell a story of some kind. There’s only one character, myself, and no climax or conflict, but it does have a setting and a sequence as well as a resolution (I leave for class). It’s definitely not storytelling in the traditional sense, but neither is a lot of the stuff we do in DS106. It tells the story of what happens from when I wake up to when I leave my apartment in the morning. And although it’s not completely true (I rarely have time to sit around watching Food Network in the morning, and I don’t wake up at 9 most days), the majority is real.

The graphic elements also tell a different kind of story. They are there to kind of show the story I tell myself as I am getting ready. As I wake up I think about what my plans are that day, as I get dressed I weigh my options, as I make breakfast I have to navigate my fridge for milk. As I watch TV I go through channels I know, as I put on makeup I have a certain order, and as I put my things in my backpack I run through the list of what I’ll need for that day. It’s not riveting, and it definitely doesn’t have the most beautiful or consistent and interesting graphics, but I am relatively proud of the end result.

This is my final project: