thesis progress - 12/17/09

first draft of steve's track, working out visual ideas, applying tests and temp animation:

thesis progress 12/17/09 from kendra ryan on Vimeo.

Dec. 17th, 2k9, I had my thesis review with my faculty, and I also made a presentation to all my peers in my program. I got good feedback, and some of the criticisms were pretty unanimous, which is weirdly preferable. I've also taken some time to assess what I think needs help at this point. Here's the breakdown:

1. The prominent feedback was that most of the dialogue was inaudible. For the most part, I think this can be addressed in the final mix. Not every word needs to be crisp and clear necessarily, but there are some lines that should be more prominent than others.

There need to be a few moments where the music drops out entirely (or almost entirely). In particular, @ 01:39, when the voice is saying "I don't think anything can make up for that... child memories like that."

2. The length needs to be edited down to 3 - 3 1/2 minutes (currently 4). When brainstorming visuals, I got hung up in the last part. Steve mentioned he felt it was repeating musically there, and I think the dialogue content is repeating itself too. So I decided to cut out the whole chunk from 02:20 - 02:53 (right after "too bad I don't have it anymore. It's worth a lot of money," and going through "this has always been my underwear drawer.") To accomodate this change, i was thinking of replacing "too bad I don't have it anymore. It's worth a lot of money," with the lines "you just push a button and you got it.... Now I have it. now I'm complete."

3. Overall, the last part needs a lot of work. The idea I'm working with is that this character is building her world out of all these found images/objects. It's not evident here, but all this "stuff" is going to progressively amass and clutter the frame with the end result that she's built her "home."

Music thoughts: maybe needs to reach a (relatively) frantic excitement in the 3rd quarter before it calms down again at the very end? nothing insane, but something to imply the desperation of trying to reverse time through collection of memorabilia. It might be cool if you cut the dialogue up more frenetically? Or just something to change it up.

There needs to be more emphasis on the line/idea, "it's definitely something about holding on to bring back...reclaim...brought back a memory... build stuff out of something gone."

Music thoughts: What about a small bridge before that line introduces the end of the piece? This could also be one of those moments where the music quiets down. Again, I think the piece is asking for some kind of break or change at this point.