WILD time really do be flying when youre having fun. Meaningless platitudes aside, i really cannot believe this is it. This class, although a lot of work, has been such an overwhelming positive experience for me. I’ve gained skills i literally never thought i would have and realized that this kind of techy creative stuff isn’t as intimidating as I had always mad it out to be [see: gif making]. But anyways! the final project! that was a thing! I’m gonna start by going through it media type by media type because that sounds the most straightforward.
Photography! So photography and photo editing REALLY grew on me over the course of this course [hehe], so i wasn’t really too worried with this one. What i did not anticipate, however, was how much i did not want to photograph myself at all points this week, which was terribly unfortunate because that was a big big part of what i had to do. I got over it though, and the photos got taken. I started out by gathering & styling clothing in each of the characters colors [veronica=blue, heather=red, jd=black]. Then I found a place with okay-ish [i was aiming for good but unfortunately did not get there] lighting and a solid background [for editing purposes]. I did some posing and some timer selfies, and then transferred those lovely photos onto my laptop for one last run with my good friend gimp. On gimp, I added an alpha channel to each layer, fuzzy-selected the background, & then deleted it [because its all one color and contiguous so i can just click it away, i’ve learned SO MUCH yall]. Once it was just individual people floating around, I took photos from my personal collection to use as background. I also discovered you can copy/paste different sections of the photo to cover up things you don’t want in it, which is a ridicuously clever feature. I also did some photo editing on picsart, an app that a lot of Clever Fancy instagrammers use for casual photo editing, for some of Heathers photos, which was surprisingly fun and I may or may not [i haven’t decided yet] use that for my own pics. Once I had all of the photos looking the way i wanted them to, I added them to the respective accounts. As far as captioning went, I tried as hard as i could for as many as possible to be obvious lines from the musical [while also still feeling relevant and not outdated] or, if not the musical, be a little bit meta with some movie references.
Still a part of the visual category, i wanna talk a little about the design of each page. Veronica’s page is meant to be reflective of the fact that even though she is a part of the popular crowd, a heather, she is also a pretty well-rounded student who is Kind of Nerdy [this is shown in the movie through her involvement with the yearbook and her relationship with/kindness towards Betty Finn]. JD’s page is meant to be very “i’m too cool for this and i’m angsty so its gonna be in all grayscale” [which is also reflected in the photos of him on Veronica’s page], and Heather Chandler’s is meant to be very instagram model-y and wannabe influencer.
The next category I’m going to call design. The design portion of this final was low key my favorite, which was a little bit of a shocker to me. The design portion was the different surveys and advertisements found pinned on Veronica’s instagram page. I just had a really good time desigining cute advertisements for fake events, and making little instagram stories asking fake questions. part of what appealed to be was also the fact that i could do the fun cute editing stuff, but it wasn’t of my face over and over again. So this part was a really good time, although I definitely wish I could have come up with a better way to showcase it. My reasoning with the video was that puttig each individual post/poster up on a post would have taken up too much space and been stupidly klunky, and i stand by that, but i do wish there was some Other Way [and i’m sure there is but homegirl couldn’t find it].
up next! audio! this one was also really fun. For this, I took two versions of two different songs starring JD and mixed them together so that it was one song and the JDs were singing together, in hopes of acheiving a sort of harmonizing with himself vocal effect [which i think i got?]. This was fun because it was relatively simple audio editing; I did a lot of adding of white space to make sure the jds were singing together, but the end result was really really fun. I did cut out a few different parts so that it was more “this is a song” and less “this is a musical number” and i’m unsure of how well i made the distinction. regardless, the end result was really fun and i’m kind of super proud. unfortunately soundcloud did not want this to exist in their space [which i suppose i respect, because copyright law is a thing] but made putting this on the internet much more difficult. After the initial takedown, i figured maybe i just needed to list more of the artists, maybe soundcloud would accept it then, more artist credit & whatnot. That did not work : (. Next idea was to put it on youtube, but i was afraid the same thing would happen, for youtube is also a little notorious for copyright strictness. After youtube was vimeo, which i recalled hearing was a little looser with that sort of thing. So far it hasn’t been taken down so fingers crossed it will stay that way! So JD’s stuff isn’t actually on spotify, which is a bummer, but it is on the interet and also is really cool, so imma take the win and run.
which takes me to video. I tried my hand at tiktok. that was a TIME. As i mentioned in the photography section, i was not vibing with photographic proof of my existence this week, so finding the motivation to make these tiktoks was HARD. But that got made! apologies for the explicit-ness in JD’s the audio just tracked with the vibe i wanted and i thought it was kinda funny so i used it. gotta keep myself entertained somehow! All of jd’s tiktoks are in black and white, because thats his aesthetic and i was not about to change that, and theyre a mix of pov and Too Cool For This tiktok, which is what a friend and i decided his tiktok vibe would be. I tried [mayhaps unsuccessfully] to reference JD’s plans to blow up the school in one of the tiktoks, but again, not sure how clearly that came across. Heather’s tiktoks were a little more fun to make [fun fact: i own very little red clothing], proabably because my personal aesthetic and vibe is very much not Black and White Filter and Am Cool, so at least as Heather i had color. I really liked the dancing video, which i chose for a multitude of reasons but the most important of which are: its a popular dance and Heather follows trends & its one of like 2 popular tiktok dances that i felt comfortable doing and posting for a Graded Final project. The other tiktok i did for heather, the one with all the outfits, was really fun and i really enjoyed playing with and trying to master all the transitions. I wish I could have figured out a way to better line up outfit switches and audio bass drops/focal points, but as a tiktok newbie i’m pretty happy.
Last and shortest— but not least!— writing. The only reason i’m bringing this up is because I’m kind of unhappy with how the writing flows. I’m not really sure who the speaking voice is exactly, my bones want it to be one of the three I was talking about, but it definitely reads more as an innocent bystander/average high school student. Additionally, I was hoping it would be of a cohesive story and less of an infodump, but i did bring it back around with Veronica and JD breaking up [that was a fun part to write, and a fun video to make, defintely one of the top three videos i made] so by no means am i Completely Unhappy with it, just a few V Noticeable improvement spots. But thats what this is all about then huh. improvement! and on that note, i sign off for the final time.
thanks for everything; this has been an amazing course!
-liz
