I finished up a rough draft of just the imagery of my final essay movies without adding the sound, but the narratives significantly changed as I listened to the audio of the youth and from some short video I had captured from the Lawrence Community Works opening. I decided to use iMovie to keep it simple, rather than try to recreate standard effects in Final Cut. The “past” and “future” obviously had less photos and good audio, but I improvised when I could. When I was ordering the photos and thinking of movement and transition, I really started to hone in on recreating the movement of walking through the spaces, as well as using very deliberate points in photos for zooming and panning.
After the rough draft, I was hesitant to add the audio. I was afraid the voices might dominate over the photos and take away from the photos speaking the narrative themselves. But as I added the audio, the way I approached displaying and moving the photos changed quite a bit. I got back to the creative process I highly enjoy about making these types of “digital stories” – that it’s not just editing video but creating the aspects of visual and audio yourself, so the real control of the message is more in my hands as the author.
While the audio editing took FOREVER using Audacity, finding the right music took even longer. Again, I was apprehensive about adding music (yet another layer of meaning) but I felt like there’d be too many holes in sound between the voices. I started on a search for music typical of the time periods I was shooting for in each piece, but I moved on quickly to just searching for moods. I stuck to finding copyright free or Creative Commons licensed tunes so the search took hours.
In the end, I enjoyed making the rollover collages for the landing page the most. I loved that I could recreate all the aspects that stood out from my photos and experience trying to capture Lawrence in one 2D frame.
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