Digital Short: Storytelling

 A very challenging assignment! Tasked with creating a video using only your own materials, something which requires a lot of planning and follow-through. For this project I had a good time trying to zone in on the feeling of escaping your room after hiding in it for months and months. After being in such a small space for so long, leaving the house had a dizzying effect that I tried to capture. I've also made the music for this video! Music is my main creative outlet, so it was really nice to have a chance to incorporate that work in this class. My original vision for this project was to capture this kind of isolation by 1. being the only person in the video (which also made it easier to coordinate!) and 2. but attaching my phone-camera to my head via a headband. To be honest the make-shift go pro footage didn't turn out anywhere near as cool as I'd hoped since the phone kind of wobbled around a lot and it was very hard to know if you were actually recording and if what you were recording was any good. Despite the technical difficulties I think I was able to salvage the video alright. The goal then was to try and get back to something I really liked from the found video edits which was the juxtaposition of fast and slow audio and video. It seemed like it could fit well with the theme of claustrophobia and disorientation. When set with some tense sound design initially, the kind of serene ambient music once the character is outside is that much more relieving. There is also supposed to be kind of a nudge at rediscovering things you love but have been distracted from, you can see this in the bicycle overgrown with dead trees and bushes. In making the music for this, I really wanted something simple but kind of unsettling at first to help make the relief a little more impactful, but to have the nice music set against kind of frantic, confused cycling energy.

The Title, Grinding For Frog Coins, is a reference between a friend and I who were caught up playing an old RPG during the early weeks of Covid-19 closures. Left without jobs, we found ourselves putting a lot of effort into "grinding" for in-game rare currency, Frog Coins. The relationship to the video is just to do with the feeling of being stuck inside doing things that don't feel much more real than grinding for frog coins, just wanted to get out there, but also being socially and physically out of shape, and that making it difficult and disorienting to get back out.