1 Word = 1000 Pictures
For this project I was given an action word that may have more than one meaning and I had to express this word through a short half minute video that had to be in black and white and no sound.
The word I was assigned was “agitate”.
With agitate I immediately thought of two meanings, agitate as in feeling agitated, and agitate as in stirring or agitating a substance. I wanted to show both of these directly in the video as short clips but I also wanted the video as a whole to make the viewer feel a little agitated.
This was the rough plan I came up with. I usually like to storyboard everything as it gives me a good idea of what the different parts of the video will look like. For this project, however, I felt like I had a really good idea of how everything was going to look like so I decided a written plan would be enough. Looking back, and now I know moving forward, I think I should just always storyboard because somethings you can’t know if they’ll work or not unless you have a composition you can actually look at.
I used a couple close-up shots of my head turning back and forth and my eyes blinking rapidly. These shots were to create that agitated feel to the video I wanted and I also played with the speed of the video (increasing the speed) to again increase how agitated the video is.
These two stills depict the two main ways I portrayed the word agitated. The first picture being me stirring, or agitating, water and the second is me clicking the pen, which is depicting an agitated tick.
Having the limitations of no color and no sound really helped me focus on the visual content which for me was useful since I haven’t done much motion graphics or video work and it was initially quite overwhelming to have to think about all those factors. I’m quite happy with the final result but more so glad that I learned a couple of things from such a small project.