I actually really enjoyed this project. In the midst of a lot of end-of-the-quarter work, performances, and sickness, I was not really looking forward to this project at first. Also, as a textbook perfectionist when it comes to projects involving any sort of creativity, I over-analyzed the prompt so much that i barely felt like I could handle the project - I’m not someone who wants to turn in shoddy work.
Amanda and I approached this project wanting to have everything as well prepared as possible so we wouldn’t need to go back and film extra scenes or refilm things that we felt would take a lot of time so what we did was create a script including every meme that we wanted to use and the original meme that we created that fit in with what we were trying to communicate. From here we filmed the entire scene from one point of view, filling in the scenes that needed to be acted out with as many angles as possible. We also recorded the entirety of the script with Voice Memo on my iPhone so that we could fill in the audio track when using clips would detract from the overall flow of the video.
I did not anticipate not only needing to use iMovie but also importing files through Photoshop, Garageband, and iTunes. The easiest way I could see to break up the audio track was to utilize Garageband (software I am extremely familiar with) and to layer different aspects of the video from all of these different sources.
What ended up being the most difficult part in the end was to tie in the memes in a believable way without it becoming trite or too repetitive (theme and variation are beneficial but are often over-used). Also, delivering the “punch line” of the memes to describe a feeling or situation in minimal relevant wording was a bit of a challenge. We had to decide how long of an interval to give for just the image before showing the text as well, not only for comedic timing but also for the maximum amount of enjoyment for each meme as well as enough time so that the audience could actually read the whole meme and understand it.
In approaching our subject as a whole it was difficult to not make the whole thing sound really bitter. It is difficult because memes emerged from a very biting sense of humor and very often have a “burn” factor to them.
