This is unfortunately a bit late as my illness caught up with me on Friday. It’s been a rough couple of weeks, I completely missed week 5 because of my health and I was only able to get two video assignments and my goals revisited complete. For the two video assignments I was able to get done, l chose to do a lyric snippet to showcase another song my course character would connect with and a video of who I am to further showcase my identity as it is something I hold dear to myself.
Physical disability and illness have certainly been making it very difficult to do most things lately, but hopefully I’ll be back to my normal self to be able to keep up with everything.
I revisited my goals this week and I have conflicting thoughts. On one hand, I’m meeting the goals I set for myself of learning new forms of media and figuring out ways to utilize them outside of this class, but on the other, I have been truly unable to keep up with the rigors especially as of late due to health crisis after health crisis with my disabilities. I had two massive flare ups, a cold, and a horrible infection in the last three weeks alone and it has been physically incredibly challenging some days to even sit up to use my laptop without my heart rate spiking. While I haven’t been able to complete as much that is expected, I’ve been very happy with what I have created and I feel that I am much more digitally adept because of them. I’ve gotten to use my analytical skills to look into some of my favorite media like the colors in The Corpse Bride and the plot of Dear Evan Hansen, I’ve gotten to shine a light on who I am through playlists of music and videos, and I’ve learned a lot about an aesthetic that I’ve normally avoided due to it being very sensory overwhelming (I still find it overwhelming, I just know more information about it now). I’m hoping my health struggles ease up in the near future, so I can begin to effectively complete the assignments for this class and continue to work towards those goals.
My identity is something I hold very dearly and work every day to express. As someone who is far and away from any sense of normalcy, it took me so long to embrace those differences rather than be ashamed of them. This video assignment allowed me to briefly showcase some of the most crucial traits of myself that I find most inherent to what makes me who I am.
I used CapCut and TikTok to create this video as it was the easiest way to access and play around with my camera roll as well as adding audio. It was very difficult choosing which photos to use as I have so many full of amazing memories that made me the person I am today, but I was able to narrow it down to some of my favorites. The song in the background is Swamp Thing by The Chameleons, a band that I am not only friends with, but a band that has helped me through the darkest times of my life. This song in particular is one I listen to on loop when I’m feeling down, defeated, or alone and it is what helped me survive my first semester back in the fall of 2023; it feels like the song that I am most connected to.
Making this was a very emotional, cathartic experience. I’ve been incredibly sick these last two weeks due to complications with my disability being impacted by the wild fluctuations with the weather as well as it being illness season, so I haven’t really felt like myself lately. However, going through all my photos, putting this all together, adding the music, it reminded me who I am which is something I really needed.
I was looking back on one of my assignments from week 3 where I made an aesthetic song lyric image to represent my character, Lenore, and it had me thinking what other songs would represent her. With her working in a music-based scene, it didn’t feel right to only have one song that she connected with, so I decided to find another and create a lyric video snippet to showcase it.
I ended up choosing Demons by Empathy Test as the lyrics not only represent her troubled past and struggles with herself and her dreams, but the chorus provides a glimpse into the haven she’s made for herself and thrives in now. To get the right audio snippet, I scree-recorded my Spotify and converted it to an audio track that I then put into WeVideo as I have the most experience editing there. I chose a light background to compliment the soft sounds of the synths and vocals, and a dark font color coupled with a classy font for the verse lyrics to represent living in darkness on the inside, but never letting it affect her outward appearance. For the chorus, I added various fonts and colors as well as graphics to showcase a new vibrancy and variety that Lenore finds in her life.
The process of this was a lot more time consuming than I fully anticipated. Syncing up the text with the lyrics, getting everything stylistically correct, adding transitions to bring life to the lyrics, just creating a minute and a half of video took me about 2-2.5 hours. It’s a good thing I love this song and normally listen to songs on loop anyways because otherwise I would’ve gotten really sick of this song really fast.
