Mo Dao Zu Shi || THEREFORE; I AM
Leeet's gooo!!! i'm really happy that i was able to finish this. This is my first personal project in 2 months (the other one i made, i don't really intend to post because of the song/theme i used), and I've been working on this ever since around the start of March, on and off when my schedule, motivation, and mental health allowed me.
Making this was quite the experience. I originally got this idea a year back, in March or April, started the project in like? May or June? and then set one clip, and ta-dah- XD Which was the clip at 0:04 with the voice line. It stayed like this for many months after that. I honestly thought this would be another one of those projects that i couldn't properly start nor finish, because i simply didn't have a clear idea of what i wanted to do here, besides work on using different action scenes.
I began working on this more quite spontaneously maybe in February/early March, i figured, hey, just for the heck of it, I'll add some more scenes. Any calm scenes or what have you. And in doing so i realized, hey! I like adding these sound effects and creating different kinds of video and audio cuts here, L cuts and J cuts, and i decided that I wanna focus on that for this video, along with general flow.
Setting the clips was trial and error. I had to sometimes adjust my scenes or just rely on what instinct told me in terms of what could feel natural in terms of the motions and also fit the lyrics somewhat. I ended up finding a rather good balance of scenes in the end, i feel. That was where i decided that i want to make the scenes have this ''condescending'' tone to them, where perhaps Wei and Lan are referring to certain characters in the donghua.
I was feeling very proud after having set the scenes! I also decided to keep the letterboxed look for the clips instead of cropping them into 16:9, to give maybe a ''cinematic'' look and to retain the context of the original scenes. I'll come back to this aspect later here.
However, after having set the scenes, so began my insecurity about adding effects or transitions, or their intensity, because i didn't want to ''ruin'' the look of the video or take much attention away from the feeling of the clips. But somewhere i still knew that if i wouldn't add many effects, that just wouldn't be what i want to edit like or what makes me happy for a song of this kind of intensity.
The effect ideas and transitions were a lot of trial and error. Bits of overthinking, deleting effects, went into them. I started to doubt myself a fair bit. But eventually... i guess i understood that i was thinking too hard about what could look ''good'', that i didn't let myself just flow and make things without much thought. When it came to doing that then, finally, i enjoyed the process a bit more, and it was a bit easier to edit this forwards. Even if my motivation got eaten up very quickly.
Back to the letterboxing - i had trouble with effects due to this letterbox. I'd made my own letterbox above every other layer, but whenever i wanted to do big, intense zooms or shakes, ones that would go outside of the borders, i had to start experimenting with ways to make it so that the original black border of subs don't appear from the episodes.
I wanted to work with grainy effects in this video! However, unfortunately, adding grain, as a result, just added mostly pixelation to the video, but hey, maybe effect is also cool?
Switching between two different computers to edit this wasn't all too fun in terms of losing fonts or clips and needing to find alternatives. The positives about this tho was that i was able to find pretty good alternatives, and even one new font that I'm starting to like. Said font is ''Livret Display'' ^^
Currently finishing and uploading this on my uni laptop, which isn't very color-accurate, so i hope some certain tones in this video aren't too ''in your face'' or saturated.
There were some ideas here that i ended up scrapping, such a heavier focus on neon purple and pink overlays. I decided that overlays like those would create a bit of a mismatch of colors and be too overbearing when the clips are already so active at certain points, so i didn't use this idea.
I also intended to use more radial blurs, but i forgot about this idea. I think it's fine if i didn't use as many tho.
Currently, i'll simply continue uploading and whatnot when my motivation and time allows me. Things had or have been feeling very hard for me mentally, so it feels especially hard to return to most things or projects, but I'm gonna keep trying what i can. I do feel bad about my lack of activity or motivation, but, there are certain days where i feel capable of tackling more than usual, so, that's good.
Overall, i am very happy and proud of this result, and i'm excited to share it with y'all ^^
I really hope that y'all enjoy it and also have a lovely day/night! c:
~
Layers: 57
Time taken: ~ 1 month and 15 days (idea originally thought of/project started ~1 year ago)