Throughout the past few weeks in Digital Perspectives class, we have been creating a stop motion video based on a vignettes that we had written in English class previously. My partner (Daniel) and I chose to base our stop motion video on Ady’s vignette, which was about daily life in his home city of Mumbai, India.

These are the slides we completed prior to working on the video, so that we understood what we were doing and had a good foundation to build upon.

One can listen to the partner agreement audio recording we did on the first day of the project through the link on the first slide. Now that the project is done, it’s time to reflect on how well we honoured this partner agreement and how we can improve our teamwork and collaboration for future projects.

I’d say that we honoured our partner agreement pretty well. The main things we talked about were procrastination, equal contributions, and laying down ideas. As for the former, both my partner and I are procrastinators, and we agreed to acknowledge each other’s work habits and to try and overcome this tendency by doing bits of work whenever we had the time to do so. This was partially successful, as we had gotten the majority of our slides and all our filming done well beforehand, but we were scrambling to finish the storyboards and the editing process during the last few days before the due date, which wasn’t ideal. To improve, we could have divided the work up into chunks to do beforehand to divert us from our tendencies to procrastinate. However, we somewhat expected this and knew how to cope with such a scenario. Our other main agreement was that we could contribute equally and let the other partner know if they weren’t doing their share of work. Fortunately, we didn’t need to do that since we found ourselves contributing fairly equally throughout. This was especially evident when filming, where we both were chipping in with ideas and finding ways to compromise and fuse them. This leads in to our final major agreement, which was that we would both continuously lay down ideas, so that we could refine and develop them. This also worked out well, since we always were thinking of something new to add into our film. We didn’t have filming roles but we did split up the resources that we were supposed to bring, and I was in charge of bringing all the Lego. My partner was able to rely on me since I got everything that was required. One thing that we should have added to the agreement was a solution to how we could overcome procrastination, since both of us mentioned that we are procrastinators, but didn’t really expand on that as much as we could have.

Watch our final video here

*Music is “India” from Bensound and background sounds are from “Traffic Noise in India” (TrafficNoiseDanger- YouTube)

1) What is the ’emotional significance in this moment (what should the audience feel and why?)

Longing for home and appreciating each and every minor detail that adds to its character

Though our movie may remind someone of their home or remind them of feelings such as nostalgia, I don’t think it’s capable of actually making the person long for home or feel emotional as a result of it. This is because of how limited we were in our filming. If we had more time and more resources for filming, we would have undoubtedly made a more emotionally resonant and impactful movie. However, we only had one class to film and had to use Lego buildings and minifigures. Lego minifigures are great for stop motion, but we were limited in our selection of Lego sets/minifigures, and the inability to modify facial expressions wasn’t ideal either. This is why we had to use minifigures such as an almost-naked Santa Claus with Chewbacca meant to represent a dog, and used skyline sets of Venice and Berlin to represent Mumbai. Additionally, not having much time to film meant that our movie could only be so long, rendering it much harder to leave an emotional impact on someone. Since our video was divided into little sections, it may feel disjointed to some who can’t relate to life in India cities. We also had to take photos with a phone, because it was nigh-on impossible to maneuver a laptop the way we wanted to and because the quality of pictures on the phone camera was so much better. However, this meant that each shot was taken from a slightly different position than the last one (not still like laptops), which would make the stop motion look a bit choppy. And finally, neither me or my partner are skilled iMovie editors, which is why the green-screen editing was rather basic and looked messy at times. Since we couldn’t control the time, we could have tried to organize our time better when filming so that we weren’t rushing, used fixed camera positions throughout to ensure smoothness, and made an extra effort to locate the resources that we needed. However, we managed to do what we could.

Despite all these shortcomings, our movie did have its upsides as well. Our biggest success was using sound effects and music to a great effect (as described in our rationale). We used traditional Indian music from Bensound, which we thought fit very well into our movie. Additionally, I used audio from the internet of the sounds from a regular Indian street. If our movie is resonant at all, this is the reason why. Using those sounds makes the movie sound authentic and if the viewer is an Indian, really takes them back home, since every Indian can relate to that symphony of noise. Watching the video before and after the addition of that truly underpins what a profound difference its made on the movie’s impact. We also used the iMovie “Bark” sound effect a couple of times in there, which makes sense, considering the fact that dogs are mentioned in the vignette and dogs are used in the movie.

I feel that the roughness and disjointedness of our movie is apt especially considering the subject matter, which is daily life in Mumbai, one of the most chaotic cities in India (as any major Indian city is). If we had a perfectly polished movie, it would undoubtedly be great, but it would rather be for a city like Berlin, Tokyo, Copenhagen, or maybe even Singapore. For a city like Mumbai, our choice of presentation was probably the better fit. Our movie may not be as resonant to all people as it is to Indians in particular, but what it’s supposed to convey is a longingness for home, and in this case, it’s all about where home is.