In making this movie, I learned a lot about a new way of making videos. I think that stop motions are very useful and I would love to use this in a class room setting. Some of the difficulty I had was from not using a tripod, because the subjects were moving, which created moderate differences in the lighting. If I were to go back and reshoot this, I would have put more effort in to the scenes. I think that I would have figured out a way to use the tripod, and create that more constant source of light. Another thing that I learned is to take more pictures than I did. I took enough to let the information be understood but I would have liked to be able to do more costume changes, and more scenes. It would be more effective for the story line, but I would also have to make the movie length longer. In a class room I would probably keep the requirements around 30 seconds when using it as a teaching tool since the students wont have as much time to focus on it. However, with art making I think that is a very fun process. As a photo major I really enjoyed this assignment. I had worked with iMovie before so putting the images together and working with the program was fairly simple. The main problem I had was remembering to change the crop settings to fill the screen and to get the photos in their correct order. I would have preferred to have all four actors together and just shoot them in different rooms in the order that I needed them, however that did not work out, so it just added more time to the making process.
I enjoyed telling this story because it is very personal to me. There are a lot of details that were left out of it because it takes place over seven years, and is still continually changing day by day. I have always used my work to represent what is going on in my personal life, so I was glad to see this continue with that trend. In all of my photographs for photography projects I represent myself and my personal life using friends and family to represent me, and I did the same for this. The friendship has been a part of my every day life for so long that it is just something I don’t even consciously think about any more. It was nice to take a step back and think about the landmark points, and the general emotions and feelings that come to mind daily. It is interesting to talk about the journey I have gone through with making this film because as of today he doesn’t know if he will be able to meet me while I am in California, so I think this film speaks to how the workings of a long distance relationships/friendships always has its ups and downs. There is a line from the song that says, “ I’m scared you’ll forget about me” which is a fear in my every day life. This video means that much more to me now that him and I are not sure we will meet while I am there, and it has caused some friction. Its sort of a way of documenting this as a part of my life that happened and I will always be able to go back and watch, and reflect on how I felt about our relationship.