Pressure
Pressure is my senior thesis project. This piece is about the constant doubts that I face when working to reach my goals and the expectations placed on me by the ones I love. This project is using an experimental technique that is new to me.
I wrote the poem that I am voicing over in the animation, some footage from Pexels and others self-recorded, lastly the music score was done by Kelly Warner.
This project was made in Adobe Photoshop, and After Effects.
Pressure Final
Below is more in-depth information on the creation and thought process while doing this thesis.
Work in Progress
This frame is to depict me looking up to my role models.
This frame is to convey feeling trapped under the weight of responsibility.
In the beginning, I knew I wanted to create a piece based on problems that I face, I was just not sure of the look yet. Through different experiments, I found this textured look that felt tactile and I really liked. I felt the textures were good to mirror my mood in the reading so grungy is more lost or overwhelmed, and less grunge is clarity.
I created three style frames to stand in for three stanzas of my poem. Eventually, the content of the frames would slightly change but the themes would follow through.
This frame is about what comes next as time winds down.
This is the final version of my poem. The first stanza is about meeting the expectations of my role models and the fear of making them proud. The second stanza is about the fear of being be lost or not ready. Lastly, where to go next in my life and making something great with all that I have learned.
Above is the boardomatic for Pressure. It contains rough sketches as place holders for footage and animation, showing early composition and pacing. After the initial viewing changes were made to replace scenes that didn’t convey my message strongly or felt too generic.
I first edit the speed of footage in After Effects then render it out to Photoshop.
Throwing the footage into photoshop to adjust the different value levels and I mainly exported the animations out of this software. After effects was only used to combine the stanzas.
I had a lot of fun working on this process and being more experimental to get out of my comfort zone. The problem I faced was controlling the grunge in the video or glitching. I wanted to purposefully use this and it took a lot of changing values to finally understand what to adjust. I went through many compositions as well and lots of footage to get everything just right.
Pressure Final