Crafting A Life-Story Video

When you do a Sims "music" video, you're telling a story and I realized this today when I was working on "River & Haruo: A Life Well-Lived" It's a life-story video that I wanted to create when I finished up Generation One of "The Chikamori Selfacy"- which will happen with Haruo and River passing away.

As a wildlife/landscape/sports photographer, I never really got into the wedding side of the business. I'm just not really a sociable person in the sense that crowds and stressful situations tend to freak out my anxiety. Which is why I went for the wildlife/landscape side of the photography genre. And even though I had to deal with people during hockey games while I was shooting minor hockey, they left me alone to do my thing after the puck dropped at center ice to start the first period. So frankly...being a photographer at a wedding would not be my cup of tea and having no clue about videography either at a wedding...it would be absolutely a nightmare. But when I get to play around with PS Premiere Elements, it gives me a chance to experiment and learn by myself in a self-paced situation and it allows me to craft what I want instead of doing the tasks that an instructor tells me to do and best of all, I get to do it MY WAY.

But today I got hit with a realization in that not only are you trying to develop a story with visually, you are using music to tug at the heartstrings of a life-story video along with carefully selected video or screencaps. You utilize the scene or screencap changes to go along with the beat of the music to create a visual piece that will strike a chord with the viewer. There is also a tempo to the visual changes of a "life-story" and subtle nuances in the background of the video, sound, visual, transitions: all woven together.

When you look back at your childhood, you remember how time used to drag on...that you couldn't wait to get to the next exciting moment of your existence. Thus in a life-story video...I find that to really tug at the heartstrings I want to space out the screencap changes in the Sim's childhood/teenage stage of their life-span, then as they age, the screencap changes grow faster and faster in conjunction with the notes of the piece that I have selected as the soundtrack of the visual tableau that I have created. It is a way of saying: Your life goes by in an instant.... All of this story-telling goes into the crafting of a "music-video". With even the video blends in the video, you can tweak the opacity levels and stretch out timings to create a visual effect that you want with the video. In this video, I opted to lower the opacity on the ring-exchange to focus on the kiss section of the video and then gradually bring back the opacity on the ring exchange to finish off that segment. There's a visual and a heart-tug there at that moment. This is what I love about video-creation. Like playing the piano, there are so many ways in which to bring out the nuances of the story that you are trying to tell.

I don't have all the screencaps yet that I want to use to tell this story, mainly because Haruo and River haven't gotten to half-their-life yet, but at least I know the framework of what I want to accomplish.