This is my final project for the 2018-2019 school year at CART. The project topic was Personal Narrative. I wrote a short story that was personal to me, because it encompasses my fears of failing as an adult.  

I used technology to engage my audience by manipulating the emotion of the scenario. The scenes are cold so people will feel a tad upset or even sad. Their is rarely any music because silence is the best way to back an emotion. Silence let's people think, and when people are left alone with their thoughts, they get uncomfortable.

I used Premier Pro to not only just assemble my footage into a product and be done with it, but to create the entire mood. In total I had about 7 audio layers. I used audio transitions to help some choppy dialogue flow a little bit better. I used color correction to make the beginning of the film cold, because that is when the film is at it's most depressing in my opinion. I used the razor tool so that if I felt a shot, scene, song, etc were too long, instead of just deleting the footage and readjusting the in and out points in the source viewer, I can just snip the extra bits off. I used the audio mixer to balance out the audio. If some dialogue was too loud, I just lower the volume. If a sound effect was too quite, I just raised the volume.

In specific scenes it was not physically possible for me to hide off screen and also keep the puppet moving. For those situations I used After Effects to remove me from the scene without removing the puppet. I first put in a recording of the background without the puppet. Then I put in a recording of the same shot, but now the puppet and I are in the scene. I remembered how when we learned motion tracking, for the lamp post assignment we had to create a matte to hide the text until it comes from behind the lamp post. So I created a black shape layer, and then paired it with the empty footage and created a comp. I then alpha inverted the shape and moved it to about the point where my body would be, and presto! You've got yourself a puppet with no puppeteer.