Revised edit 2

http://vimeo.com/36053425

     So this time there are more changes with the story, scenes and script. Since I had the animatic viewed by my sound professor, who pointed out that voice-over makes the story less interesting to watch, as the story is already explained everything and leaves no space for audience to think. Also, Leslie has given me much more ideas and suggestions to work on based on my last revised edit. The process for editing my story has been a very, very long and struggled journey. And I feel grateful for the critiques and different opinions my professors and classmates provided to me.

      The story was originally twelve minutes in length with a painfully straight forward dialogue. Leslie tried to persuade me to change the story boldly when I was in 3rd year. But I was not able to touch the story at all because the story was based on real event with my friends and family, and it happened not long before I decided to make an animated version out of the story. It took me a whole summer vacation at China in year 2011, to fresh my mind and to be able to introduce new characters and new perspectives into the story. The beginning of 4th year, Marilyn and Martin suggested me to try narration for the story. I soon found out how useful narration was for organizing and constructing a short story. With narration, I was able to tell the whole story in a short time. The story was then cut down to seven minutes. Marilyn helped me a lot with cutting the story further and made it more concise. Many unimportant details were thrown out, and new storyline was formed.

     Marilyn liked my voice-actor's performance and recommended me to have one man voice-over. Yet the problem was my voice-actor could not perform the perfect Mandarin sentences, and there were many scenes required Mandarin speaking, the dialogue track then become a weird combination of my voice for mandarin speaking scenes and the voice-actor's voice for other scenes.

     Then it came to Leslie again at the second semester of my 4th year at ECU. The first editing project assignment was something I have complete no idea about. The editing assignment for my grad film is like tear down all the flesh and body of my story. Every single scene became something waited to be knocked down and either destroyed to dust, or re-sculpted in another form. I was of course shocked by the amount of changes required and new possibliteds of new scenes and new storylines, yet I understood this was a precious chance to create a solid bone structure for my story, and it could be a last chance before I go into full production. Thus, I was all opened to accept opinions from people to alter my film. One biggest change I made through the assignment is the choice of using dialougues instead of voice-over. As the fact that both Lesilie and Dennis have pointed out that there were secnes felt redundant with voice-over explaining things.

      Originally I was scared about bringing dialogues back to the story, that I thought I may drag the story to ten minutes or longer again. But it came out just fine. I guess main reason for that is working under my previous concise narration structure. This second revised edit has some shots that should be held longer, yet it will still be under 5 minutes when I finished the editing. I am now working full time on layouts and minor animation of my film. Next week will have Christine looking at my edit. Need to go back to do more drawings so she would understand my rough sketches.