Creating the final presentation

After our group tutorial with Becca it was unanimous that we did not want to present our work in a boring way. We wanted to do something conceptual like our brand and work. The idea was to creat an experience for everyone watching. Some of the initial ideas were to just stand there with our work on slides and just be silent while it flicked through, another idea was to not accept any questions. We then thought about standing in a circle around the audience holding candles while the presentation flicked through on the screen, we all liked this idea however we couldn't use the candles as flames and smoke are a safety hazard. One of our group members was creating a head piece out of a burlap material so we decided that if he made six of them we could all where them during the presentation. This idea got everyone excited. Most of my group just thought we should do a power point and have voice over of everyone explaining their work. However I had a thought that our work was strong enough to need no explanation and Comme are not the type to explain themselves. I wrote a poem and read it to our group, they all felt it summed up our concept really well. I suggested that maybe we could just have voice over of the poem going through the presentation while showing everyone's work.

I have a long history with PowerPoint, there was a time in my life where in one class they made us make a PowerPoint for basically every lesson. Because of this I knew that having a voice over on PowerPoint would not work well. I also knew that it would not make our work look good. Our work needs to flow on its own in one beautiful loop. To get that we needed to create the whole presentation as one flowing film, to do that I had to re-create my film in a new film document then convert everyone's scanned in work from PDF's to JPEG's then insert them and change the speed and way in which they appeared. That all takes a long time. We started working on this presentation on the  Wednesday before the final presentation. I really wanted to start earlier but no one was ready to give me their work before 3 in the afternoon that day. This was probably the only time our group felt really uptight and tense. We had a long evening of editing ahead of us. We started working at 3 and gradually throughout the evening went from all 6 of us to only 2 of us, till 9 O'Clock when I was left trying to finalize and save the final cut. WE DID IT. FINISHED!

The voice over 

To record the poem I needed a really quiet place where there would be no background noise, this meant Phoebe and I sat on the floor in the disabled toiled reciting my poem. The poem was shorter than the length of the video. Phoebe suggested that I read slower and put way more drama into my voice as I do. The first few try's I tried reading through it as a whole watching the clip as I go to try and time it well and make it last as long as possible. Phoebe then suggested we try and recorded it in sections then drag them around and create spaces in between. This worked perfectly. Another member of our group thought that adding effects to the voice over may be interesting and effective. We tried out all the effects but none of them sounded as good as it did natural.

The poem

A family
By blood or by bond
It didn't matter
It was more about the connection. The truth.
An invisible twine tangled between us
holding and locking together
The secret spell which will encapsulate us
Into a single moment
A kiss or song
A beautiful painting hung on the wall
A family portrait of foreigners yet to be met
us or them
A dream, a dream
A potion, a trick
An embodiment of lust
greed
The things families need
and magic, mostly magic
To tighten the seams,
no tearing but fearing from un-involved beings
cause we,
we are the foreigners in the painting
the people you meet un-expecting
in the cool cool night
Orange, candle light 

 Here is a copy of the final presentation...

(Video authors own)