A Day in the Life: Hollyday

In my Digital Video class at Delaware College of Art and Design, I was reminded why I enjoyed animation. I absolutely love the editing process of animation. Normally people might think this is boring, but I on the other hand find it exhilarating! This past week in Digital Video, we did a “Day in the Life” project.

The first week was spent collecting and editing the videos without sound. Naturally, I chose myself as the subject as it makes the process easier and less awkward then it would be with another person. Plus, I’m awesome! Woot! Anyway, after carefully editing, I finally got my video close to the one minute mark that was required. My teacher was satisfied with my work and hardly had any negative feedback. This positivity motivated me for the next step, adding sound! Initially, I was going to do something comedic, but I thought that would be expected of me. After looking through various sound effects, I came across heart beat and monitor sounds that inspired me to use them to drive a new idea. My video would start out with a heart monitor leading up to a heartbeat to symbolize myself not only waking up but slowly coming to life. I continue to use different speeds of heart beats to drive my story while also adding a few additional sound effects like light switches or doors opening. As I went to sleep to end my day, I slowed the heart beat then transitioned into the heart monitor once again. However, I added a few more seconds to the video so I could put a flatline during the black screen symbolizing my “death” therefore coming full circle. This created a cycle as the video plays on repeat; it would appear as if every day in the life of me I die only to come back alive the next day. I was extremely excited to show off my hard work that I had fun putting together.

I presented this video with sound to my class with a clever pun of a title, "Hollyday!" My teacher and classmates loved the heart beat concept while even giggling a bit at the fact that I “die” at the end. Overall, I received mostly positive feedback! A success! Despite getting little to no bad notes on my video with sound I decided to do a few little tweaks here and there simply because I wanted to get it portfolio worthy. I really enjoyed this project and cannot wait to do more in this class! For now, I hope you enjoy this final version of my “Hollyday.” project.