Real Life Adventures 30: I Don't Drink (Valentines Day 2004) (2004) - The original idea of the Real Life Adventures series was that each number in the sequence represented an everyday occurence that had happened in my life (that I could remember) that was worthy of being made into a documentary. At the time of the first Real Life Adventures documentary I had arbitrarily determined that 27 of these had happened. While editing the next one I determined that I had experienced 2 more of these everyday adventures worthy of being made into documentaries had happened but hadn't been caught on tape since I hadn't had a camera with me, but that I would number the series as if I had. I dropped this idea with Real Life Adventures 18, when I decided to make 40 of these short documentaries total, and would fill in the numbers as they caught my fancy. I thought it would make for an interesting viewing experience to watch them numerically if they had been produced out of sequence. RLA 30 features the first comprehensive use of After Effects for color and value adjustments in a video I had made. Delicious dabbles a bit in these techniques, but with RLA 30 it was necessary to make major adjustments since some of the rooms that filming had taken place in were so poorly lit.While working on it I decided to make a narrative adjustment to the colors. In each room or area, a different digital color filter has been put over the video to separate the different areas and groups present in the party. Outside is true-color, where the color most represents the actual colors. Inside-downstairs I used a saturation of browns and greens. Upstairs a blue filter was used that ended up washing out the image. Downstairs in "another room," an orange filter made the image super saturated with the orange of the tungsten lightbulbs while people played a very green Splinter Cell game. At the time of production, I had not heard that this was an element used in the film Traffic, but had noticed a use of similar techniques in tinting films in Tsui Hark produced Hong Kong films of the late 80s and early 90s. In another interesting note about the video, the substance being snorted is actually crushed yellow caffeine pills that appear white because of the yellow school notebook they are being snorted off of. When friends of mine who had partaken of these saw how this looked, they quit crushing and snorting the pills, which were sold at local convenience stores as an aide to help stay awake for long hours of study. They had started doing so as a gag. click on the links below to view this video Click here to return to the documentary menu. |