I have been able to discover so much about premiere pro this semester which has been quite exciting. On some level, there are similarities between photoshop and premiere, which helped my initial approach to the software. After playing a bit with more simple concepts such as creating a video that looped or a video that only consisted of sound, I moved onto more conceptually stimulating projects.

Water talk was part of the beginning of my investigation of how I can authentically but also curiously represent my eating disorder and recovery. When brainstorming for the video I had a couple of false leads of ideas, but this idea suddenly emerged with much clarity. It is an artistic documentation of toxic behaviors that I used during the descent into my eating disorder. I was more interested in the visual aspect of this piece and wrote the spoken word aspect in about 2 minutes to match what I saw in my head. I am sure I was at least slightly inspired by the video Blue Jeans by Lana Del Rey, and the book The Awakening. The reason I wore a robe was to make the whole thing seem dreamy and surreal.

Filming this video was a little stressful because the environment was very volatile, the streetlight kept going out and turning back on so we had to rush to film. But Mayra did a great job and definitely captured the visual I was looking for. While editing this video I learned a lot of skills including how to operate the opacity and play with the colors of footage. I played a lot with the timing of the images to give myself the feel I was going for.

I think the most important part of this film is the end where I explode out of the water, hinting to recovery.

I wrote the song Leave You in February of 2017. Since May of 2018 Moses and I have collaborated to produce the song and make it even better than what I heard in my head originally. I told him what I wanted and he knows my music taste in depth, so he was able to create a beat I loved. He did an incredible job of producing the song. I decided that it deserved a video.

I constantly watch music videos and I love SIA’s Chandelier and Elastic Heart Videos, both for the modern dancing and the way it is contrasted with the grungy spaces the dancers are in. I guess those videos helped inform my vision, which was originally a dichotomy of heaven and hell, with Maya dancing in “hell” and some people sitting around a table on the stage representing heaven. I eventually deviated from that theme with the discovery of the plexiglass boxes that were able to fit a person inside of them.

I have shot a music video before in high school and so I knew the basic idea of how to do it- choreograph the moves then take different shots of close up and far away. That approach got the job done, but I regret that I did not use two cameras filming at the same time to make it easier on myself. In a way though, the challenge of the dances in different shots being not exactly lined up was good, because I got much better at syncing up cuts so that they look more natural. During the editing process, I also discovered new tools and their shortcuts and I became much more comfortable with the program overall. This semester I have gone from never opening Premiere to feeling relatively competent with it. I still want to know how to cut video like in photoshop to layer it, that should be my next project.

I am relatively satisfied with this product, I felt like I could keep editing it forever and I just had to stop eventually. I know it’s far from perfect but I hope that it is an exciting way to communicate my song to others.