The idea of this video is to tell a story that can simulate a compelling experience. I choose to a slice of life on the celebration of the Chinese new year, which falls on the same day as Valentine's Day this year. I am invited to attend a party at a friend's house. I need to bring some good dishes to share wit other party goers. I like cooking so I decide to make a video of food making in a festival atmosphere.

I take pictures and video clips during food preparation and recording phone conversations. I also searched online for some pictures and music, for which I gave due credit for copyright consideration. Many pictures have been taken from which I choose the typical ones that can best tell the story. I use only a small segment of video as I find it is slow for video to demonstrate a process.

A story must have a tone, either sadness or happiness or just neutral. Because my story is the celebration of the New Year, the tone is naturally a cheerful one. This tone affects several aspects of the video making. For example, I choose red, the Chinese traditional festival color, as the theme color for the title pages. I also use colorful ingredients to make a dish for the story—the scenes are enjoyable when I show the disk making step by step. At the end, I present a set of colorful dishes also out of this tone consideration.

Although sound is not the focus of the project, I find a good use of sound can add a great deal to the entertaining nature of the story telling. I choose a high-beat Chinese festival song as the background music. Adding my happy tone of phone conversations, the sound effect certainly helps create a pleasant mood among the viewing audience. As we discussed, a happy feeling can enhance a compelling experience. I use phone conversation recording, instead of a more “realistic” video clip. To create the climax effect at the end of the video, I use a picture of fireworks and a sound track to maximize a visual and audio effect. I hope that, by the time they reach this point of viewing, the happy viewers can feel excited to join our celebration!

I create this video project using iMovie. Several skills I have learned from other MAET courses are very helpful. I am still new to iMovie, so it takes me a lot of time to put all pictures and frames together, adjust the background music and add fade-in and fade-out effect, overlay it with my own phone conversation recording and tweak the transition effects. Overall, the video project, in and of itself, is a compelling learning experience for me, too.

Compelling Experience from Julie Jiang on Vimeo.