Merritt Lum
Multimedia Digital Artist
Artstation (3D works):
https://www.artstation.com/merrittlum121
Contact:
mgl13@sfu.ca
Software Used:
Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Blender
Overview
This is a fanmade music video for The Perfect Product by TWRP and JP Incorporated, made independently for an "anything goes" assignment in senior year high school video class. In a basic sense, I sought to make this project a culmination of the various skills I had accumulated up to that point, combining learnings on editing, basic VFX, motion graphics and direction to create a highly ambitious project, whilst getting to expand on those skills along the way.
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In addition to being very well-recieved in a general sense, this project became a youth category finalist in the Lamorinda Arts Council's 2021 SuperShorts contest (see https://lamorindaarts.org/lamorinda-supershorts-winners-archive/).
Process
Everything in this project was built off of the idea of interpreting the song's tone and general theme as an exaggerated, somewhat cynical interpretation of modern advertisement, and translating that into a video format; the combination of a salesman as the main character, the heavy, explicit use of stock footage & images, and the overall bizarro-style humor provided a strong foundation for the project, allowing most elements to flow naturally from it.
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The fact of it being made during COVID lockdown influenced this project to a surprising degree; it had to be entirely self-filmed, mostly within my own house. Though this certainly had a variety of disadvantages (ex. I had to film with a phone camera and rely on natural lighting from my window), it also provided a set of constraints that ultimately inspired elements of the project that worked to its benefit; myself playing both the marketer and the "customer" ended up being surprisingly fitting to the cynical tone of the song, and though I originally planned to incorporate more footage of myself in various places, substituting this for further stock footage ended up both being tonally fitting and kept project scope in check.
Project Type:
Fanmade Music Video
Date:
October - November 2020
Unedited greenscreen shot, vs. one in the final project.
As previously mentioned, this project was also heavy on combining skills across a wide variety of software, and often combining them together, as well as getting to learn more about them; Photoshop was used to create the texture for the box, which was used both physically and in Blender, which was itself used for physics simulations and renders (and I learned a good deal on SVG to Blender workflows, when needing to import the logo), and Premiere was used to edit the final project together.
However, the bulk of this project's post production time was spent in After Effects - having to do and learn a wide variety of motion graphics, motion tracking, and both subtle and flashy effects, this project somewhat allowed me to explore nearly every major use of After Effects to some extent.
Animated circle graphic, requiring text animation, a large amount of precompositions, and precise masking, all within After Effects.
Original box texture, used both in Blender and for a physical prop.
Reflection
Though I recognize this project's ambition did leave it lacking in some areas - for example, though some parts are meant to look intentionally bad, there are a select group of edits, graphics and effects I wish had gone better - it still felt somewhat appropriate as something of a culmination of my skills up to that point, and I'm glad with how it turned out as the sort of "ultimate" project of my time in high school video, regardless of it not being the best reflection of my current skills. Putting this level of effort into a project isn't something I see as practical to do often, but it was a project I certainly enjoyed making and am glad to have done so.
Sample of the Blender compositions for the turntable and falling boxes.
