Hi! My name is Niko and I’ll be discussing the process of how I created my project for “What in the World?” which was the creative project we were assigned this quarter. We were told that we had to create a project about anything we were interested it, but it had to tie into a specific place. I immediately thought of Greece since I’m extremely fascinated in classic Greek mythology. Although at first I wanted to focus of the aspects of Olympus via myths about it, I eventually settled on Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, as the topic for my project. I’m not too sure why exactly I chose such a “lame” god, I guess I was curious about his true history since you never hear ANYTHING about him. Heck, some people don’t even know he exists! But boy am I glad I chose him, I got to learn so many interesting things about Dionysus, things I would’ve never known unless I took on a project like this.
I chose to convey all the information I had learned in a documentary because I had been inspired by various informative documentaries I had seen on YouTube. And I decided to draw almost every single frame because I wanted to incorporate art somewhere in my project since I love drawing. If I knew how monumental this project would be, I probably wouldn’t have chosen to do something as ambitious as this, but I’m glad I was able to complete it. Now on to the process! At first, I had to complete all of my research before I could do anything else. I started researching books and different myths pertaining to Dionysus. I found a book titled, “Dionysus: Myth and Cultus,” by Walter F. Otto. It was perfect since it went in depth with every single aspect of Dionysus, so I had a lot of material to work with. The problem was, the book was 263 pages and I only had seven weeks to create this entire documentary. So I spend 2 weeks doing nothing but reading as fast as I could and taking as many notes as possible on Dionysus’s history. I’m not the fastest reader and the book was quite above my reading level so it was a stressful two weeks. However, I was able to finish all of my needed research on schedule, which was a major relief.
But the research was the easy part. I was about to plunge myself into five straight weeks of nonstop work, stress, and blood sacrifices because that’s what it took to finish the monumental project on time. The next step in this process was writing the script. This part only took a week since I already had all the information I needed, I just needed to write it down in a coherent “story” so to speak. After I finished writing my script, it was time to record. I was pretty worried about this step in the process because I didn’t have good equipment for recording audio. I had a five dollar microphone that I had bought four years ago, so I wasn’t optimistic about how the audio would turn out. I didn’t have a very good setup either. I ended up having to record from underneath three layers of blankets (to absorb as much echo as possible) with the microphone I had and my laptop with the script on the screen while my mic was plugged into my computer via extension cord. So not the most efficient set up. I also had to record the audio three times because the quality was so bad. But after I finally got the audio to an okay quality, and after editing it down from forty-five minutes to an easily digestible fourteen minutes, I was finished, and also really tired.
Finally, I was at the stage I was most frightened of, drawing all of the frames. My process for drawing every frame was pretty unorthodox. I exported the audio in an mp3 file and then listened to it, bit by bit. Once I had an idea of what I could draw for that section of the audio, I sketched it out in a Photoshop file. Though if I could go back in time I would slap myself for my overly complicated naming conventions I used for each file. Anyway, this process only took about two weeks. Although that doesn’t sound like a lot of time, know that I had absolutely no free time what so ever, and any time I wasn’t in school or going to the bathroom, I was working. I lost a lot of sleep on this project, though that was unnecessary and probably not good idea. The point is, I worked my butt off to get the drawings complete. Though I wasn’t out of the woods yet, even after finishing all of my sketches. I still had to *cue dramatic music* color everything. Now, this wasn’t as difficult as drawing out all of the sketches, and I had a lot of fun with the effects in Photoshop to enhance the drawings, but this process was long and it was slow. So I was pretty stressed since I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get everything finished in time. I’ll spare you all the details, but coloring every frame took another week to complete. I was finally over the huge hill I had been dreading to climb ever since I thought of doing this documentary. I ended up drawing and coloring around one-hundred individual frames. But finally, I could assemble everything together.
This process took a while as well, but I took each frame and put it with it’s corresponding audio. I was pretty proud of what I had done so far, but I knew that to make it feel complete, I would have to add music. So I searched for many different tracks that I could put behind the drawings. This was the most fun I’d had in the project, since I could insert any music I wanted. After I had finally finished pretty much my entire project, I had a small idea to finish it off. I wanted to add a cute little credit scroll at the end of my documentary, depicting my sources and a few thoughts I had on it. It took a little while to figure out, but I finally got it working nicely. As for a finishing touch, I recorded myself playing a song on my guitar to play behind the credits, since I love playing guitar and I wanted to incorporate it in some way. And with that, I was finally done.
I couldn’t have been more relieved to have finally completed this documentary. Frankly it was a miracle I got it finished, and a week early no less. But there was one final thing I needed to test it up against. I needed to show it to a live audience. I showed it at the end of one of my smaller classes, and everyone who had watched it ended up really liking it. I was so incredibly happy that I had successfully captured the attention of those who watched it, since that was a concern of mine. Now that I’m completely done with it, I can say with confidence that I probably won’t do something this ambitious next time, but I had a blast working on this project.
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