Extremely Soft and Incredibly Close (Patreon)

❥ Louder Music ❥ No Music

I've been working on this thing for you guys. Over the past week I've just been overwhelmed by so much love and acceptance and encouragement from you all and no matter how loud I want to scream thank you, it's just never enough. I'm so ridiculously thankful for all your comments and messages, all your monthly pledges and donations, even letters and personal little gifts. All your speedy recovery wishes. It all came so unexpected and as much as I dislike being sentimental, it does make me warm and fuzzy. I won't admit to it 90% of the time, but it does. Thank you for all the love.

In my last BTS post I said I would start very small, so I did. In many ways, this video is small. It's about half my usual video length, it's rather uncomplicated, the bokeh heart I used for the background is very small... Thankfully, sometimes, less really is more. I've had a few high functioning days between getting triggered by random ass obnoxious ass shit and reserved at least a few hours every day to work on this. 

The idea of the video was simple - the execution was anything but. Let me give you a more or less complete overview via the following picture blog: 

TL;DR Skip the cursive text

One of you guys said that I could make my own bokeh shapes so I looked into that a little bit because I had no idea how this could possibly be a thing. I learned that you just overlay a stencil with a shape cut out of the middle over your camera lens and defocus to your heart's desire. So I tried that...

It didn't go super well. 

The one on the left was my first attempt. At first I was poking about, searching my whole apartment for scissors small enough to be able to cut out any reasonably sized shape out of the piece of cardboard. I couldn't find anything but my hair cutting shears, nor anything decently sharp, until it occurred to me that I could fold the cardboard to try to cut out a symmetrical shape. Why I didn't think of that in the beginning? It's been a while since elementary school. *casually sips coffee* 

No matter how hard I tried, though, it never came out symmetrical. I ended up cutting it way too big, so the end result looked like this

The stencil on the right was my second attempt - a result of me stabbing a new piece of cardboard with a painfully dull knife repeatedly, until a much smaller heart shape was achieved. I still wasn't happy, however. The dull knife just ended up tearing fibers out of the cardboard, giving the heart fuzzy edges. No one wants a fuzzy bokeh. There is black nail polish around the stencil in question where I tried to smooth out the edges with what I had at hand. Eventually I gave up for the day. 

As you can see, still not pretty and very unclean. 

The next day I decided to test my luck at the mall, specifically the art supply store at the mall. I wasn't expecting them to have what I needed, because shops here very rarely carry what I need - I have to go to great lengths just to get my supply of organic meat and eggs a lot of the time. Anyhow, I didn't want to get my hopes up and was planning on browsing eBay afterwards to look for little shape punchers. This was the best idea I had as to how to achieve a perfectly clean and symmetrical stencil. And lo and behold... 

At first I wasn't sure if they would be small enough to bokeh with them and the image on the packaging was not helpful but I thought, I'll just try out the heart and if it doesn't work, I can still return the rest. While I was there I also picked up black writing paper because I had previously had issues with reflective edges. A thin black sheet proved much more useful than fibrous cardboard. 

Because those small punchers only fit so much paper in between them though, I had to get a little creative with assembling the stencil, as demonstrated with the cherry blossom one I made today:

Because the cutout has to be pretty much exactly in the middle, I just kind of cut out two slightly disproportionate half circles like this

and joined them together with tape like this

... Okay, so with the heart one I fucked up a little...

You've gotta cut me some slack here. I'm not a Virgo, I can't make things look perfect, neat and delicate... The point is that it fits, it sits, it filters out the light and it produces clean bokeh:

Some of the shapes around the edges are cut off because of the curve of the lens itself. Nothing I can do about it, to my knowledge.

Yes, I could have tried harder for the pictures, but I already tried so hard for the video and I don't feel like wearing myself out.

Though, my vision for the video was not a gazillion cut off bokeh hearts... The image that popped into my head was just one large slow blinking pink bokeh heart. Unfortunately, the only blinking light sources I had were teensy little fairy lights...

... out of which I had to single out and fixate a solitary one...

... of which I had to paint the edges to reduce reflection for a cleaner bokeh, film it on the alternating glow setting for 20 minutes, crop, zoom, slow down, change the color et voila...

...the 4k lofi fuzzy blinking bokeh heart. Yes, I would prefer a sharper, cleaner bokeh heart, but it's the best I could do. Jack found it really cozy and relaxing. 

From there on, keeping in mind that I do not want to overdo it and just work on something simple, I thought for a while about what kind of soundscape I could create to match this background. 

The first thing that came to mind is that I had never actually used my other wind shield that came with my recorder, so I decided to plomp that one on and see if I can get some comforting hair play or whatever going...

But having to touch the little hairs and try to coordinate binaural whispering got too taxing on my concentration, so I used this random ass ostrich feather to gently caress the microphone, creating the soft, fluffy, gentle head petting sounds you can hear in this video. 

And this marks the end of the picture blog. I hope you found it interesting and not overwhelming. I really want to offer more comprehensive summaries and little peeks behind the scenes like this for all my videos. I've been wanting to for a long time but I've been busy and overpacking my schedule and just spreading myself way too thin. Lately I've been made aware of the fact that I've really never given myself enough time to put my all into one project and I feel like I'm missing the point if I don't do that. Eveything just takes so much time. Experimenting with new things takes time, perfecting a theme takes time, post production takes time... 

Some more of the issues I ran into while trying to create this video:

Mouth sounds. Ohhh, nasty, nasty, sticky, wet mouth sounds. I realize that some people like them, but I don't. Until I attempted this close-up recording, I had no idea my mouth produced so much saliva. Like, an unreal amount. The original recording was 48 minutes long, but I literally had to swallow every two seconds and it was a real ... process... to try to minimize the clicking wet sounds my tongue made everytime it moved. Like, I had to teach myself how to speak all over again. For every single sentence I spoke, I ended up having to swallow thoroughly, tilt my head back, pant 4 times to dry out my mouth and say whatever I wanted to as fast as possible because after these 4 pants, I could feel the cavity under my tongue filling up with saliva again. Between keeping my tongue as still as possible and excessive hours of editing out as many of the obnoxious clicks as possible, I finally managed to compose this medley of close up breathing, soft whispering and gentle head pettings. 

The idea for this specific video was to give you a feeling of comforting closeness, without too much agitated chatter, forced affection or anything remotely tense. 

The calm breathing works well to calm you down by itself, the spatially accurate head petting feels soothing and tingly and the soft whispering is loving without being overbearing. It's designed for when you can't fall asleep and it's meant to get you there fast.  You tell me how well I did on that one.

The next issue came up when I tried to upload my videos. Because I insist on rendering every single video in 4k, YouTube is a piece of shit and can't keep up half the time. It ended up bugging the fuck out of two of the three videos I uploaded and wouldn't process them properly, so I ended up spending a whole entire day literally from the minute I woke up to an hour before evening quality time with Jack just uploading these fuckers. This is also what happened to the last video I posted. If you tried to watch the video after I said I fixed it and it wouldn't play for you, do not fret, it's not you. It wouldn't play for anyone else either, so I had to change it back and publish the flawed version with the extra line. It really do be like that sometimes.

I'm a little bit proud that today I can give you not only a complete 'making of' a video project, but also three complete versions that all play right. Only a little though, because all this time I've been thinking, that should go without saying. 

The original version has subtle dreamy background music and I configured the volume specifically for my headphones, which somehow boost the low frequencies and make the music sound louder than it is, but it's comfortable for me to listen to. I also made a version with louder music (5dB added to just the background music) for those who don't have a bass booster or low quality hardware. And then a version without music in case you think it's annoying for whatever reason. I think it sets the mood quite nicely, but I acknowledge and respect that your opinion may differ. 

Now it's all cleaned, processed, set, linked, synched and ready for you to watch. 

If you actually read this whole entire post, thank you, I'm flattered. Please forget that any sentimentality ever happened and enjoy the video :) 

//Ally