The word I got was “act” or “the act” and the first thing that came to mind was a quote from William Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” We all act throughout our lives, whether we mean to or not. Our existence is an act. Who we are is an act. Even if what we are expressing is genuine, it is still acting. We act out roles in society, interpersonal relationships, and emotions.
I decided to focus on the acting out of emotions.
I began by taking a video of myself watching a variety of videos on youtube, from news reels to comedic skits, and filming myself. The entire video was an hour and thirteen minutes long, but I sped it up 5x its original speed to shorten it to a watchable length:
Most of the emotions acted were relatively subdued, so I came to the conclusion that a better way to capture the acting out of emotions would be to tell stories that elicited specific emotions, so I videoed myself recalling specific recent memories that had strong emotions attached to them. To seperate the acting of emotions from the words I was saying, but keeping the tone and pitch of voice (which is also very expressive when conveying emotion), I reversed the video:
I felt the words were still too prevalent, I just wanted to preserved the tone and pitch, not necessarily the words, to further highlight the act and detract from the stories, so I messed around with the audio.
This is the audio profile I ended up with.
And this is the video that was the result:
While I was happy with the audio, I felt I needed to better highlight the most extreme expressed emotions, so I drew seven seperate seconds of the video and inserted them only for a second at the highest point of each emotion.
Here is the final experiment: