Creative Project Analysis

I made "Queer-Asian: A Collective Story" wanting to give the world a perspective of those who identify as queer and Asian. I see that in class, no one has stood up to represent this community, so I wanted to do so with this creative project. I wanted to make a film that discusses a lot of issues, not just what I have gone through personally. This is why I used more than one perspective in the film, showing issues such as coming out, rejection, fear of coming out, and media influences. I decided to use film because I could reuse it as a resource, but I also wanted to do a demon-story.  


This is how I created the stop-motion film. It incorporated both aspects of film and a comic. I used my friends as an example of the modern day queer Asian American. I had them write out a story or struggle about themselves and submit it to me for editing. After the edits and cuts, I used four stories and had these specific friends record themselves reading the text. This was a lengthy process due to all our busy lives, and it took about a month.  


After the audio, I created the footage of the film through a normal digital camera. First, I drew pictures for Trans' story. His story was very playful and ended happily, therefore, I wanted to portray this message with cute, hand-drawn pictures for the stop motion. Next, I used a computer background and magazine cut outs for Lin's story. His story emphasized how media influenced him, so I thought using the elements of a computer screen and magazine pictures/words would be suitable to show this. The third story was Yuan's which was about him and his Chinese family. I used Chinese characters to portray the characters in this story. Lastly was the story of candles, Lui's story. I used this very metaphoric medium for his story because I wanted to show Lui's dark coming out story and the realities of coming out in an Asian American family.  


The most difficult decision in this project was to decide how long a picture would stay on the screen. It was hard to tell what to prioritize and emphasize in the story. I didn't know whether to focus on main points of the picture or if I should change pictures based on the speech. Another difficult choice was the background music because it was hard to find suitable music to fit the mood of the entire collection of stories. I ended up using instrumentals of songs.  


Editing the film proved to be easy after figuring out the sequences and emphasis on pictures. I used Windows Media Movie Maker for the editing, which was an alright editor. It is an inconvenient program, but it proved to work. In the end, I think I did alright. I believe this film is really well balanced, and Queer-Asian can give a nice perspective to those who have no clue about those who identify as queer and Asian.