My award-winning second project for my Motion Graphics 2 class was to take a poem of my choice, record myself reading it, and apply motion graphics in a way I saw fit. I selected Rudyard Kipling’s “The Way Through the Woods,” as I enjoyed his writings in the “The Jungle Book” and wanted to see what else he had done. I had to gather stock footage and piece it together in a coherent manner using Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects. This piece would go on to win a Silver ADDY and a Student Judge’s Choice ADDY.

Since much of my footage was gathered from different people, in different places, at different times of the day, some of the footage looked inconsistent. To solve this, I implemented color grading into all of the footage to give it a similar look. The color also grading added to the ominous feeling I was trying to achieve in my project, making it more eerie. Color grading is the process of digitally coloring and stylizing footage to achieve a certain emotion or tone (think of the green tint seen throughout “The Matrix”). Here you can see some before and after shots of the color grading I applied to change the footage from day to sunset to night.