Why Am I Like This?

Why Am I Like This - Music Video

For my senior thesis I wanted to create a contemporary dance video that features Orla Gartlands song, Why Am I Like this?. The narrative follows a teenager girl as she struggles to cope with her anxiety disorder. This causes her to be consumed by negative thought patterns, in-flict self harm, dissociate, as well as experience very real affects anxiety has on the body.

The goal of this piece to show how individuals struggling with mental health disorders are often written off as being “dramatic” or “attention seeking", when in reality its a huge, yet silent, battle fought under the surface. As someone who has fought this battle personally, I wanted to be able to tell my story through art and dance.

Refining The Footage

After we were happy with the new video footage, I edited and color graded the clips in Nuke Studio. Here, we generated a RBG lut to bring the initial color back to the footage and then the footage was graded to have a greenish/blue undertone. I chose this look because I wanted to emphasize the feeling of fear and confusion in conjunction with the dancers micro body movements.

Look Development 

During the early stages of development, I knew the story I wanted to tell but wasn't sure how to communicate it visually just yet. This led me to shoot test videos of my dancer and how the hand drawn animations would interact with her. 

After exploring the hand drawn elements integrated with the video footage, I wanted to try experimenting with expressionistic and colorful rotoscoping.

Cell Assets

I began animating on each of the clips in Photoshop after the editing was finished. I wanted to use visuals that depicted the raw emotions felt when struggling with a mental disorder. 

Roto Assets

The other aspect of the cell animation I tackled next was the rotoscoping. These looks went through several changes as we wanted something that was bold and expressive while still conveying the raw emotions of our dancer.

In Conclusion...

This piece was so special to create. I loved getting to experiment with hand drawn animation, color grading, editing, and art direction. This piece was a big milestone for my career as I tackled a issue that is very important to me as well as helped me grow creativily as an artist. I am truly honored to be able to finally share this piece with the world. 

Sincerely,

Taylor