The Longest Time

Album Cover

You’d think that I didn’t spend much time onto this album cover. You’d be wrong. I spent time planning and planning, and the end result, well, is soso, but is still good enough to be on a cover, right?

At first, I drew how I would position everyone of myself (weird thing to say) on my iPad with the Apple Pencil (never used it until here), then, planned on wardrobe, and lastly, actions I’d be doing.

I planned on shooting the entire picture using the wall in my house as the background. The picture you see here is the test shot I had for setting a timer. Yes, I had to click on the shutter button, run to my position, do the posture, and run back to see the result.

Since I planned on using my wall as the background, I put stickers on the ground to indicate position where I’d be standing. Then, I started taking pictures. The one thing that skipped my mine would be auto-exposure. That bastard made every picture look way different in the subject of brightness. That’s why, you can see that the color of my faces (another weird thing to say) are different. Since the background color was way off for each of the “me”, I decided to cut background off entirely. That’s how this white background came to be. I spent probably 3 days onto this cover alone, to adjust everything, shadows, etc. and the end result wasn’t too shabby.

This is also the first time I have employed my trusty logo, granted that I hand drew it.

Originally I had many non-handwritten words, like the red words and the “I freaking love suits” line at the bottom left corner. Then, my friend Kihyun voted against it, and she’s always right.

Video

I have planned for a “big” video for the song, since you know, I spent about 2-3 months for the cover song. My initial imagination would be like my older videos, where there is a “seamless” seam between each of the characters in a single shot. It would be already horrible enough to have 4 people in one screen because of the 16:9 ratio. In the normal ratio I have to watch for shadows every time because it might crash onto the “seam” between each “mes”.

For the “grand project”, I bought a new camera, the Canon M50. A friend who studies Photography in Duke University in Pittsburg recommended it to me, because it has got a wide angle. On my first try for the “grand project”, I didn’t know how to operate the camera because I didn’t read deep into the menu items. I set manual exposure to like 6000 or something, and the autofocus ran wild. For some parts, the autofocus was so sensitive it locked onto flakes and took the focus away from me. If it is a 1 person top, normal video, it would be fine; but for a six people shot that requires consistency on the edges, it was too horrible, I deleted them in an instance.

See the hair length difference between when I took the album picture and when I shot the video? Yeah, I waited that long to actually finalize on the idea of not shooting a fancy video. Reason? There are two. First, I wanted to shoot outdoors under the sun to avoid shadows, and maybe at UCLA. Coronavirus hit, and that was that. Second, you know, it’s not my song, it’s not really worth it because it will forever be “not mine”. If I write an a cappella song in the future, I will pull out all the stops.

But making this video was fun though. I can’t stop giggling every time I see six of me dancing to the same song. I mean, it wasn’t the way I hoped it would be, but damn it does the scenery look cool. Next time though I’d probably have a darker wallpaper installed to make my face more pronounced, because the wall is only a tat darker than my skin.

Contributors

Huge shoutout to Kihyun Jo. We met in San Diego through our common friend John. This project wouldn’t be as good as it is now if she was not there helping me. Man, she is so amazing, she listened to my song every time I made changes to it, to give me advice. She caught out all of the mistakes that I didn’t catch, and I was like: “how did she catch it??”

Without her, I’d probably wrap it all up at version 15 (the final count was 48), but then she caught out every little mistakes I made and pointed them out to me using seconds. I was absolutely shocked that she got so many details. She is amazing.

Who gave me advice (bold for great advice)

• Alice Deng

• Jasmine Guo

• Jack Li

• Dymond Lee

• Kihyun Jo

• Joy

• Aileen Ju

• Ms. K

• Professor Chi Li

• Grace Roseman

Don’t ask why there are so many girls here, UCLA has more female students than male students, especially non-STEM. And despite this, I am still single.