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Zukang Yang

Professor McClure

Writing 39B

March 17, 2017

Rhetoric in Practice: Alone

In my RIP, I will be presenting a brief introduction of my RIP project and the meaning

behind the movie. Then, I will analyze two moments from the movie Infinity Fountain and

eerier texts rhetorically. Besides, I will be talking about my contributions of being the monster in

the movie and the audio searcher in detail. Finally, I will explain how I enjoy interacting and

collaborating with my group members Alec and David with reasons.

First, My RIP group project is a short horror movie about a story between a male UCI

student and a number of shadowy figures the monster, and conveys the fear of being alone.

This story, taking place at night in Aldrich Park, University of California, Irvine, presents the

course of a student keeping receiving eerie texts with the key words never be alone and getting

caught by the monster as a result of constantly being alone. Nol Carroll, an American

philosopher considered to be one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy of art, states

that In the examples of horror, it would appear that the monster is an extraordinary character in

our ordinary world (The Nature of Horror, p. 52). In other words, horror movies usually contain

monsters that are extraordinary for human beings. Therefore, in order to film our horror movie,

we utilized eerie texts, threatening shadowy figures and a final jump scare the shadow

appearing right behind the character and being about to attack the him, to create an extraordinary

monster. On the other hand, Nol Carroll also believes that Like suspense, works of horror are
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designed to elicit a certain kind of affect (The Nature of Horror, p. 52). Therefore, the effect of

our horror movie is to inform all UCI students of the fact that a great number of students,

especially some international freshmen, are isolated by the rest of the students due to some

objective reasons. As UCI is a culturally diverse campus, it accepts a great number of

international students from around the world every year. Nevertheless, some of those students

have language barrier and cultural difference, they tend to isolate themselves from or be isolated

by local students even though they feel like fitting into local students groups. Since the

metaphor of the movie that my group and I are trying to present is the fear of being alone, I want

to reveal the situation where these international students have strong desire to fit into a new

culture and be friends with Americans but constantly being isolated due to discrimination and

lack of sense of inclusion.

Second, the Infinity Fountain has the effect of discomforting the audience, while the eerie

texts engage the audience. The familiar initial setting has the effect of discomforting the

audience. At the beginning of the movie, before the character appears in the scene, we made a

shot of the Infinity Fountain below the stairs to Rowland Hall at night, which is lit up, giving it a

glowing appearance, contrasting the dark and shadowy park it precedes. This initial setting

appeals to audience because Infinity Fountain is one of the most familiar spots for UCI students.

In daytime, as audience know, the fountain is a pleasant place to stay at, to hear the splashing

sound of the water and to watch lovely ducks chasing each other in the pool. However, at night

when dark surrounds it, the water stops springing up, the ducks disappear, and few people pass

by it, this paradise has suddenly become a strange and silent place at which people will not spend

one more second on staying. This setting, underling audiences familiarity to the daytime

fountain, discomforts audience by creating a phycological contrast. Therefore, when the

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character walks to the fountain, the audience would expect the character to leave this place as

soon as possible.

The eerie texts engage the audience. In the movie, after the character leaves the fountain,

as he walks through Aldrich Park, he suddenly receives a text from an unknow number contains

the words, Dont be alone. He appears perplexed but ignores it. However, when another text

comes along from the same number saying Its dangerous to be alone at night, the character

looks around and sees a shadowy figure in the distance but still appears peaceful. This scene is a

part of the trope that the movie is creating I Can See You. According to a famous website,

Trope, which has thorough descriptions and explanations of tropes, I Can See You depicts the

scene where a person keeps receiving calls or texts from a stranger without realizing that the

stranger is close by; as the contents of the calls or texts become more and more threatening, the

person being called finally realizes that he/she is within line of sight of the caller (Trope). In the

movie, we simulate the exact same situation. The purpose of utilizing this trope is to speed up the

formation of intense and ominous atmosphere. The words Dont be alone and Its dangerous

to be alone at night inform audience that the monster is watching the character, they start

speeding up breathing while the character still appears relaxed. Since audience realize the danger

before the character does, they would on one hand try to come up with some ways to inform the

character that he is in danger, and on the other hand question the characters ignorance.

Therefore, the trope I Can See You successfully engages the audience by informing them the

danger before the character.

My contribution to the RIP text is acting the monster and collecting audios for editing. To

begin with, we agreed on using technology to create the shadowy monster. However, due to lack

of editing technique, we finally let me play the monster. Since the shadowy monster is purely
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black based on the script, I dressed in black in the filming night. Besides, audience cant see my

face when I appear in the scene as a shadow, I got to either wear my black coat backward so that

the hood of my coat could cover my face, or stand with my back facing the camera. When we

were taking shots of me, I had to stand still, as the proposal says Shot of dark figure standing

still, then it suddenly ducks out of vision. There were two difficult shots for me to act because

of me losing my sight. One was when the character walked down the stairs and passed the

Infinity Fountain, I was standing in the dark bush by the stairs and moved to my left when the

character passed me. However, as I was wearing my coat backward and my face was covered by

the hood, I couldnt see anything but tried to move carefully as well as maintain my posture of

standing still. The other shot was when the character receives the third text containing It is

dangerous to be alone, he looks around and sees the shadow stand by a tree and suddenly move

around it and disappear. As the tree has thick roots and when I moved I couldnt look down, I had

to walk carefully again to avoiding being tripped. Apart from these two shots, my other shots

were quite easy and satisfying.

Other than acting the monster, I was responsible for collecting audios. The procedure of

searching for the audios has three steps. First, I asked friends for website resources, and selected

the ones that provide free sound audios. On the other hand, in order to boost the efficiency, I

again chose the website that have the audios appeared as soundtrack. Second, I divided our

movie into four categories: phone vibration, shadowy figures, chasing and jump scare, each of

which requires corresponding background music. While the audios for phone vibration is

straightforward, which needs a single vibration sound, the ones for shadowy figures, chasing

scene and jump scare are a lot harder to determine. In my imagination, every time when the

shadow appears in the movie, the corresponding music is supposed to not only catch audience
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attention, but also to be suspenseful and eerie enough to tense the atmosphere. As a result, I

collected some audios that have high-pitch and low-pitch with one following another. As

opposed to the audios for shadow, those ones for the chasing scene are supposed to be constantly

high-pitched. More importantly, as the climax for our movie is in the end when the character

encounters the shadow, I chose the audio that is soundless at the first few seconds and has high-

pitched scream in the middle. Third, as I didnt have the entire video at the time I was in search

of audios, I pictured all the scenes, embedded with all possible audios for comparison. After I

finished collecting audios, I sent them to the editor for his editing.

Personally, I enjoy working with my group members Alec and David because they are

willing to cooperate to make our presentations and RIP project better. Throughout this quarter,

works that required collaboration were mostly class presentations and RIP project. Alec and

David were always optimistic about the presentations while I was worried about what to present.

Every time when a presentation was assigned, I asked them if they thought it was difficult. They

would say: It is easy. Dont worry, buddy. We will figure it out. I felt less stressed because of

their confidence and optimism. Besides, they were quite effective in brainstorming what to say

during the course of preparation for the presentations they came up with ideas and found out

relevant resources quickly. Since we had gathered many information before each presentation,

we were able to perform quite well. Therefore, I surprisingly enjoyed every presentation we did

in spite of the fact that I have phobia of public speaking. However, when it comes to the things

we couldve done better, I believe that the only thing is less procrastination because we crammed

for the presentations frequently they may have been better if we didnt procrastinate. On the

other hand, they were as dedicated as I was on the RIP project. First, Alex was in charge of

writing the script and acting the main character. He sure has done his part excellently because his
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detailed script made our filming process easier. Then, David was the cameraman and was in

charge of editing. He took every shot of the film patiently and came up with lots of advice on the

characters acting. After filming, he asked us for advice while he was editing. Personally, I enjoy

collaborating with both of them and start loving teamwork because of the experience of all the

presentations and the RIP project.

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Work Cited

Carroll, Nol. The Nature of Horror. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 46, no.

1, 1987, pp. 5159., www.jstor.org/stable/431308.

"I Can See You." TV Tropes. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Mar. 2017.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ICanSeeYou