FL Chan Lives Her Best Life!

FL Chan Lives Her Best Life actually started as a DJ set believe it or not. I’m part of this little online community of music producers and other creative people in a discord server, and this fall we were hosting a small virtual music festival to showcase everybody’s talents. I got picked to participate, and got to work brainstorming ideas for songs that I could include or mash up together. As part of the DJ set that we were making, we had to include some visual aspect that goes in time with the music, so I started to look at the tools I had available to me. I actually have no experience whatsoever with visual editing software like After Effects or anything, so I was limited to editing pictures in the Apple Pages app or using footage from films or video games that were already created. To be honest I am very thankful for this limitation, since it forced me to think outside the box and to be extra creative with what I had to work with. From there I came up with the idea of having a character based in the online world traversing different spaces, and I thought about what kind of songs could fit the visual theme for each world I had come up with. Once I had general concepts for different segments of the film down, I began to tie them together with a narrative and began to add more depth and realism to this story, ultimately deciding on exploring the social landscape of adolescent / young adult life. Out of any aspect of the film this was by far the most difficult to create, since I needed to make sure that the visuals, as well as the tone and lyrical content of the music, fit the main idea of each segment and sufficiently did them justice. I also needed to maintain a cohesive narrative thread that you could follow, even though the film was fairly nonlinear in its premise. In the end, I am very proud of what I have created, and I feel that I have learned a lot in the process of creating this film. My hope is that this film can resonate with people who are going through the same things FL Chan goes through, and that it can make them feel that they aren’t alone in their struggles. Even if you can’t relate to anything in the film, I still hope that through watching, people will gain a greater sense of understanding and empathy towards their friends and family who may be struggling with these issues.