Editing Day 2

Today our main focus was adding the audio to our film. Our main audio for our film was a robotic voice over that we planned a script for (shown in a previous blog post.) We had a selection of these audio clips that we had to listen to and decide which ones we wanted to use and which ones were relevant to certain sections of the film.

We also had a backing track that Alice put together on Adobe Audition consisting of old Microsoft sounds that she edited to sound really creepy and distorted. We decided to have this running throughout so that the film has an actual backing track and isn't just silent in places where there is no robotic voice.

After we had organized the audio, we watched the film back entirely and were really happy with the outcome we had created. The next step was to transfer the project into Adobe After Effects in order to create the glitch edits on top of our footage. 

Multi Screen Initial Ideas

For the final project within the Portraits module, we have to create a multi screen film showing how well we can use Adobe After Effects, as we have been having weekly workshops with Phil to learn some skills.

The theme of the project is to explore the relationship between the human body and the digital world. This can be interpreted however we like.

Initially I started by thinking about the hold the digital world has on us, and how the younger generations today are becoming totally reliant on the use of technology, as they haven't grown up without the most advanced versions of the internet, phones etc. 
I looked at some recent news articles discussing this idea and similar ideas, proving that it seems to be a very relevant and recent concern in the media.

Are Young People Addicted To Digital Technology? (2017)
http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/young-people-addicted-digital-technology-12961456

This article discusses the increasing concern for the young people of today who are obsessed with the use of digital devices. The concern of the development of social skills because of children constantly being online. Another concern being that excessive use of digital technology can disturb sleep, affect concentration and disrupt school work.

This article was particularly interesting to be me because it was discussing a lot of the things I was thinking about already, how people are becoming addicted to technology and not living in the real world, interacting with people in social situations or having actual conversations. This is something I could develop into an idea visually, thinking about the control of the digital world on humans. 

Social Media Safety: Protecting Yourself And Others From Online Predators (2017)
http://www.upmatters.com/news/local-news/social-media-safety-protecting-yourself-and-others-from-online-predators/704067766

Discussing how modern technology and social media apps have become a regular part of everyday life. The importance of keeping yourself safe online if you are a regular user. Encouraging parents to teach young people about being safe online.

From this article I began to think about the need for safety talks and measures regarding the online community, thinking about how young people don't necessarily worry about who they might be talking to or who they are sharing things with.

Generally I want to explore ideas of humans being totally obsessed with technology, making it a regular part of everyday life to be checking your phone or updating your status. I think I could make an interesting twin screen exploring these ideas as it would demonstrate a clear interpretation of the relationship between humans and the digital world. 

Editing Day 1

Today was our first day editing our experimental film together using Adobe Premiere Pro. We decided the best way to approach our edit was to create some sort of structure for what we wanted to do, so that we weren't going in with no idea how we wanted the film to come together.

We also wrote down the steps as we went along, so we could keep track of what we had done, and what we still needed to do. Writing this alongside the structure of the film was really helpful because it kept us organized throughout.

The beginning of the whole process was to scale all our clips to the frame size. We followed this up by unlinking the audio, as we have chosen an external audio track, made by Alice on Adobe Audition. 

The main focus of organizing the clips was cross cutting between footage to get the structure we wanted. We also played around with layering certain clips on top of each other and fiddling with the opacity to see how weird it would look and what different effects we could achieve.

Our plan to continue editing is to edit some glitches over the top of all of our footage to create the desired glitch effect that we want. Watching tutorials on youtube will help us out with this step. We also need to sort out the audio now that we have the structure of the film, as we didn't want this step to interrupt our structure at first.

After Effects Workshop 3

In today's workshop we were given a list of tutorials we could watch on YouTube and choose to try out ourselves on After Effects, to improve our independent skills.

I wanted to try out something I hadn't worked with before, as a lot were based around shapes, and in our first After Effects workshop we did a lot with the shape tool and making them into logos and adding effects to them. 
Therefore I chose the tutorial on morphing text as I thought it looked interesting but was also something I would be able to do with my skill level. I hadn't really worked with the text element in After Effects before, so I thought it would also be something new to try out and get good at.

Here is the tutorial I watched:

This effect was mainly achieved by using a lot of different elements, such as paths, rotations and key frames. 

I managed to pretty much copy this tutorial perfectly. I feel like I've learnt a lot of different skills from this and would be confident doing it again.

This was my first creation:

This one shows a bit of a more 'computerised' transition, which I was happy with, but as the tutorial progressed it showed more creative ways of making the transition, opening up the possibilities of what I can make the transition look like.

I then made a second one, using more of a rotation idea:

This one is more creative, as you can see there is more of a rotation involved in it, which makes it almost look more complex but it was still fairly easy.
I had to learn how to change the anchor point again, as the letter was rotating off the screen at first, but by changing the anchor point I could keep it to rotating in the center. 

I'm slowly learning all the shortcuts for After Effects also, since the tutorial went through some of the shortcuts to use in order to look at different elements of the composition. Using the shortcuts makes working in this software so much quicker as you don't have to search for what you want all the time, you can simply press a letter key and find what you want.

I want to look at some of the other tutorials by this same user to see what other effects I can try in my free time. Although I don't really have a solid idea for my multi screen yet, I want to keep my options open to what effects I could use within in, so broadening my skills is a good idea.

Experimental Film - Further Development

During the first day of filming we were thinking about our concept being how the digital world is taking over your life, and how it is invading our minds. From this we came up with the idea of attempting to project the computer screen onto our faces, as it would achieve this idea of the digital world taking over, and becoming a part of us.

We attempted this by plugging Alice's computer into the tv monitor. I sat in front of it to try and get the light projection over my face, however it didn't really work as we had hoped.

Then I suggested that we try using my projector to project the content onto our faces. We decided to trial these ideas before our second day of shooting tomorrow, so we could get a rough idea of what we would be able to film.

We compiled a list of things we would want to project;

• Project social media platforms, facebook, twitter, tumblr 
• Search bar on forehead 
• Play glitching videos over face Become emojis in the end 
• Evie over our face 
• Chat room messages (you can see what theyre writing)
• See you scrolling through sites on their face 
• Searching for help to get away 
• Towards the end show bad sides of the internet and the dark net 
• Weird computer advert Danielle showed Archive footage on face

We then did a trial run of some of these ideas to see if this whole concept would work.

HAPPY EMOJI

SAD EMOJI

HAPPY EMOJI (EYES CLOSED)

SAD EMOJI (EYES CLOSED)

SEARCH BAR ON FOREHEAD

ERROR 

COMPUTER 

EVIEBOT

EVIEBOT

Our trials proved that this idea can work, however when we actually get to film tomorrow we will adjust the angle and the zoom of the projector. We will still glitch this footage in post production, and maybe saturate the colours to achieve our desired effects. 

Experimental Film - Day 1

Today was the beginning of our shooting week. Alice and I had a clear structure of what we wanted to achieve on our days of filming. We plan to get most of our filming done in the first two days and due to the nature of our film it's mainly going to come together in post production, and as Alice and I are the only crew members we don't have to rely on anyone else's availability.

As we wanted to use archive footage throughout our film, we began the day by finding appropriate videos that related to our theme and idea.

1.  A compilation of old tv adverts for the computer company Commodore.

We probably won't use the entirety of this clip, but there are some parts we will take from it and use in our own film. This advert shows the development of old computers and the adverts that were put out to attract the public. It's interesting to hear the selling points they used to try and draw people in, and the simplicity of the technology compared to what we have today. 

2. Steve Jobs presenting the first Mac in 1984

 

This video is useful because it shows how technology has developed over the years. If you look at the variety of Mac's you can buy from Apple nowadays, they are so much more advanced and show a great development from the one presented in this video.

3. Centel first mobile phone advert 1989

Similar to how we looked at the development of the Mac, we wanted to look into old adverts for mobile phones. This advert clearly displays the size of the phone, however I'm not sure if we'll use it in our film just because of how cinematic it is.

4. Gameboy Advert 1992

Thinking about different technology, we also picked a Gameboy advert that features real people but also still images manipulated to be playing with a Gameboy. We thought this would be an interesting advert to glitch as the footage itself is kind of strange already, and glitching it would make it even weirder.

ELEMENT OF GLITCH

Another key aspect of our film that will come together in the post production is the element of glitching the footage to give it a really 'digital overload' effect. We did some research into glitch art videos to get some inspiration for what we can create.

Below are some links for videos we found on Vimeo relating to glitch art;

https://vimeo.com/67177221

https://vimeo.com/42798760

https://vimeo.com/48861899

https://vimeo.com/14702632

ROBOTIC VOICE OF 'GOD'

We also really love the idea of having a digital voiceover that we can manipulate to sound really creepy, similar to the voice of Eviebot that we used in our short film before. 

We searched for several websites that could do this but eventually came across one called Oddcast that not only allowed a online bot to speak what you type, but it also allowed us to add effects to the voice and change the voice completely.

Below is a video showing what this website can do. We used the effect called duration which made her voice sound really robotic. 

 

We proceeded to write out a script of what we wanted to make the bot say, and then recorded this footage.

We wanted her to say things that relate to the idea of a Digital Overload, looking at articles for research to get inspiration for the script.

Script for the AI

• You are being watched
• Slide to unlock
• Digital overload is now central to the human condition
• Our brains are wired
• You have forgotten where the off button is 
• Are you feeling overwhelmed?
• Just check the internet for five minutes
• Control alt delete 
• Escape 
• You cannot escape 
• You have no identity without the internet 
• Who are you without the internet?
• You’re hiding behind a screen 
• Don’t be afraid we’re all watching you 
• You let the world comment on your existence 
• Hashtag no escape 
• You have a notification…
• Share your location with me 
• Don’t you trust me?
• Lol, lmao, omfg, fml

Experimental Film Research and Development

RESEARCH

In order to progress with the coming together of our film I did some research on articles relating to the idea of Digital Overload. Some of the results were really interesting and made me think about different angles we could take for the film, thinking about ideas that are relevant to the current generation.

Why Digital Overload Is Now Central To The Human Condition
https://singularityhub.com/2016/01/15/why-grappling-with-digital-overload-is-now-part-of-the-human-condition/
This article discusses the idea that we are now so reliant on technology that it has become essential to us in every day life.
This is interesting because so many young people now have smartphones and are glued to screens all day long, choosing this over going outside and leaving their phones (etc) behind.  It could change the way the younger generation is growing up, as they are more reliant on technology than ever.

Digital Overload and the Curation Crossroads
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2012/05/digital_overload_and_the_curat.html
Discussing the ideas of micro-publishing and how there has been an overload of information from so many sources. 

Unplug And Reboot Your Creativity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00tTjaC7uZw
Caroline Giegerich's talks about digital overload as it affects our creative thinking. Through her own battle with digital addiction, she lays the stage for the effects on the brain and discusses how to detox to unleash change in our society.

Smartphones Are Really Stressing Out Americans

http://time.com/4680067/stress-smartphones-anxiety/

An article about how people feel the need to be constantly checking their phones and this is raising stress levels. Also the stress that social media creates, and having everything right at your fingertips.

CONTEXTUAL UNDERSTANDING

We want to create a film that features a lot of digital manipulation and saturated colours, leaving it very suggestive and to be interpreted by its audience, like other experimental films such as Berlin Horse and Black Ice.

Our own concept is to display how we are disconnecting ourselves with the real world due to the fact we are so obsessed and overtaken by technology in our lives. We are also going to take influence from our Digital Materialism short film that Alice and I made previously, as we want this film to almost be an expansion from that.

Our goal is to take people away from reality when they watch our film, and make them feel overloaded by the technology as the screen will be very bright and colourful, with the almost robotic voice over. 

TECHNICAL AND CREATIVE SKILLS

We will probably do all of our filming on a DSLR camera, as there isn’t really any need for a bigger film camera.

In the editing process we will watch tutorials to teach ourselves how to glitch video footage, as this is an effect we want to feature on our final work. We also want to use other effects such as saturating the colours rapidly throughout the film, and also having the screen appear jolty or as if it is flickering. This will help us create the desired effect of a digital overload.

We also thought about attempting the slit scan effect, which we have watched videos on. This could bring a different feel to our video and we are willing to try it out to see if we can make it work.

For sound we might use a voiceover, almost trance like, and edit it to make it sound more robotic to have it repeat throughout the film, like we did in our Digital Materialisation short film. This idea came to us when we were thinking about technology such as Siri (iPhone) and Alexa (Amazon). How these robotic voices interact with us and take commands from us, but are also able to have a short conversation with us. Thinking about how these technologies already exist they are only going to progress and get more involved with our lives, which is scary, so we thought having an almost robotic voice over would be a good representation of these technologies.

SELF MANAGEMENT

Alice and I are very good with our time management and communicate frequently so we can make sure we are following a tight schedule during the filming week to get all of our filming complete.

We plan to make use of all of the filming days efficiently, as our film is going to come together properly during the filming and editing process. As we both have good availability this shouldn’t be a problem.

We have already been doing a lot of self-directed study, mostly presented on our blogs.