After looking over my first attempt at creating my left screen I reconsidered how I wanted to make it, thinking about what else I could put inside the iPhone screen. I came up with the idea of putting my face inside the screen also, to match up with the background footage, but glitching it so it played differently.
The screenshot above shows the pre-composition I made after I was happy with the edit I had created. I placed the iPhone on top of the footage and use the draw tool to cut out the screen in order to be able to place footage 'inside' it. I then added the same footage, but zoomed it in to fit the screen and match up with the background, just showing my face inside the phone.
This screenshot shows how I created the glitch. I downloaded some copyright free footage of a glitching screen to use for the moving glitch. With the footage I created an adjustment layer and added the preset effect displacement map onto it, this then made the glitch appear through my footage.
I then added the 'set channels' so I could play around with the colours emitted through each channel of the footage. This is how I created the coloured footage. I then just moved them around so they weren't displayed perfectly on top of each other which allowed each individual colour to be seen. This also worked well with the glitch.
This is the free stock footage I used:
Here is what I created:
The idea behind it is that we live through our mobile phones, which is why I wanted to have my face seen on the phone screen, glitching as if it is being affected.
I am really pleased with how this screen edit came out and I want to use it in my final twin screen. I will need to edit it further for the final twin screen as I need to make it loop for the duration of my final piece and cut off the ending slightly.
For the left side of my twin screen, my idea is to have footage of my face, not moving just blinking and still, then I want to put an iPhone over my face to symbolise how we live through our phones, and that we are becoming obsessed with technology. On the iPhone I will have a slide to unlock background, as if you would be unlocking me and gaining access to my life. I decided to try out this idea by filming myself, and the screen of my iPhone and then going onto Adobe After Effects to put the footage together.
This was my first attempt at creating footage for the left side of the twin screen. Although it's not perfect I was pretty pleased with myself as I remembered the effects we had learnt in one of our workshops to create an alpha matte, which allowed me to cut out the section that I wanted and put the iPhone screen on my face.
The clip is only 10 seconds long but I would have it looping on the left side for the duration, as it would be the simplistic link to what would be going on on the other side.
For the right side I want to just have an iPhone, and create moving footage on the screen, another thing I will have to do using an alpha matte so I can cut out the section I want and just place the moving footage inside that area.
When we began thinking about how we wanted to make our film, we took a lot of inspiration from the research we had done and the films we had looked at in class. Our concept for this film came from our short film we made on Digital Materialisation. We thought a lot about how the digital world has an overbear on our lives nowadays and how we could visualise this concept in a film.
Looking at films such as Piplotti Rist, Black Ice and Berlin Horse we gained an understanding of what experimental films are presented like and how we could go about beginning our film.
We also did a lot of research into articles surrounding the overtake of digital technology in the 21st Century and how the younger generation is now heavily influenced by things such as iPhones and social media.
We used some archive footage in our film as well, meaning we researched into old television adverts and the way technology was presented as a new life-changing thing.
Planning
As we had clear ideas to what we wanted to produce, I'd say our planning was really effective and made our whole filming and editing process run a lot smoother. We planned out everything we wanted to film so we had a clear check list, meaning we didn't miss anything out or have a lack of footage.
For our voice over we wrote a script of what we wanted to be said, over compensating so that we would have more footage to play around with and decide between. This meant that we wouldn't have to shoot more things in the editing weeks as we had more than enough to use.
Development
From the beginning we had a clear outlook on what we wanted to achieve, however this didn't stop our idea from developing throughout the filming weeks. We started off thinking a lot about archive footage and how we could achieve the concept of a digital overload. This led us to think about using a projector to project glitches and footage onto our own faces and bodies to achieve the idea that the glitches were taking over our minds.
Although we knew what we wanted to achieve and how we wanted our ideas to come across, the constant development of our ideas throughout meant that our ideas were stronger and the making of our film went smoother and we managed to try out a lot of different ideas before establishing what we really liked.
We also knew that we wanted a robotic voice to almost narrate throughout our film, so we did a lot of research and development into websites that would allow us to create a speaking robot with a voice that we chose and decided upon.
Edit
The editing process went pretty smoothly for us. As we had planned out what order we wanted the clips to appear in, it was mainly a matter of putting them altogether on the timeline and cropping them to how we wanted them, so the film wasn't too long and each clip got a fair showing.
We also watched a lot of tutorials to gain experience of how to use Adobe After Effects efficiently so we wouldn't waste time messing around and risk tampering with our footage and not being able to take back the mistake we would make. This sped up the entire editing process as we were able to just get on with creating the glitch effects and not having to mess around trying to figure out how to make them work.
Communication
Alice and I had really good communication throughout the entire filming and editing process. We were constantly discussing ideas and planning things together, so we were both up to date with how the film was progressing. It helped that we both had similar ideas to begin with, so by combining these ideas we were able to create something that we possibly wouldn't have been able to do alone.
We also improved each others weaknesses, as something things Alice was better at and could help me with, and some things I was better at. This meant that everything was flowing smoothly and we didn't really encounter many problems.
Time Management
I think because we had planned everything so well, this really improved our time management as we were really focused on what we needed to get done. We had clearly established our ideas and what we wanted to shoot, meaning we were very focused and able to complete our filming over two days. We also managed to shoot a lot of extra footage in case we needed it in the edit.
The same thing applied in the editing process, we had planned out what we wanted to achieve well enough that we had a clear schedule to stick to, meaning our time management was one again very good.
After creating my experimental film, I began to think about what route I want to take with my twin screen, incorporating this idea of glitching footage. Thinking about the relationship between humans and the digital world, I want to try and visually express this idea that we live through our phones, not really living in the moment anymore. We are constantly updating our status with elements of our daily lives, rather than calling someone on the phone to tell them about what we've been doing. It is much easier to text your friend than arrange to see them for an actual conversation, which is worrying to me. I also wanted to think about technology can be seen as something evil, something that can mess with us and potentially ruin our lives. This lead me to think about an increase in horror films using technology to develop their storylines, showing it as something dangerous that can bring threats to humans.
Unfriended (2015)
Six high school friends with a dark secret receive a Skype message from a classmate who committed suicide a year ago after someone uploaded a video of her online. The footage of this film is mostly seen through what is a laptop screen, featuring Skype calls and showing other elements of social media, with an anonymous profile terrorising the friends. This demonstrates the dangers of social media and not knowing who you might be talking to, or who can get hold of your information and data online. This was interesting to me as it shows technology as a threat to people, rather than something positive.
Hacked (2016)
Creepy found- footage horror about a grad student whose research into video chat culture quickly takes a dark and unsettling turn.
This film is another film that uses the features of technology to portray the storyline. With most of the film being shown as if on a chat room, it shows how people might be hacking into our webcams and watching everything we do, recording footage of ourselves to use against us. Once again it portrays a negative relationship between the digital world and humans, something I want to explore further.
Today we had some major problems we needed to fix in order for our edit to be complete. We needed to finalize the glitch edits we had created in After Effects, however when we ran through our film we realized that one of the glitches stopped moving about a minute in. This would be a major problem as we wanted it to continue moving throughout to have it's proper effect on the footage. At first we looked to see if it was key framed to stop at any point, then looked at the duration and they both showed that it should continue running throughout. With the help of a technician, he recommended that we render the file as maybe the edit just couldn't keep up with the playback. Once the film was rendered we watched it through and the glitch still wasn't moving. This was so frustrating as it was the final step to the film being finished, and it was becoming more of a complex problem than we thought, as we couldn't find a solution. Eventually the technician came back with one final attempt to try and get it to move. He looked at the evolution settings of the fractal noise edit, and reset them. This made the glitch begin to move again throughout !! It was caused due to the equation we had entered previously, causing the effect to stop at a certain point. What seemed to be such a complex problem was solved with such a simple solution!
Finally we had to change the frame size of our project, as we realized that it was slightly too small and didn't fit the entire screen. This was easily changed in Adobe Premiere Pro, and then we just re-imported the main footage back into our Adobe After Effects composition. We finished the edit by watching the whole film through once more, double checking that all the effects were working smoothly, and the film looked how we wanted it to. Then, once we were happy with it, we rendered the final edit. Overall, I am really pleased with how the editing process went. I think because we had a clear plan of what we wanted to achieve, it made the whole process run so much smoother and allowed us to be more organised and focused. I am really pleased with the outcome of the film and how it looks, I think it really captures our idea of the digital overload and experimental film. Alice and I made a great team and we are really proud of our film.
Today's mission was to finalize the edit of our film after our tutorial with Anne, showing her what we had created so far. She was pleased with what we had done so far, so we got the go ahead to being editing glitch effects onto our film in Adobe After Effects. We found a tutorial on YouTube that showed us how to create some really cool effects over our footage, so we followed it closely making adaptions to suit our film.
The video was very complex to follow since it was quite advanced in After Effects, however after a lot of stress and redoing certain elements, we managed to create some glitch effects we were really happy with. The glitch effects came to 11 layers in After Effects, all using different skills and effects such as:
mask layers
editing the hue
editing the curve
fractal noise
CC Griddler
editing the saturation
This particular tutorial was really good as it showed us how to create the effects for many different glitches, rather than having the same one continuously throughout. Involved in this tutorial there were some equations we had to add into the program layers, which was very daunting at first as we had never done anything like this before. However from following the tutorial and banging our heads together we managed to make it work and it looked really good.
The screenshots below show some of the red distorted footage glitches we created, that really fit in with our theme of digital overload. This was achieved by adding in some fractal noise and changing the hue to 100% on red. From the screenshots it almost looks like a horror film.
We are still in the process of finalizing the glitch edits and making sure they run smoothly throughout the film, however so far we are really pleased with the outcome and what we have achieved, teaching ourselves new skills along the way.
