Twin Screen - The human Body and the Digital World Evaluation of Final Piece

I am really happy with what I managed to produce in the end even though I went through a lot of struggles to get here. I feel like all the problems I faced have helped me to develop my skills having to solve them and find ways around them. I wasn't confident at ll on After Effects when we began this project but now that we have come to the end of it and I have managed to produce this piece I am much more confident and happy to use it as I can see the kind of advantages it has in creating these unique effects. My piece is meant to be an observation but also comparison between the human body and the digital world aka a computer. I did this through the use of Binary code on one and side and DNA code on the other side. I feel like the binary code is very identifiable but to a lot of people I showed this too they weren't too sure what the right side was meant to be. I feel like maybe if I were to approach this again I could find a more identifiable way to represent DNA and the human body which would make it easier to understand. I feel like the use of time remapping was effective though because it allowed me to make the silhouettes fall in and out of time with each other which added a key point to them message of the piece. It is showing how humans have created this technology like computers and we keep making these computers better and better so in a way computers need us to progress. However we have reached a point were humans also rely on computers and digital technology to help us progress as people so in tern we now need computers but computers are only here because of us. This is a very interesting theory so I wanted to keep the piece quite basic to not over complicate an already intense thought process. I had the silhouettes fall in and out of time through out but I made sure to eave long enough gaps in between doing so because I didn't want the audience to feel too bombarded with information and visuals. I also really like the glitch effect which I was able to add in on Premier because it adds another element of interest to the piece which I felt it needed as it was getting quite slow in a few places and I felt people may loose interest to some viewers who weren't necessarily understanding the meaning fully. I also thought it was really clever how I could work between the Adobe platforms to create this piece because it allowed me to add lots more elements. For example I began in After Effects with my footage editing it all and keying out the green screen and then I used Photoshop to create the layering materials so the DNA code and the Binary code images. I then imported these in and finished editing and adding effects on After Effects. I then to improve the piece further moved it into premier where I was able to add the glitch effect and also the sound track and then I was done. I am glad that I have learnt all these new skills and I feel like now I have them in the future I will be able to create much more impressive pieces on this programme but for now I am pleased I got this far with it. I have made a message and also made a piece which I think is visually interesting.

Twin Screen Project- The Human Body an the Digital World... Final Piece Attempt 2

Now that I was aware of what went wrong last time I could make sure that this second shoot was much more successful. I managed to book out a green screen of an evening when my actress/model was free and I also had another friend come with me to help out as well. I however did not realize that we weren't aloud to use the lighting in this studio because it belonged to the journalism course so I was concerned about lighting but had to make do with the house lights. I stretched out the green screen as tight as I could to avoid creases and shadows ruining the shot. I set my framing up for the shot and this time decided to be further back so that I could get more of the body in which is what I wanted now I had a bigger space to work in. I feel like I knew what worked well from last time such as the contemporary dancing so I just got her to do a few repeats of that. This is a screen shot of how the footage looked unedited:

Now that I have managed to film it well enough using the green screen I can begin editing it much more successfully this time. I began by importing the best video into After Effects by itself and keying out the background and changing the 'Screen Matte' settings to make it a plane black silohette on a white background like so:

As you can see this time the silohette is much clearer and bolder which is what I wanted and now it seems much more professional.

I next needed to create my twin screen composition by expanding the width of a standard composition to double. I can then insert this silohette video in twice making it mirror itself:

This looks a lot cleaner and I am happy with it so far. I have matched up the silhouettes so that they perfectly mirror each other. I now need to layer the binary computer code on the first silohette but in order to do this I needed to work out how to make a script on After Effects which means it will type out as the piece goes along. However after trying this effect multiple times I couldnt find a way to get it to work so I was unable to make it type out. Instead I went onto Photo Shop and created my own Binary Code using text in here and then saved it as an image like this:

I then inserted my image of the coding as a jpeg into my After Effects twin screen project. I layered it underneath one of the silhouettes using the screen matte options which means it only appears in the silohette. I have decided to stick with this for now and I will add effects to it later to make it look more realistic and if I cant have it being typed out I will find another way to make it appear. Here is a screen shot of it with the binary code on top in my After Effects Project:

Next I needed to find a way of representing DNA and human nature on the other side and decided that a helix may not look right compared to what is essentially text on the other side. I went back and looked further into DNA and found this which gives you an example of DNA coding:

This has led me to go back on to Photo Shop and create another text based image but this time on the DNA coding system like so:

I then on after effects layered this in the same way as before to put it inside the other silohette:

I am really happy with were I have managed to get to by myself on After Effects and its almost how I imagined it to be but in order to add more interest to it I am also going to experiment with editing the speeds of clips so they fall in and out of time from each other and also see if I can add some glitches.

I managed to get the two clips to fall in and out of time by using the time remapping setting effect in the time menu and applying key-frames to the sections where I wanted it to speed up. I then in turn do the the same to the other side just later in the sequence so that they can fall back in time as well:

I have the speeds slowly progress through the routine and I think it works well to make the piece more interesting and to also fit my meaning better about how one cant progress without the other the same with technology and humans.
I am happy with the speeds now but I have decided to add a glitch styled effect. I have done this by creating a different composition where I cut out my actresses silhouettes but leave her real body in the silohette like so:

I attempted this glitch effect by putting this new layer over my original composition one small second at a time so it flashes up almost like a glitch however I was really struggling with this on After Effects. Since I know how to do this kind of thing on Premiere Pro I decided to import both my After Effects compositions into premiere and create this effect on there like so:

Now that I am really happy with what I have achieved I worked on a sound track for my piece. I decided to go to B-Rec who is a music production company who has worked on sound projects with me before. I Sam Williams the brief of my project and summed up what I was trying to do and he said he would show me some ideas once he had come up with something. He sent some stuff over and we conversed about it and then he sent me a final over once we were both happy with it. He has used a human process of creating all the sounds by hand on his keyboards and synthesizers and then mixed it in a digital way on his computer which again fits the whole theme of this project. I then added this music to my piece trying to make it fit and that has led me to have my final piece completed. Here it is:

Twin Screen Project- The human body and the digital World... Final Piece Attempt 1

I began by filming at my house with my actress against a plain wall. I lit the wall as best as I could with the small amount of lighting I had at my house such as desk lamps. I would have hired out proper film lighting like a set of red heads but with only public transport to get home I found it would be too much equipment to carry so I decided to make do with my lamps at home. However after finding out how hard it was to light with small lamps I realize red heads would have been much easier so in the future I will plan to use them and find a lift to help me get them home. Here is my basic lighting set up with my actress in it:

As you can see the lighting set up wasn't that good but I did the best I could with what was available to me and I already tried to make my actress as much as a silhouette as possible so that I could just enhance this in post through the keying out process. I experimented with her doing everyday activities like having a conversation and being on the phone but these weren't identifiable as a silhouette really so I then tried the contemporary dancing and this worked a lot better and made a much more visually pleasing silhouette so I decided it was one of the dance pieces I would edit.

I imported my favourite video from this shoot into After Effects and tried the keying out process however it didn't really work because I didn't have an identifiable enough background for the tool to pick up. I did my best with the key-light tool though and I even played about with the setting for 'Screen Matte'for a while trying my best to make it a full black silohette but I could not quite get it there. Here is a screen shot of what it looked like:

The poor lighting set up I had has defiantly effected my ability to be able to key it out properly in After Effects. I played with the settings a lot to see if there was any way I could do it but I was unable to achieve a better result that what you see above. This wasn't going to work with my final idea because all the detail you cans still see in the background and on her will distract away from the images I wanted to layer over the top.

I had a think about another way I could go about manipulating this footage to end up with silhouette and I remembered our workshop/lesson on Rota-Scoping and how we used this to cut images out of a background. I decided to give this process a go and see if it would give me a better result. I found it very hard at first to cut her out with the rota-scoping tool because of the tiny details like her hair etc. I spent a long day trying to do it and it was so complicated I only got 35 seconds of the video rota-scoped out. I thought I would put it in to a twin screen composition after this because I wanted to see how it looked so far and I wanted to mirror it against itself to see how it looked. Here is a screen shot of what it looked like:

Because I found rota-scoping was a much more difficult and time consuming process I haven't achieved something that I am happy with so far. I have managed to make a silohette twin screen piece without any images layered over it yet but it isn't working like I want it to. It is too messy and I feel like if I had a green screen I could have keyed it out and had something far more professional looking. Also I regret the very close up framing I chose for this shoot.

I have decided after all this experimentation that I am going to re-shoot this in a more professional way. I will hire out the green screen studio space on a day which my model/actress can make and we will re-shoot but this time with much better results hopefully.

Twin Screen Project- The Human Body and the Digital World... Planning the Piece

I decided after taking part in all the After Effects tutorials on offer to me that I needed to begin making a plan on how I could make my final piece for this project. I knew I was going to go with the idea of having human silhouettes on screen and comparing DNA to Computer coding with in those silhouettes through obvious symbolism however now I need to plan how I am going to technically execute it:

1) Firstly I will need to record a well lit model moving in front of a plain background. I preferably need the background to be an bold colour so that I can use the process learnt in one of the workshops/lessons to key out the background leaving me with the silhouette. Ideally I want to have a green screen for this but because I am not able to get a green screen studio space soon and my model/actress is only going to be free on certain days at certain times I have planned to film this at my house instead and see if I can make the process work without a green screen first just to practice the process. I will do it in front of a plain cream wall  as I had no other plain background to use. I will light the background wall so that this can been seen properly and so that the model is already nearly a silhouette and then hopefully when I key this background out I can just enhance the shape of the silhouette and make it bolder. I will have the model/actress performing some general everyday movements and also some contemporary dance movements just to see which looks more ascetically pleasing when editing.

2) Secondly I will import the footage once recorded into after effects and start experimenting with the effects when keying the model out and making her into a silhouette. I will then create a twin screen on After Effects by expanding the width of the composition area to make it double but keeping the height the same. On my twin screen composition I will put the same video on there twice, one on either side, but then I will flip it so the two mirror each other.

3) Now that I have my twin screen composition set up I will plan to play with the symbolism by finding a way to make the binary code appear on one silhouette and DNA symbolism appear on the other. This will probably be done in the same way I learnt to layer images up on silhouettes in our green screen keying tutorial however it depends how effective this looks as to weather I will further this and find other ways to do it.

4) One of the last things I want to do is to try and have the silhouettes on each half slip out of time occasionally and speed up but then they will fall back in time. This is because I feel it adds more of a meaning to my piece by expressing that in modern society computers cant progress without humans because we make them but then a lot of humans become dependent on computers and feel they cant progress without them. This shows how they both need each other and that is the way our society has become. I want to also try and get a original soundtrack made for this piece to add to the meaning even further with out distracting people from the visuals.

Hopefully if this all goes to plan and I can pull it off successfully I will have at the end of this process a very visually pleasing twin screen piece which will also have a very strong message to share.