Public Convenience

Another week, another word. This time being public convenience. Not going to lie, this so far has been the one that has gotten me stuck the most. I simply did not have any idea what I wanted to do for it. What can be considered a public convenience? What could I possibly create in the little time I had?

While trying to answer the first question, I received a notification on my phone and I thought, “That’s it!”. What is more convenient than a phone? I got to researching and looking in my phone for all the tools that it has in it.

Then, I remembered this antique landline phone my parents used to have during my childhood, and how I would spend hours going through it putting my phone on one of its holes and waiting for it to complete a spin. I thought “these are not around anymore”. And, that is where the inspiration for this particular project came from.

I decided to do a, sort of dystopian, poster of a modern phone and having a hologram (to symbolise the future) come out of it with all the different objects that have disappeared from our lives simply because phones are… more convenient.

While trying to design the poster on photoshop and using a stock images picture of a phone and breaking it apart, as well as an old alarm clock that I added broken glass too as though to appear forgotten about... I realised… this would look much better as a moving image. So that is what I did.

I looked up tutorials on YouTube that would teach me how to do a motion graphics hologram, and after watching, and watching it, and watching it, I felt confident enough that I would be able to follow it and use it on this project.

Obviously, YouTube tutorials do not teach you everything. So, I had to figure out a way to get highlights onto the objects that were behind it. To do this, I simply decided to paint the highlights over it on Photoshop, where I could add as many details as I wanted to it, and then I would overlap it with the old image with the objects as soon as the light appeared. Mostly, it was a process of going back and forth between Photoshop and After Effects. It takes more hours to experiment to get things right, than it does to do what the final result will look like.

The final result, I was quite happy with. To add a bit more detail, I edited some different sound effects together and added static noise to the background. One thing I did not consider, but should have, is where this would be shown in. And, what the audience would be. But, regardless, it was a something that I had a lot of fun thinking of and doing.

Note to future self: only turn on the motion effect on After Effects at the end because it does slow the entire program up and it will take hours to get it to move in any direction.