Fitness in Mind

Reflection:

On the 2^nd Tuesday of the Augmented cinema class, we shared our elevator pitches, some were very Black Mirror-like, some were bizarre, Mine was a case of both. My idea consisted of a fitness fanatic who had the implanted technology that gave him the ability to see his body statistics, primarily his weight, his heart rate and reps for each exercise. This concept was inspired by “the different types of computing technology that may be worn on or in the body” that Barfield addresses in his book (2015:4). The way the fanatics implant works is the chip is “connected to a person’s central nervous system, that is, their brain”, hence the capability to see augmented texts. (Barfield, 2015:4). One of the other characters within the long take is a character named Fitness, who is “a computer by thought alone [is able] to communicate” with Keaton, the protagonist (Barfield, 2015:5).

Pre-production consisted of me writing the script about my brother Keaton who gets screwed over by this new technology and like in Black Mirror, it ends in tragedy.  I then proceeded to ask Keaton to act in this 2-minute one-take and got him to sign a personal release form. Then I proceeded to open a new Premiere Pro project and type all the necessary statistics in advance, rather than stressing over it in post-production. That way I can focus more on keyframing the animation for the previously mentioned text.

Script

Release Form

Production commenced at this park called John Batman Gardens, which is just down the road from where I live. It was a fairly cold day for Keaton since he wasn’t wearing much clothing, and it became annoying. I got him to do the required shots and finished each take with any form of a smooth transition, whether it’d be through a whip pan or coverage. After we finished filming Keaton’s improvised shots, we went back home. After reviewing the footage back home, the wind had obstructed the audio and made it hard to hear Keaton. Then I recorded my lines from the script on Voice memos since I was playing the voice of the computer system named Fitness.

Post-production was unnecessarily complicated since Premiere had suddenly turned into a glitchy catastrophe that resulted in me creating the long take in Final Cut Pro x. This required me to match cut the whip pan movements together as a means to make the edits seamless as if it was actually shot in one interrupted take. The transition from one side of the tree to a different side of the same tree was impossible to match since the two sides had different colours and the camera movements were too slow to actually get any motion blur. This dilemma forced me to morph the two shots together as a means to technically create a seamlessly uninterrupted cut, despite how notable the transition is. After exporting it as an H.264 video, I imported the long take within the premiere project and just saved it as quickly as possible before it decided to lag.

The very next day on August 1^st, a miracle had finally fixed adobe premiere and prevented me from destroying my MacBook purely out of frustration. Given how I had previously typed up the words already, all I really had to do was to animate the text by adjusting the positions and scale, masking the surrounding area and importing the voiceovers from the voice memo. I then implemented a chorus plug-in to give my voiceover a more synthetic texture to it. Then I proceeded to add a limiter on my voice since one of the requirements was to not have audio exceeding -6dB.

After sharing the rough cut on August 2^nd, the class found it entertaining, to say the least. The only criticism I received from Cat Lew was the fact that my audio from the shoot was considered poor since the dialogue that Keaton was saying was inaudible. She recommended that Keaton redelivered his lines through an audio recording. But knowing Keaton, he’ll be unwilling to do any reshooting, therefore ultimately resulting in me adding subtitles for Keaton’s dialogue since my dialogue is much clearer than Keaton’s.

I then proceeded to create a synthetic jingle using logic pro x to play a reverberated F major chord, bounced it as an mp3, inserted it within the premiere project and added different pitch shifts on each jingle to prevent the F major chord from feeling repetitive to audiences.

Timeline Panel:

The best thing that came out of this project was the fact that I was able to keyframe the different texts within the project rather than just having to insert multiple texts at a time. This part was extremely useful when it came down to doing the subtitles, the counting of metres, kilometres and repetitions of bicep curls. The other positive thing that was a success within the long take was the use of the pitch-shifted F Major chords that made the text within the scene feel more diegetic as opposed to just accessible to read, like Keaton’s subtitles.

What I would do next time is use more efficient actors to help me with my projects rather than immediately resort to my brother, this is due to his reluctance in helping me out which makes the quality of my videos much lower. The other thing is using proper planning documentation like a storyboard rather than just relying on a script since the vision I had in mind would have been much clearer and better than what I had improvised on the day. In terms of editing, I would use after effects to track the motion of the camera for the augmented reality effects. Although in hindsight, tracking in after effects can be dodgy at times since there have been times where the tracking has been completely inaccurate, leading me to do manual tracking anyway. Given how I was essentially mandated to create subtitles due to the wind obscuring the audio, I would utilise a windsock or some sort of filter that will reduce the chances of the audio being disrupted.

Blog Posts:

• https://www.mediafactory.org.au/addison-law/2022/07/22/week-1-introduction-week/
• https://www.mediafactory.org.au/addison-law/2022/07/26/week-2-tuesday/
• https://www.mediafactory.org.au/addison-law/2022/08/02/week-3-ar-synths/

Bibliography:

• Barfield W (2015) Fundamentals of Wearable Computers and Augmented Reality, 2^nd edn, CRC Press, Boca Raton.