Our project work is to explore the interactive side of making media for online screen, as well as hyperlink driven, which ties in to Manovich’s article on hypermedia.

But first…

Before I dive into describing the concept of our project work, I’d like to point out how old school I find myself annotating and highlighting readings not just from this studio, but in the other electives I’m taking too. Makes me think that no matter how technology evolves, some people might retain some deeply rooted old habits, and I’m no exception.

The Concept…

An online e-portfolio that allows viewers, potential employers, or even friends to view your profile. It’ll operate as a website based style, like how some of the projects we’ve seen during the week where they have customised web designs and multimedia. The portfolio will start with a brief opening introduction of the person, and then several hyperlinks will appear at the end for viewers to click on if they would like to find out more about the person. Links to their resumé, showreel or past work related achievements/projects, social media profiles, and other interests such as, hobbies, family, pets, etc…

Manovich refers to this as, “branching-type interactivity”, by having several branches to various platforms across the web to access different media texts and documents. It could be a family portrait on your Instagram account, or a vlog of your last getaway trip overseas. We thought of establishing a media platform that enables users to tie in all their social media platforms together with their credentials that they may have gathered throughout their professional career.

The Video…

Since we have no knowledge of web design or writing java scripts, we did a mock up of the platform with the use of Youtube’s function on embedding hyperlinks into the video.

The mock up video can be viewed below…

 

One Step Further…

I know this isn’t part of making media for online screens, but I attempted to do some compositing using Premiere Pro’s compound blur effect to touch up the face of yours truly. I mean, there is no better specimen than yourself right? Going back to my internship last summer,  I was exposed to a full post-production house facility with a whole team of CG artists, compositors, colourists, online artists, and offline editors. I was shadowing one of the online artists for a week and witnessed him working on several TV commercials for a laundry detergents, beauty products, and more. The programme his used was Flame, developed by Autodesk, and I was really blown away by the capabilities that software is able to do. Currently, I’m still exploring the greater depths of what Premiere Pro can do, and I thought of touching up my face that puberty has done  such a fabulous job on leaving its mark. And I must admit, it’s a long process, keying out frame by frame to mask the compound blur effect. I’m not sure if there’s a faster way of doing it, as Premiere does have a tracking function, however it isn’t as complex as Flame’s for that matter. I am currently still in the midst of everything, as you can tell from the mock up video, there are still some parts that are glitchy. Maybe I’ll put up a before & after video just to compare and see if it’s convincing or it looks too artificial…

 

*This segment of the post has been added on to the original post on 30/03/2018.

The verdict…

So as mentioned above, I took a bit more time to polish up a bit of the video we shot.

The video below would demonstrate what I’ve been messing around with on Premiere. I am very much aware that these can be done in other programmes in a much more efficient, and probably, more professional way, such as After Effects, Flame Assist, or Da Vinci Resolve, however, fortunately, or unfortunately, I am only limited to using Premiere Pro at the moment.