Samantha Yu

For my final project this semester, I created the short film The Person Behind the Screen. With digital identity as the central theme, my work explores the conflict and contradiction between the virtual and real selves in the digital age. I was inspired by the phenomenon of ‘fake personas’ in social media, where we portray the perfect persona and the most desirable image online, but often these online images are not exactly the same as the reality. Through this film, I hope that the audience can reflect on their own identity the intersection between the virtual and the real.

My film is also an expansion of the ‘Dialogue’ experiment from week 4, I produced a script that simulates an interaction between the character and his AI virtual self, as a way of revealing the contradictions and incompleteness of digital identities. I incorporated ideas from this experiment into the storyline of this project. At the beginning of the film, the viewer meets the character’s real identity. Following this, a vintage television frame and the sound effects of the video recording start, suggesting the appearance of a ‘perfect’ virtual identity, a well-crafted persona standing in front of the viewer. As the film progresses, the contrasts and conflicts between the virtual and real identities become more and more obvious, and the character’s truth and fake are gradually showed. I used a black screen subtitle at the end of the film to leave a thoughtful question, ‘Who are we, when no one is watching?’ Further leading the audience to consider the complexity of digital identity.

In her article, Grondlund (2014) discusses how artmaking in the digital age has increasingly turned to the use of dialogue to create more lively identities. In my film, I gradually expose the audience to the fragility as well as the weird instability that the digital world brings by setting up an interactive plot of dialogue between the character and her virtual identity. In order to reinforce this sense of conflict, I choose glitch effects as the main visual expression element. These glitch effects break the audience’s trust in the perfect virtual image, reinforcing the sense of unreality as well as distance behind the digital identities, while creating an uneasy emotional atmosphere. According to Cameron (2018), glitches as a visual element are effective in conveying a sense of distancing and unreality. I used this technique in the film in order to strengthen the falseness of the virtual identity and to further lead the viewer to reflect on the perception of the digital self. Ravetto-Biagioli (2016) mentions that digital media can bring about a blurred and unsettling sense of digital uncanny. This idea has also inspired me to represent the fragility of digital identity in my work through glitchy effects and unstable images. During the viewing process, the audience is led to reflect on how the real self struggles with the erosion of a perfect-looking virtual image in the digital media environment.

Throughout the semester, collaboration with other students has helped me a lot in the process of creating my final piece of work. Sharing my ideas and making suggestions for each other with different people in the classes allowed me to see the creativity of my peers and provided me with a lot of inspiration. For the final project, my initial idea was to create a real-time interactive installation, but my peers’ suggestions made me think about the feasibility of my work. The idea of an interactive installation was interesting, but it required a very high level of skill and a lot of time to realise. Feedback from my peers made me realise that my initial idea might be difficult to realise, so I decided to give up and focus on making a short film instead.

If I continue to develop my media work in the future, I hope to further strengthen the central theme of identity conflict, and make it more distinct and complex. In my current work, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement in the dialogue section. In future versions, I may improve the storyline by showing how the character loses herself in the digital world and goes against herself in order to create a perfect image, making the conflict between the two identities more obvious. Apart from that, I would like to further improve on the editing techniques, especially the pacing of the film. The first part of the film about the virtual identity takes up more time, weakening the audience’s attention to the identity conflict. By increasing the pace of the first part, the audience can concentrate more on the sense of division between the characters, making the theme of the film more meaningful.

During my studies in the studio this semester, my understanding of digital media has shifted on a deeper level. We explored a range of ideas and themes such as new aesthetics, glitches, digital identity, and I gained a broader understanding of digital media not just on a technical level, but I also felt the complexity of digital media and the emotions it conveys to people. My understanding of digital media over the course of the semester has broadened my artistic expression and added new possibilities for visual and narrative expression in my future work.

 

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