APD Week 1- PLAY & SELF Theme

Theme 

PLAY AND SELF

Context

Which X are you? Instagram Filter https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2020/01/the-best-which-____-are-you-instagram-filters/

Following the inspiration of the interactive filter on Instagram, which actually allows followers to have a little game-play interaction with the story someone posts on their stories. It is simply based on the tap and hold function when people look at the stories, to generate the result, however, it is quite successful to enhance a better engagement and interaction in asking and response flatform, rather than just a simple answer Yes/No.

Method

Generate handrawings from my peers.

After that, I collect all the drawings and bring them in Illustrator to have all the bitmap images converted into vectors.

When it's all done, I try to use Toon Boom/After Effects to do the morphing transition from one image to another, which my intention is to do the eye, the nose and the mouth separately. 

After all, the three pieces will be put together in a platform (similarly to the Instagram filter) which tends to create an interactive activity for people to have fun with.

Response

I asked my peers to do a very simple quick drawing of me in 30 seconds, which the task requires them to draw 1 eye, a nose and a mouth with closed lines. Before that, I showed them an example of how it can be done. Even though people look at me and try their best to illustrate my appearance, it turns out that when the amount of time was very limited, everyone tends to look pass through the process of observation and try to visualise based on their memories and styles of design. Not very surprisingly, most of the drawings I collect from my peers are the same as the example I showed them before. 

The part of converting the drawings into vectors didn’t take me long since I am familiar with it. It comes to the real struggle when I have to deal with ToonBoom (which I rarely use before). I tried to use After Effect, and that takes me even longer to handle the task, but I have more options in deciding how the morphing effect can look like. I couldn’t finish the task in my given amount of time ( and may finish it later), but I think this is a basic step that helps me to get an idea of how we can innovate with an old platform material.

Reflection

I feel like under the pressure of a very short amount of time given, people get to be losing their awareness of their observation towards the subject (my face). They seem to be concerned more about getting the task done IN TIME ( which I found very similar to the idea of Instagram filter X ironically) rather than having their drawings accurately. It is related to the point that Hannah (2020) makes in her article about how we thought technology can tell us who we were, turns out everything was pointless. However, some people seem to have the problem of relying on the tech rather than trusting their own sense, which eventually may cause impacts on our community perception.

Source:

Hannah Ewens (2020) Instagram's 'What X Are You' Filters Reveal a Lot About You. But Not What You Think

https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/m7qgp8/instagram-what-which-who-are-you-ai-filter-quiz