APD Week 2

By Priyankar Ray

This is the submission for Week 2 of APD

Theme: Time + Play

APD W2

Play & Self

The Project link: https://youtu.be/TaHY8Pnb1SA

Theme: Play & Time

Context:

For this week’s prompt we collected several keywords for play and time respectively. I wanted to make something that showed the progression of time. I wanted to play with objects old and new and put it into one piece. The keywords I chose for play were ‘progression’ and for time I thought of ‘generation’. As time progresses, we get more generations in our family.

I wanted to use some new technology to bring back old photos to life. I found this app which allows you to upload very old pictures, enhance them, and using AI, animate them for a short clip. I realised that a lot of the older generations did not have the luxury or opportunity to record themselves or others. We have a surplus of videos and pictures in the current generation (probably a little too much). So, in an attempt to have a play with the representation of the progress of time, I decided to use new tools to update some old archival objects.

A lot of the idea came from a very old conversation I had with my mother. She had mentioned that she didn't have any videos of her father (he passed away just before I was born), and having seen all the new ways of preserving memories in the last couple of decades, she wished she had some videos of her father. That thought fueled a lot of the initial thought process of the idea.

I also worked with a friend, Ishan Kala, to add some music to this piece. We took a similar route for the music in the sense of progression. I recorded myself playing the handpan to give an old timely feel to music and added some newer methods of music production as the song progressed. It is however a simple loop to add a little more feel to the overall project.

Method:

The biggest challenge to make this happen was to get usable pictures of the older generation. I had to instruct and guide some of my granduncles and aunts to take pictures of the pictures the best way they could to make this happen.

Once done, I used the app called MyHeritage to create a family tree and uploaded as many pictures of each person as possible. Now was the time-consuming process of the app to use AI and tracking technology (called the DNS- Deep Nostalgia system) to animate each person’s face as best as it could. It required quite a bit of tweaking for each picture to make it work.

It was at this stage, my phone gave out and the app underwent a 1-day update process, which forced me to take a 2-day extension.

However, after this, I made the music as mentioned before, using a handpan to record some tunes, and edit it all on Ableton.

Fun Fact: Amongst all the chaos, I forgot to unsubsribe from the app during it's free trial and got charged a 250 dollar annual fee for the app. So if you like the response and want to enhance or animate old photos, do hit me up!

Response:

I went through the family tree and displayed the outcome of the AI animated play on time through old generational photos. I added as many images I had at my disposal, for the app to make more informed decisions on how to turn the pictures into video.

Each image was first enhanced manually to make it look cleaner and sharper, and then it was fed to the AI system to do its magic along with regular tweaking from my end. After the software update of the app, some of its operations changes, but the results weren’t affected as much.

After having all the components, I put it all together on premiere to give it some more cohesion.

Reflection:

''Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.''

-Aldous Huxley

I feel I resonated with this quote so much with respect to this week's theme and my response to it as I literally used the progress of technology to bring back things from the past in new ways. I was excited to try this thing out as I found this not only fitting for the theme, but also because I didn’t have the good fortune to meet some of these relatives. I feel the quote by Aldous Huxley kind of encapsulates what I was trying to achieve.

Due to the overall lack of pictures, the AI does falter here and there. But all things considered, the results are pretty convincing. None the less, it was a fun experiment and marked my first encounter with an AI system that works on photos. What made it really worth it was the responses I got from my parents and relatives. A lot of whom were in tears to see some of their loved ones as videos, something they hadn't seen before, making this whole experience very surreal (for them and me)! I have added a couple of screenshots of some of the reactions (apologies for the other language...but most of it is in english).

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” George Bernard Shaw

With that spirit, I brought some of the older generations out to play! There were some constructive play involved where I had a rough idea of a goal and worked towards it with a plan. But here was some contemplative play with the inception of the idea and also the music aspect of it, where there was a sense of spirituality and quietness that came with both aspects.

References:

Unfortunately, I did not reference much for this other than a video that I had watched that displayed this exact result.

APD Week 2

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