Month: November 2021

This week, I went further with the eye-contact experiment. As Michal Rock claims at Designer as Author, the designer is the medium that brings the material to a new model and expresses to the new audience and being a translator, you should outline the spirit of the original material but also give your personal perspective.

What goes on inside the brain influences emotions, and emotions are expressed through a combination of facial expressions and body movements. Reinforcing the narrativity of the images by creating a flipbook for the viewer to create their own expressions.

The middle part of this flipbook is from the original clip, which basically has 3 kinds of expressions that would affect the narrative: eye contact, looking away, smiling. below are the extra actions and the above are the possible thoughts in mind.

Body language tells secrets, which influences human interactions. What these two characters have in common with the leaders’ meeting is that they show some nonverbal information, including facial expressions and body language.

By naming the project by the description of the clip on the internet: I like to feel your eyes on me when I look away, I capture the ambiguousness of the body language and related it to the facial expression of politicians when they are at the leader’s meeting. Showing the contrary of the small things that happen to two people and the things that happen to two or a few leaders that could have a huge impact on the country, I try to give it an ironic and serious-humour feeling.

Basically, I use the same method which is to create a flipbook, it’s also for readers that can have their own narrative or experience the sense of serious-humour based on empirical.

Feedback:

– Maybe try more context.

– Flipbook idea is excellent because you can create your own story.

– Political part: These people know how to use their body language properly because they were trained to do something. We can see that there are moments when they are acting “improperly.”

– Last weeks’ zoom eye contact is also enjoyable.

– Utilizing two iPad is nice. Maybe use an app that can change each portion of the image.

– Film one works well. But the political one should further develop, choose the image more intentionally.

Translating could be considered that putting yourself in a creator position. You translate the text into images, sound, or even smells through your brain by reading a novel. You translate the actions and facial expressions of a person into messages. The translation is happening all the time unconsciously.

Generally, the important part of the film was translated by actor or actress from screenwriting through acting if the theme is human-related. In the Before Sunrise clip, the BGM arises the emotion of the actor and actress and translates the emotion into action.

Discovers:

1. The body language of the complexity emotion of shyness, fear of being seen and judge, hidden feeling, the restrained attraction.
2. The music and the lyrics here speak out the emotion of the characters, and they are the lines of this scene.
3. As the audience, what is the psychology of empathy and crush.

Experiment 1:

Translate from video to a book, which changes the linen narrative situation and allow the audience to create their own narrative.

Experiment 2:

Translate from images to context, take away the time, detailize the emotion, movement and surroundings of the story, allow the audience to create the video by themselves in their head.

Experiment 3:

Translate from physical experience to virtual experience. Thinking of the long-distance relationship or online dating in this pandemic era. Parodying the “eye contact” with myself, the lagging internet connection naturally creates desynchrony eye contact.

Please see the file attached, thanks!

I follow the last weeks’ feedback and have found more images about “Bella”. The images show the decent life that the character has, I imaging what do the characters have been through and what the actress felt after pretending to be someone else, will she have the sense of unevenness? The quantity of the images of she works as different occupations are more outstanding than her personal life.

Bella has so many different occupations and interesting spare time in iStock World, I can’t help to relate to the real-life, woman seems don’t have that much choice and generally don’t share the equal rights that man does in reality, especially in China, woman exceeds the specific age have less competitive because the society assumes that they will have to focus more on the family than the job. I would like to address that, showing the contrast between Bella’s story and real-life by using the images to make a ridiculous feeling document.

By emphasising the delusional life that Bella had, I quote some sentences from some feminist books that relate to work or self-value, and combine them together with the story:

“Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.” ― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. That means thinking about power differently. It means decoupling it from public prestige. It means thinking collaboratively, about the power of followers not just of leaders. It means, above all, thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb (‘to power’), not as a possession.”

― Mary Beard, Women & Power: A Manifesto

“Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. (…) Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

etc.

Using the form of pirated movies that are downloaded from the internet, which always have the scrolling advertisement at the top and consciously insert to your head. Here I refer the cinematic story of Bella to something artificial and idealized, and the quotes from feminist books refer to things that actually happen and are contentious in reality, using this way of narrative to trigger the critical reflection.

Feedback:

Working: 

– Interesting relate to the feminism

– Advertisement(can communicate the artificial aspect of it than the google voice)

in this context devalued, allude the perfect story to lack valued

– The use of feminist text with the subtitle is powerful

Not working:

– Google voice&artificial aspect of it. It is not working well. (It can be only subtitle or someone narrative)，the audio might be better if it is recorded by a real person.

– The text was devalued in the form of scrolling subtitles.

Maybe:

– Ultimate part

– Maybe some negative

– Two different narratives, two different voices incorporate in.

– Bring your perspective in. Maybe cultural aspects.

The set I choose developed is iStockphoto. iStockphoto basically is an endless storage website of paid images. Seeing tones of photos, it is natural to notice some similarities between images. Under different themes on iStock, the stereotype of one thing are outstanding. Because most of the images there are for commercial use, and they were designed at the start.

The first set is the smiley face under the “workspace photos” which look positive, and people seem to be doing their work happily in the photos, but the actual situation is usually the opposite.

The second set is when you use the search engine to search a word, if it is something abstract, the outcome could be very metaphorical, and if the word has a different meaning, the outcome could be opposite. 

Above the second set, images are more likely related to the core of “visual communication” but don’t seem to be the key to using iStockPhoto as inspiration.

The third set shows the actor/actress playing different characters in different scenes, having multiple parallel life, and most of them are living a “decent” life in the iStock world.

Feedback:

1. Explore further about Bella, and the people that have a “relationship” with her.
2. The first set might combine with Bella set, since the shared the same feeling of “wonderful life”.
3. If go explore the NOISE set, there are good noise and bad noise can be play with.