After Effects

A mood board I made, I was trying to figure out what the video would look like

Our brief was to explore the relationship we have with digital technology. I immediately wanted to do something about its overwhelmingness. I thought about how we are constantly connected and constantly receive new information. I looked a bit into how social media causes anxiety and how we are addicted to our phones. I know I am at least- I get anxious whenever my phone isn’t around and I´m constantly checking it for new messages.

Here are some interesting Ted talks I listened to:

I decided that I wanted the film to be able to loop. I want it to feel overwhelming and like its never going to end. Also, as it´s only going to be a minute long, looping it will be good to make it more substantial. With this in mind, I came up with the idea to make it from a first-person perspective. I thought it would be a good way to show all the things overwhelming the person. This was the first story board I came up with:

I then decided it wasn´t very realistic for me to create the walking person whose head we´d go inside to and that the looping wasn´t smooth at all. I decided to simplify it so now we have a film where you see eyes opening at the beginning and then closing in the end, out of exhaustion. In between there will be an overload of videos, images, notifications, news articles etc. (like originally planned)

my final story board

The tutorials we had with Angie were really useful, and showed me how many possibilities there are. On top of this though I have had to go to youtube several times for more detailed instructions for the things I want (I couldn´t log into LinkedIn). I´ve also watched more general videos (like top 25 effects on AE) for inspiration and ideas. I´m not sure yet what sort of effects I´m going to want to use. I know I want to manipulate at least some of the videos and photos I bring in. I also want to try and play around with the text possibilities like Angie did. I actually wanted to get the hands (as you can see in my storyboard) but I couldn´t find that font on my laptop. I also think I might colour code a little bit, so its still nice to look at. At least nicer then if it was a complete mess.

 I don´t want to be as negative as I did when I started to plan this. I´m definitely keeping the overwhelmingness, but I wont only use bad news and that kind of thing. I´ll also use fun videos, to show that social media and technology is also used to share good things.


The first thing I did was to play around a bit on After Effects, to try to get used to it, which I´m still not.

Then I tried to get the mask eyes done, and for some reason it took me two days to get it right. I thought I knew how to do the mask so I didn´t look it up or anything. In the end what was wrong, was that I tried to do it with two separate layers, and then I had the colours the wrong way so that when I inverted the mask It wouldn´t do anything. I ended up watching a YouTube video and it turns out making a mask like that is really simple. I did it in like a minute and animating it was super easy too. I keyframed the mask to make it look like the eyes were opening and then to expand it. 

After I had done that I started bringing in loads of videos and other elements that I might use for it the film. All of the videos are of my laptop, so most of them were filmed by me. I´m also going to have social media notifications, articles and infographics which I´ve got from online. I need to have a lot if I´m going to achieve the feeling of there being too much, I realise that I still have loads more to do and I´m not entirely sure if I can finish everything on time.