-
an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.
In this project I wanted to revisit my self portrait assignment “Oblivion” 2 assignments ago. Taking the same concept of a dystopian environment, I wanted to use animation and visual effects to further enhance the message I was trying to tell as an artist. To me the world is not as beautiful and naive as it seems. A lot of what we see on the internet and the media feeding us is just a curtain shielding us from the ugly truths of the world. As a result, our vision of what we think is real is blurred and only time and experience will be able to lift this curtain revealing the dystopian society that we live in.
As a step up from Oblivion, the colours in this project are more distinct. The separation between the subjects in the photo are more apparent with the different colours. The city in the background is mainly made out of muted dark blue and cyan hues representing the state of depression. The foreground has brighter highlights of orange and yellow portraying a sense of hope. Using complementary colours to create contrast in this composition made my message as an artist more apparent.
Technical Decisions
The animation can be separated into 3 components. The background of the city, the foreground of the rocks/bushes, and the human subject.
The effect I was trying to achieve is known as the vertigo effect in film. The effect is achieved by either moving the camera toward the subject on a dolly while zooming out or vice versa.
To imitate the real life motion of achieving this effect, I converted the layers into 3D objects and used a camera layer to keyframe the zooming in of the composition. To achieve the zooming out effect that would cause the background to push further into the distance, I keyframed the city layer’s scale with an initial value of 200% and decreased it to 100% at the end of 5 seconds. To disorientate and further emphasise the idea of dystopia, I rotated the city layer by 45 degrees and keyframed the orientation back to 0 degrees creating a swirling motion throughout the animation. Furthermore, A camera lens blur effect was added to enhance the message that I wanted to tell with this animation, that as we unveil the curtains behind the ugliness of the world, our vision starts to become clearer. Thus, the effect of the city starting from a blurred image becoming sharper and clearer is achieved by using keyframes on the blur radius of the camera lens blur effect.
This effect was repeated on the foreground layers, namely the human subject layer and the rocks/bushes layer. The keyframes however, were reversed with the lens blur effect starting at full sharpness slowly increasing the blur throughout the 5 seconds of the animation. This was to imitate a real camera’s change in focus from the foreground to the background, which helps the viewers understand the elements of the image throughout the animation. Apart from the focus change, the foreground elements were keyframed to retain its position throughout when the camera is zooming in.
In order to create depth, i separated the human from the foreground layer and changed the gradient of which the foreground increases in size. Starting with a value of 80% on the scale keyframe I gradually increased the human subject’s scale to 120%. The difference in speed of the camera zooming in and the human subject increasing in size helps to add depth to the animation and prevent it from looking too 2 dimensional.
Before & After
Before carrying out the animation in after effects, i composited the layers in photoshop and colour graded the RAW images accordingly to set the tone of the animation.
Before Colour Grading
After Colour Grading
The focus of the city colours were to make it look super depressing and somewhat having a consistency throughout the landscape. Cooling down the white balance and darkening the shadows helped to create a mysterious looking city with minimal highlights, portraying the landscape to be dull and dead.
Before Colour Grading
After Colour Grading
The vibrance of the initial image shot on the mountain was too saturated. Desaturating some of the unnecessary colours and concentrating on a few helped make the image more consistent in the mood i was trying to achieve.
To create a dystopian look, I duplicated the city image and stacked them up on each other. Rotating the combined image 45 degrees helped to add onto the theme of a twisted reality.
Next i had to mask out the unnecessary background from the mountain image. It was not an easy task to mask the bushes as the intricate details required close attention in order to make it look as real as possible.
Several adjustment layers had to be made in order to seamlessly combine the 2 drastically different images together.
A basic curves adjustment layer was added for the background the increase the highlights and darken the shadows in order to match the foreground image. On top of that a colour balance layer was added to add some magenta into the image and to match the warmer tones of the foreground image an orange colour fill was added with a low opacity %.
The human layer consisted of a curves adjustment layer to darken the shadows to match the dark tone of the cityscape. A blue colour fill layer was added to cool down the image creating a consistency throughout the composition. On top of that a dodge and burn layer was added to clean up some areas and create extra contrast to make the image pop.
The final composition thus looks like a seamless image.
Artist/Film References
Inception
A major influence to this concept like much of my other works is Christopher Nolan’s Inception. The idea of stacking cities on top of each other has baffled me and made me interested in exploring photo manipulation. As an experimental cityscape photographer, Inception has opened up new horizons to my imagination and paved the way to some of my latest works.
Doctor Strange
Doctor Strange is another movie that plays with perception and alternate realities inspiring the concept behind my project. Doctor Strange being a more recent movie, contained better visual effects than Inception. The process of how complex buildings folded and behaved fluidly amazed me. Scott Derrickson and his team has heavily influenced this project and helped me conceptualise “Dystopian Reality”.
Jaws (1975)
The animation part of the project was hugely inspired by movies that incorporated the vertigo effect in their scenes. One example that inspired me is Jaws from 1975. The effect created a sense of uneasiness and surrealism that cannot be achieved with our eyes. Incorporating that into this project has hugely pushed the idea forth of creating a world that had distorting realities.
Conclusion
With this as the final assignment for this module, I have learnt a lot from starting how to mask an image in photoshop to rendering an animation on after effects. The creative process for each assignment has been unique and dear to me. Each assignment has helped me express a side of me that I will not have been able to do so in words or actions. With “Dystopian Reality” I wanted to end of on a high note and create one of my proudest works to date.
