Synthetic Media
Caption: An AI generated storytelling portrait.
Team: A collaborative effort with Athena Zhou.
Using one of my portraits of Vasilii Focov, leader of the Old Believers of the Priest-less Order community in Moldova, an audio recording of his voice in combination with AI generative imagery (Dall-e and Runway ML) based on research and historical facts, Athena and I pieced together one image that speaks to the story of our protagonist. The character was animated speaking using My Heritage Deep Story.
Caption: Center image is a portrait by Andriana Mereuta from “Moldova - An Iconography of the Land and its People” project. Side renditions are AI generated through Dall-e based on text prompts and using the center image as an inspiration/sample to generate side imagery as a continuation of the frame.
Caption: Vasilii Focov, leader of the Old Believers community, the only community of the priestless order living in Republic of Moldova.
The Russian text in Russian alphabet wasn't recognized by the software.
Tools: My Heritage Deep Story - to animate the portrait.
Stop motion
Caption: A stop motion experience of a little leaf who wants to reconnect with her friends somewhere in a New York park on a beautiful fall day.
Team: A collaborative effort with Anna Lin.
Caption: Concept Idea of a leaf story falling down the tree and wanting to reunite with her friends.
Caption: On location we had to decide how to start the story, how to find the tree with the beautiful leaves, the branch we can reach to tape our friends leafs, and how to shoot the trunk that was so removed from our branch.
Caption: Debating setting up the scene. Where to start? Then a tree with interesting leaves, clean background, trunk close to leaves - choosing our protagonists. We also had to move the tripod.
We had great fun creating the story, it took us 2.5h - more than we had anticipated, met around 9:30 before the park became super crowded. The light was already strong (creating strong contrast) but still pleasant for the eye. We started off working in Manual mode but then soon realized it was taking a lot of fiddling with the settings from one shot to the other (exposure, focus, white balance) as more and more people would occupy the benches under our branch. We used strings to make the leaves fall and tape to make our main character climb the trunk of the tree. In post Anna will add the facial expressions. We tried to use the element of “staging” , “anticipation” when the leaf stops mid way on the trunk of the tree and then the unexpected turn of events “surprise” at the end of the movie when the wind sweeps them off which in all created an “arc” to our story.
Augumented reality
Caption: “Our Journey to NY” is the theme. Sophie’s idea was to use the plane window as peeking into another world, and start there. Ken brought the idea of the ‘Cloud Baby’. We’ll add some turbulence in the midst of our story to create drama and suspance. It’s a mix of video, sound and assets from images.
Story begins with a dark screen. It’s night. Next - thunder and (maybe a bit of turbulence). We can do it through sound. So far no one knows where we are. Next scene we open the window shield, there is the reveal we are in a plane. We see the clouds. Next scene, baby cloud looking scared, next mama looking for the baby cloud (the baby is hiding). Next scene we point to where the baby is. Mom is trying to catch the mischievous baby cloud (parabole to us being those baby clouds running from our “parents” in search of adventure - great plot, lol). For narration, we can use text in form of bubbles (like comics) or writing on the window, or even sounds. Next scene, she catches the baby and they both are happy rolling through the air - next scene NY pops up. The mama and the baby cloud ‘write’ on our window, come with us and extending their hands or handing us a parachute. The person decouples the rubber around the window to open the window (lol - hope it’s easy to photoshop that). Last scene, here is a person now, with baby and momma cloud rolling down towards NY and fall into the statue of Liberty lap/crown - or something related to NYU. End of story! :))
Caption: 3D printed keychain for each member of the team by Sophie.
Caption: Testing the keychain AR.
Note: We made it possible for anyone to experience it with the link, even without a trigger. The project can be experienced on EyeJack by accessing this link and following the instructions under the image and / or on Aero by scanning the QR below.
Instructions: Access the EyeJack link, scan the image, see the animation.
Instructions: Scan the QR code to play.
Caption: An AR experience of a little cloud and his mother flying over NY. A concept my colleagues Haoquan, Sophie, and I wanted to explore as a commentary to our experience as immigrants and what it feels like to arrive to a new city from abroad, and especially to the metropolitan NY.
Team: Haoquan Wang, Sophie Lee, Andriana Mereuta.