Design Concept
Inspired by the outage of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp on Oct 5,2021, which reminded us how much time we have spent every day on the screen. Do you really need to connect to the internet 24 hours 7 days? What if the time we spend staring on our phones was used differently? What have you missed from the world around you when you are too focused on the screen? In this project, we documented people on New York City subways who were extremely focused on their phones. By adding them to different scenes, from indoor to outdoor areas, we want to emphasise that stop swiping your phone, and start paying attention to your precious surroundings, is vital for forming a healthy society. Otherwise, we are just lonely stars rotating in the endless universe, where there is no connection but only darkness.
Development
I started the whole story with noticing how many people were sucked into the phone screen on the subway during my commute. I decided to document as many as I see during one trip, and here are 25 footages I filmed in an hour. Their carelessness towards the surrounding environment are just surprising to me, so then we decided to use some sort of "addition" expression to extend this story.
We have 2 different sets of scenes: indoor and outdoor. By adding these subway people to different scenes, we can easily get sometimes how inappropriate it is to play your phone with 100% concentration. And also to address the increasing social issues, not only for people on the subway, but in general people are addicted to phones, just like the slot machines, but in a different form. Thus, I have used the slot machine sound track for the beginning of the video to mimic the similarity.
We used the Green Screen from Runwayml to subtract the people from the subway scene, and then used Premiere Pro to add them back to different scenes.
How would I approach the project differently
At the beginning, it was hard for us all to make the decision for the theme that we are going to work with. We have spent a lot of time wondering around, so this was the unsuccessful side of our project, that we ran out of time to make it better. If I get to allow more time on this project, I would also subtract the phone from the people, so they are holding nothing or something else, like a rose, which I believe can be interesting and educating.
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