Synthetic Media Project
The main concept of this project is to talk about the construction of self consciousness. If there is no mirror in this world, can we still know what we look like? In real life, when a reflective surface appears, people can't help but look at it to find themselves, but is what the mirror shows really what we really look like?
The reflective surface is actually a metaphor in this project, people tend to use the reflective surface to understand our external appearance, the reflective surface is a medium, which is "other". In fact, just like the way how we discover ourselves, we all learn about ourselves through the contact and communication with others, through the evaluation and feedback of others, to strengthen the perception of the self. But if we get to know ourselves through a medium, is that the real self?
Nowadays, social media play the role of "the mirror", which seems to become the best reference for people to look at and improve themselves.
We used Runway ML, Faceapp, Adobe Premiere to make this project.
Genggeng used the green screen function to make the face black. I tried to use Runaway's models to add some effects on the face, but the results are not good, so i turned to Faceapp.
we took many videos...
Challenges:
our original idea is every time when the character looks at the mirror/ something has reflection, the faces in the reflection should change and are always different, but this kind of work is time consuming, we have to generate different new faces and fit them into the video manually...
so we decided to use generated faces at the end of the video while the character goes back home and looks at themselves in the mirror, the face keeps changing, indicating they don’t know why they really are. During the daytime, when the character looks at themselves in the mirror, they keep asking themselves: is that me?