My Techniques: Reality vs. the Virtual World

Since coming across the cinemagraphs produced by Beck and Burg I have been contemplating this idea of combining to aspects of the media. I find it fascinating how much our lives depend on the internet for information and as a way to communicate with anyone, anywhere, any time. It is because of this dependence that the distinctions between the virtual and the real are not so bold and defined any more.

This image is one I created on Adobe Photoshop as a test of combining the real world with the virtual world to see how effective it would look. I used a photo of the iconic London landscape as I liked how most people would be able to identify with this. The technique I used was called rotoscoping which is where I literally just drew on top of the photo to gain this effect. The reaction to this image is to do a double take because it all looks animated at first glance but when you really look at it just the sky and river have been animated. I love the effect this style has and how it works really well in terms of blurring the virtual world and reality.

This artistic and original approach is perfect for my project, this has helped to confirm this is the style I want to use. I will rotoscope a load of images in order to tell the story in more ways than one, the style and appearance of the animation will reinforce my narrative.

I then chose to animated this image further on Flash to see how it would turn out. The video is shown above. As you can see I did not scale the image down before making this animation before I animated the clouds to move. Looking back at it I now know for next time to scale the image down to the size of the stage first.