#imageup

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IMAGEUP FINAL WORK

Behold, the final masterpiece!

Ultimately I think I ended up with a fairly generic message i.e. “don’t put your butt on the internet”, but I think it’s a message that bears repeating given how prevalent the issue is.

I’ve also tried, as mentioned previously, to indicate that it’s not just blatantly sexual images that can get you into trouble.  Additionally, I’ve tried highlight that as well as embarrassment, there is some actual real danger in sharing things online.

The music and sounds I’ve used here (attributed below) are all royalty-free, and I’ve tried to use them to set the tone for the piece - a lighthearted reminder at the beginning, a short interval of SRS BUSINESS, and then bringing the tone back up again at the end.

Attributions:

"Carefree" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

IMAGEUP - FRAME EXAMPLES/STORYBOARD (PT. 2)

...aaaaand here’s the rest of it!

IMAGEUP - FRAME EXAMPLES/STORYBOARD (PT 1.)

Tumblr only lets me upload ten images at a time which is a travesty so I gotta upload this in two parts.

This is what I ended up with for the style of the final piece - low colour, low detail cartoon lineart. 

Because this project is intended for display primarily on smartphones, there are technical considerations to be had - in particular, the resolution and aspect ratio of the final piece (resolution referring to the actual number of pixels on the screen, and aspect ratio referring to the ratio of the pixels - i.e. Instagram posts usually feature square photos, indicating a 1:1 aspect ratio).

Because there’s about a million different kinds of smartphone, there’s also a lot of variety in screen resolution. My goal is to figure out what’s going to be usable and at least semi-near universal. 

According to technology news website Gizmodo, the trend in recent years is towards the 16:9 ratio (that’s 16 pixels on the long edge for every 9 on the short edge). This is also the aspect ratio for the widescreen format used by most TV shows and movies; given that people are consuming media on their phones more than ever, it makes sense for smartphones to also adopt this ratio. (Nield, 2017).

Common resolutions for the 16:9 aspect ratio include:  1024×576, 1152×648, 1280×720, 1366×768, 1600×900, 1920×1080, 2560×1440 and 3840×2160. (Neagu, 2016)

1920 x 1080 is the resolution used for Full HD and incidentally is also as big as I can make my animation whilst catering to the A6 page size used to illustrate the frames, so that’s what I’m going to go with.

I’ve also opted to create my video in a vertical format rather than the traditional horizontal. This is for a couple of reasons:

1) the style of my piece focuses primarily on single characters standing in frame. To do this in a horizontal format would leave a lot of room either side and this feels like wasted space to me, when I could more effectively fill the space simply by changing the format.

2) the ImageUp app also operates in a vertical format; this means that when the user hits send and the video plays, they will not need to turn their phone around to view it at a bigger size.

References

Neagu, C. (2016).  Screen resolution? Aspect ratio? What do 720p, 1080p, 1440p, 4K and 8K mean? Retrieved from http://www.digitalcitizen.life/what-screen-resolution-or-aspect-ratio-what-do-720p-1080i-1080p-mean

IMAGEUP - STORYBOARD AND VOICEOVER

The final storyboard!

I’d like to state for the record that I was THIS CLOSE to using ‘Cover Your Ass’ as a tagline but I didn’t think I’d get away with that AND the comedy butt frames, so I compromised.

IMAGEUP - EARLY DEVELOPMENT

ImageUp is an app developed by cyber safety organization Cyber Savvy, in collaboration with young people aged 12 and up.

The aim is to get teenagers to think about what they are sharing electronically, and whether it could harm themselves or others. The app does this by showing users a short (15-20 second) message when they go to share an image, and then asks them again if they are sure they’d like to share it.

The goal of this assignment is to create one of these 15-20 second messages for potential use in the app. The challenge is to take a message that could be seen as boring and wet-blankety and make it entertaining or funny as well as getting the audience to actually consider the consequences of what they are sharing.

I got to throwing around a few ideas early on. It’s always freaked me out a little how easy it is to lose control of things posted online or shared with others, and how willing we are to throw it all out there anyway (this never stops me uploading selfies and pictures of my cat though; possibly ego is a stronger motivator than fear?), and so I based a couple of early ideas around that.

I started off using the idea of dots or balls as a metaphor for an image shared online - you put it out there, and then suddenly it multiplies, and multiplies, and multiplies, and even when you try to take it back, it’s out of control, and can overwhelm you. I did a couple of variations on this - one where the dot seemingly multiplies on its own, and one where it is assisted by the people you initially shared it with (in order to emphasise the role others play). I eventually abandoned this approach as I felt it didn’t convincingly convey the potential consequences of sharing something questionable.

I considered potential consequences for a while and messed around with some (not particularly) amusing hyperbole - the idea that the things shared online might cause a heart attack for a beloved grandma, and shouldn’t we think of the poor grandmas at risk here? Thus, ‘Save the Grandmas’ was born. I quite liked the idea but it felt like the consequences were not direct enough - it portrayed something bad happening to someone else, rather than directly to the sender, and while I’m sure nobody wants their grandma to have a heart attack, it wasn’t quite the immediate personal consequence I was gunning for.

I also tried out the message that the internet is forever, and that sharing something online can come back to bite you - for example, when an employer Googles you, or it might be used to embarrass you at your retirement 50 years from now, and so on. I also took this opportunity to make a whole lot of ‘butt’ puns because I am secretly ten years old. In the end, I found this concept a bit difficult to convey effectively and I also didn’t like it as much.