This is my infographics project for A399. I collected data of all the phone calls I
received over the course of a week. I
want to make this piece reflect the timing to scale and identify the caller via
an emotional color space.
In After
Effects, I created an animated abstracted representation of a clock figure to
illustrate the passing of time to scale.
All of my calls were collected during a roughly 12 segment of a 24 hour
day, so I let one rotation of the clock (which takes one minute) represent one
day (12 hour segment). Since I wanted to
be as precise as I could, I used a 60 fps format. All of the heavy math aside, 12 seconds of
call time equals 1/60th of a second in my piece... or an hour of real time
equals one minute in my piece... whichever helps you visualize better.
So, I took my clockwork composition
and brought it into a Premiere composition.
From there, I cued my keyframes to the call times and insert the
corresponding color space to the call from the person who was on the other end
of the line. (I created the abstract
color spaces in Photoshop and made a different piece for each of my 7 contacts
based on my emotional reaction to each of them individually.) I then adjusted the duration of display of the
color space to match each individual call length.
From a reflective stand point, I'm
a bit of a teeter-tot on this piece. I
like it's precision and I love the emotional color spaces I created, but the
down side to the precision is that it reflects the amount of time I spend off
of the phone, which results in A LOT of blank space, and the scale I had to use
made the color spaces into quick blips that really depreciate the impact that a
longer exposure to each would have. So,
it's a tradeoff. Meh.
In my initial stages, I tried
making the color spaces into color space rays that would maintain on the clock
and let them build up over the days, but my for one, my After Effects aptitude
isn't quite up to that level, and two, even when I just made a faux placeholder
ray to mimic the effect, it didn't hold enough space to be anything more than a
thin line of color since my calls were so relatively short. I also felt that that suspension really
fought against the flow of time and that the overlay, while an interesting
concept, would be misleading or confusing.
So, that issue solved itself... woo hoo.