Created in Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects by Justin Johnson and me (Ryan Rotella)
Credits
Process
Our assignment for the Hypercinema Midterm:
“Create a short (less than 2 minutes) video in which animation is overlaid onto video to present a speculative future. This future video could be informative, expressive, an interactive game or whatever you design but it should use motion tracking, animation and speculative design to bring your “future” to life.“
I tend not to think of the future. I picked my college major at the last possible time I could (end of sophomore year – thank you, liberal arts and Davidson College). When I was graduating college, I had no idea what to do for work (but did find a job within a few months). I like living in the moment. However, this assignment forced me to speculate on what the future might be. Based on the current state of the world, it’s difficult to imagine living in a positive future.
However, that’s what make the imaginative process exciting in this endeavor. How do you make the difficulties of the present and future more palatable? Naturally, I wanted to use humor. How can I express concerns over the health of our environment, stability of our society, while highlighting the endurance of humankind? By covering the news.
I find the idea of a televised news broadcast set in the future endlessly funny. First, news on television is already kind of outdated but still persists somehow. Doing satire on how we cover the most mundane yet most critical stories side-by-side contains rich levels of comedy. Second, I wanted to avoid sounding didactic or overly moralistic or overly fatalistic in my concept of the future. I didn’t want to lecture on how it should be or how it will be because ultimately, I don’t really know and I don’t think it should be up to just me. We need to work together in imagining our futures. Collectively, we need to dream our way out of our predicaments.
For the logistics of this two week project, collectivism was hard to capture on the page and screen. We had a day of video shooting booked on a green screen where Justin and I loosely agreed on the funny indirect approach of a news coverage of a world with higher water levels and aliens leading the human race. Therefore, I wrote a script on a future news broadcast covering:
a cat stuck in a tree (that turned out to be a robot, injuring firefighters); a weather tracker that goes wrong and an absurd storm that warped one reporter’s sense of reality; a sports section quickly swept away by breaking news of a peace treaty of higher species. I wanted to end the video on a touchdown from an alien doing the Griddy.
Shooting on a green screen was great. The Media Commons at 370 Jay Street is wonderful, and Justin and I were able to get everything shot in 2 hours. All equipment was available from the Media Commons and the ER at ITP.
After shooting, came the editing. My word, the editing took awhile. I spent 5 hours alone on the sequence of the JPG of the cat going from the dock to a tree on the Empire State building. So much time staring at After Effects and keyframing for a stupid joke.
Eventually, I found a good system of editing our videos in Premiere and then adding advanced graphics in After Effects. We split up each scene that needed visuals, and Justin and I worked on them asynchronously. After working in After Effects, I exported the render and added to Premiere for the final video.
I appreciate why there are so many visual effects people listed in the long credits of movies. Animating in any medium is so time-consuming and painstaking. I have a newfound respect for the craft. I hope to carry this patience and consideration of others’ time when I decide to write anything/make something for anyone to do. Maybe if we all did that, a better future will come.
Ryan Rotella 
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