Electronic Media Studio: Introduction to Interactivity and Computation
60-210 • Spring 2021 • Prof. Golan Levin
I made a funny looking video of myself. I don’t think it looks like me.
Did this with a piece I’d drawn of one of my characters.
I did this oil pastel portrait my sophomore year of high school. I thought it might be interesting to animate it – and holy crap – it is so weird seeing this. Kinda creepy but very cool.
After using this program, I realized how incredible humans are at facial recognition because even though this animation of my brother looks exactly like him, it still looks a little off to the human eye.
I think this was a super cool way to really animate faces and how they would be seen in motion. I don’t know if it emulated my friend Oliver’s face that well, but I’m sure with a more front view picture, it would be different.
This was fun to explore, but it also creeped me out. Since I did this assignment after doing part 2 (Readings and Viewings: Bias in AI), I was thinking about how any photo I have uploaded or have been found in public databases could be manipulated.
I noticed by looking at some other footage of deepnostalgia videos that it tends to have issues with long hair. In this video, the hair didn’t catch with the animation but I noticed in B’s video it grabbed hair that was not attached to the animating face.
Firstly, I thought this was incredibly uncomfortable and creepy – straight out of uncanny valley for me.
I used a photo of myself first and thought it did a pretty decent job, creepiness aside. It grabbed a little bit of hair from the person next to me, but overall, it looks kind of cool.
After that, I tried doing some characters from animated movies because of the examples we saw in class about animating artwork. I figured if it worked on art, it would work on a cartoon… but I was very wrong. It wouldn’t detect a face.
So, I decided to use one of my favorite photos of Monica Geller, my favorite character from my favorite TV show! These are the results… again, weird and creepy.