Black Mirrors

November, 2019

Black Mirrors shows how people currently engage with the world: instead of getting into the real world, they stare at the Black Mirror – screens. Through a series of interactive videos, Black Mirrors in the end encourages people to break the Black Mirror.

Link to project: [https://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~cz1627/website/index.html]. Note that you need NYU network/VPN to access this project.

For better illustration, please refer to the video walkthrough of this project.

For this project, we have several obstructions, inspired from The Five Obstructions. One of our obstructions is to “Always shoot through a mirror”, we interpreted it as Black Mirror. And our SPACE obstruction is “Forest”, so we interpreted it as repeating things – things that happen to everybody – staring at screens everyday.

Our first scene is to show the background – pictures of people watching phone, with heavy beat behind.

Then, we quoted a poem to further illustrate the situation.

After, it is two scenes in one screen, left and right, showing the importance of phone to people – it is the last thing to you before you go to sleep.

Then we shot 37 pictures of the process of apple being eaten and I made it as a stop-motion animation that changes when scrolling a long picture on the phone. This is to show people watching phone when eating.

Then I made a triangle map to illustrate the 3-dimensional world we are living in. The triangle map is colorful – “meaningful” and when you hover on it, it will turn black-and-white – “limited and boring” and show a scene of people holding phone, using phone to approach the world (at home, when eating, watching exhibition, shopping).

Then it turns to a dark room with many phones lighting up one after another – “It’s a World of Black Mirrors”, (and it looks like a forest).

Then we place our computer screen in a way to create a reflective tunnel and shoot everything through the mirror tunnel – such as messages popping up and app icons flowing – “Our life is occupied by mobile Apps”. This is our climax.

Then the climax keeps going. We shoot a scene of a line of computers passing with different times on it – “24/7 in touch with the black mirrors”

Then as BGM from Inception becoming stronger, it’s a collage of four shots all showing people sliding on their phone, the BGM goes louder. Finally, it can’t hold anymore and the black mirror cracks with a loud sound.

In the end, with a few seconds of blackout. It is a scene of people finally putting down their phone and see the beautiful & true world with their real eyes. Along with scenes of green environment and real people passing by, several lines of a poem appear to remind people once again “Put down your phones, stop watching this video”.

And it reaches the END.

Some thoughts on this project

The creation of the project is actually a painful process. From the formation of ideas, we struggled to find any. And we made some initial decisions that were mostly abandoned in the following process – Our first shots were abandoned and the website I made for 5 hours just don’t meet our requirement. For me, the finalize project cost me at least 24 hours and more in net, if not possibly be whole two days. My task involves scene shooting, picture editing, video editing, audio editing and website programming, so it’s really a hard period.

But however painful it is, our finalized project meets my expectations. After all, I am the one who devoted the most time to it, and I tries to adjust everything to be good, if not perfect – the connection of scenes, the user experience, the music choice, website design and probably so much more. I’m glad that the project tells its own story and has one or two highlighted parts which will leave a deep impression.

Thank you for staying here!