Augmenting the Balance of Power Book –

As part of my body of work I felt that it was really useful to produce an explanatory book all about the ‘Balance of Power – Unity in Bits’ mobile.  When I began the journey into the augmentation of the book I hadn’t really planned to shoot many clips, just enough to fill any gaps in my final film (Film Mark 2) and to give a flavour of the fully augmented book.  However, as I began creating each clip I decided to go ahead and augment the full book.  This needed to be done anyway as it will form part of my body of work.

Once each of the pages had been augmented with video I decided to run all of the clips together to see how it looked.  What I hadn’t necessarily expected was that the total length of the resulting film was just over 7 minutes.  I wondered therefore, would it be possible to trim and tweak these clips to make the resulting film exactly 5 minutes?  My thinking was that this would afford me yet another possibility in terms of films to choose from.

I was also keen to experiment with sound and also try out the ‘under the duvet’ trick again.  The whole process from start to finish took up a full long weekend spanning 4 days and working into the early hours.  I needed multiple takes to perfect the augmented reality but then I wanted to add sound.  The sound effects weren’t actually that difficult to produce but it was relatively time consuming.  The most difficult part was trying to narrate the film so that the storyline fitted with the imagery on screen.  I had to repeat the narrative a number of times until I got the voiceover correct.  I can still tell that it’s not perfect but I had to make a decision.  I could carry on trying to perfect this or I could accept that it was probably only going to be me that noticed the imperfections.  Either way I think that the video of the augmented reality book is an interesting concept even if it isn’t quite perfect.

I hope to show my mobile in a variety of places and I think that the book’s augmented reality video will serve as a quick and easy way to show someone my thinking in terms of concept and rationale.  Below is the finished video.  It is a culmination of clips using augmented reality that have been strung together with interesting sound and music.  The voiceover explains the rationale and concepts that lie behind the ‘Balance of Power – Unity in Bits’ book and mobile.

I showed this film to a number of friends and family and also a few work colleagues.  Although some of them really did like the film and the concept, the overwhelming preference was for my second film which can be seen in the blog post Final Cut.  This is the film that I will submit for assessment and feedback.

Film Number 3 – The Augmented Book

I would love to develop this concept further and merge it even further with my Film Mark 2, unfortunately time is fast running out so I have decided to concentrate on finishing Film Mark 2.  However, please see below the video of the augmented reality book ‘The Balance of Power – Unity in Bits’ which explains more about the mobile of the same name.