Brave New City
Overview
#video #Adobe Premiere Pro #teamwork
A visual metaphor video depicting social class of a fictional cyberpunk world, designed with two classmates, completed on 5/11/2023.
Introduction
We want to depict three different classes/layers of society: the top, the middle, and the bottom. With the narration, we want to describe the contrast implicitly because while we hear fancy description/promotion/… of a decision/policy/… created by the “higher” people, it often comes with an underlying contrast where the “lower” people are neglected. We have been inspired by the idea of the folding city in the sci-fi novel Folding Beijing and want to apply it to the Shanghai city landscape. Later, we have also been inspired by another novel Brave New World, where people are divided into classes.
Storyboard
Footage Shooting
We first searched for locations in Shanghai with the sense of “folding” and cyberpunk (because we want the general aesthetics to be cyberpunk) on the Internet. We also specifically looked for scenes with skyscrapers and old residences. Finally, we narrowed down our choices and went to Tianzifang (田子坊) in Xuhui District, Tiantong Road (天潼路) in Hongkou District, and Lujiazui (陆家嘴).
Post Production
After cleaning up the clips, we stabilized them, edited their color temperature, color tone, contrast, shadow, color wheel, and brought up the values of orange, cyan, purple, to make them appear cyberpunk. As for the audio, we explored the robot-like voice at Narakeet. We mainly used long-shot and time lapse throughout the piece. I think we achieved the aesthetics of cyberpunk, but for future improvement, maybe we could add some close-ups or non-time-lapsed clips and slower narration to slow down the pace a bit.