Project background

Information sharing has always been part of our daily life. In modern society, we benefit from the new digital technologies and services, and are able to share different kinds of information through various platforms. While we enjoy the convenience of using the modern technologies, we should be aware that the information we share, either publicly or privately, may have been collected by third parties. 

Contemporary surveillance is not limited to visual surveillance. For example, cell phone monitoring is one example of contemporary surveillance. Our phones, which are supposed to be simply communication tools, have become recording tools too. APPs installed on our phones can collect various "legal information" from various sensors of the phones through the privacy authorization signed by us. The information is collected and analyzed through the big data analysis such that it can predict what our next move will be or what we will need. This just happens without us knowing.   

Almost all of the third-party APPs have the ability to collect some types of information. As we become more and more addict to the modern technologies, our life is exposed under more and more different types of ‘surveillance’, which is a major social issue nowadays.

Project description

My project is designed to explore this topic through stop motion animation, showing that information collection by third parties can happen among us at anytime and anywhere. Cats and mice are the metaphors for humans and third-party data collectors. Our daily life appears to be as peaceful as it can be from the surface. And we do not know what is going on behind the wall. But the truth is our phones are listening to all our conversations without us knowing. And even we know it, we may not be able to stop it from happening. 

As a graduate-level project, the question I want to ask is when social activities through mobile phones have become an indispensable part of our daily life, how can we design through using different medium to help people better understand our modern surveillance society?

2020 Spring

About

This film is a two-dimensional graphic animation that combines photography and paper-cutting. It is my first attempt and shows that the combination of photography and motion graphics can be an excellent graphic design technique. In the future, I will continue to research and explore stop motion animation. Especially I will keep exploring combinations of different artistic ways with applications in graphic design.


Software: Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe  Lightroom

Spring 2019

Story

It is a magical diary. Stop motion technique was used to present the dream of a little girl as the winter is leaving and the spring is around the corner. The dream is like a magical music box. The little girl is writing a diary, and each word she writes down is the clockwork that provides immediate power for the music box to play exactly what she has in mind. Her dream is simple but lovely. She wants to be a ballerina. The dream sealed in the snow-covered winter is now awakened in the warmth of the spring, with birds singing, trees turning green, and flowers blooming.