After many hours of overcoming technical difficulties this is the final product. The quality of video and sound isn't as great but you get the idea.
Enjoy.



'Nintendo's Reality' is a video highlighting the virtual journey of iconic Nintendo characters in comparison to a realistic perspective. It details how the fictional tales involved with games are directly related to the implications faced within our day to day lives. The title itself is directly addresses the content within the video to avoid any confusion from the viewers as to what the film is about. The [500] Days of Summer inspired split screen design is included to incorporate both interpretations upon the journey of evolution through Nintendo to provide an effective use of contrast. Inspired by the makings of Kanye West's Welcome to Heartbreak, a compression artifact approach was applied to correlate the virtual perspective of the characters of Mario and Yoshi into the world of reality. The datamoshing of the piece is used as a technique to draw a parallel between the two world to convey the connotative aspect of the artwork. The Kanye West and [500] Days of Summer inspired aesthetics of 'Nintendo's Journey' is meant to clarify the fact that the difference between the journey involved in a virtual character's gameplay is not so different to the realistic journey of our own lives.


Most of the clips downloaded were from YouTube requiring a large portion of the footage reduced and sequenced together so that the remaining video was focused upon a certain character instead of the initial multiple transitioned scenes. Using the razor tool on a frame by frame scale assist in creating a basic and seamless piece to prepare it for further editing. Below shows the work within Premiere Pro, however a larger scale is used to observe all components within the editing process...


This file is then edited in after effects with the overall composition consisting of 75 audio and visual layers going for rougly 13 minutes...


The first split screen is between Donkey Kong and footage from 10 Things I Hate About You. It shows how a man is in love with a girl (Mario and Peach), but another is taking her away from him (Donkey Kong). The Donkey Kong footage was not edited within After Effects apart from re-scaling of the video itself, the reality portion however was edited substantially. It involved the duplication and splitting of the same piece 8 times where each layer was erased around the focal point of the character which was then edited using hue & saturation to provide a digitally unsound effect...


The layers were needed to be split to focus the effect upon different sections in accordance to the character's position with the varied camera angles as shown below in the Numb3rs scene with David Krumholtz as Yoshi...



This effect was transgressed throughout the piece with it being included as a way to bring cohesiveness to sudden-ending clips with it seeming as if it was a computer malfunction, similar to that in Kanye West's Welcome To Heartbreak video...


The rest of the artwork shared the same complexities as listed above, and included precise editing on a frame by frame scale in an attempt to cue the start and finish of the clips exactly on time with each other which was arguably as time consuming as the effect editing. To finalize the piece I included some credits in regard to the actors and footage predominately featured in my artwork...



Conclusively I have decided to make a split screen video using footage from Donkey Kong, Paper Mario, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2: Yoshi's Island, Yoshi Story, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, Mario 64, [500] Days of Summer, 10 Things I Hate About You, Inception and Numb3rs using Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 for primary editing and Adobe After Effects CS3 for additional editing and overall sequencing of the footage.


I did not have an artist of inspiration as such, rather I was inspired to create a split screened piece of footage similar to that in the film [500] Days of Summer. The particular scene that I have based the construction of my piece around is one that compares the character's expectation toward a specific situation to that of reality. I am doing this by contrasting the virtual journey of Mario and Yoshi to a realistic version with Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who stars in [500] Days of Summer) as Mario and David Krumholtz as Yoshi with footage used from a sequence of Nintendo games as well as movies such as 10 Things I Hate About You and [500] Days of Summer. In film and video production, split screen is the visible division of the screen, traditionally in half, but also in several simultaneous images, rupturing the illusion that the screen's frame is a seamless view of reality, similar to that of the human eye. Below is the clip that inspired the design of my artwork...

Expectations vs. Reality (500) Days Of Summer Movie Scene from catiski on Vimeo.

Also an effect seen in Welcome To Heartbreak by Kanye West video clip caught my eye, so I tried to apply it to certain scenes in my work. The video, which features Kid Cudi, was filmed in a subway and distinctively expresses multifaceted, colorful patchworks of compression artifacts laced throughout its visuals, with certain scenes shot in slow motion. The resulting choppy, pixelated imagery makes it appear as if the software that rendered the final video outputted a low-resolution, artifact-heavy product. A compression artifact (or artefact) is a noticeable distortion of media (including images, audio, and video) caused by the application of lossy data compression. This technique is often referred to as 'datamoshing'. In video art, one technique is datamoshing, where two videos are interleaved so intermediate frames are interpolated from two separate sources. Below is the clip that inspired the effects within my artwork...



My initial Nintendo idea when properly considered seemed to lack aesthetic appeal therefore I needed to add a further element into the piece to make a half decent artwork. Also the programs that I was using (Adobe After Effects CS3 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS4) came with many technological problems with file formats not working together resulting in much time needing to be spent on converting files as well as After Effects taking up a lot of computer memory where I was unable to preview my work progress leaving me dependent upon still images to see how the footage adhered together. As well as this, corrupted files upon saving the project (I don't know why), was a repetitive occurance requiring the addition and re-edit of those particular scenes and also the audio/visual commands were switched on and off involuntarily as well which lead to the overlap of audio and visual files ruining the artwork.