http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~shl620/perfecthuman/
Description:
What is the perfect human? Who gets to decide what is perfect? Winny and I recreated the short film “The Perfect Human” by Jørgen Leth. We aimed to recreate it in the context of an NYU Shanghai student. By doing so we wanted to first show our own idea of a perfect human and then dispel the notion that there is a perfect human. We also wanted the user to see themselves as the perfect human. I tried to do this by having the website directly refer to the user as the perfect human. I hoped that by having the users think of themselves as the perfect human it would get the user to ponder what makes them perfect, and ultimately come to the conclusion that either they are indeed the perfect human or the perfect doesn’t exist (or is “flawed”). Our recreation highlights how the perfect human (or student in our case) can still be flawed.
Visuals/Style:
The website is intentionally plain. “The Perfect Human” is quite bare, the room is empty, and only the objects that are needed are present. I wanted to emulate both the visual and narrative style of the film. The original film was black and white (most likely due to technological limitations at the time), but I still wanted to copy the color scheme. The text comes in very short phrases as I felt like it was the same as the narrative style of the film. Furthermore, after Ann gave feedback on what kind of text we should have, I felt like it might be best if our text felt more like an extension of the art piece rather than a continuously scrolling article. I had the background slowly change from black to white as you progress from Jørgen’s films to our work. I used this to signal to the user that they were switching to a different part of the website as well as have the tone shift to something more light. I added a down arrow to the first part of the website (which disappears when you scroll) as testers had mentioned the instructions were a bit obscure (they didn’t realize the text was meant to refer to them.
In terms of video design, I think our videos were decently well shot. In addition, I feel like our style is very close to the original film. We incorporate the close-ups from both films as well as some quick cuts from “The Five Obstructions”. While the humans in “The Perfect Human” and “The Five Obstructions” are relatively indistinct, our humans intentionally have more personality to better personify (in our eyes) a perfect human.
Code:
I feel like the code isn’t very notable. I had a bit of difficulty with the scrolling to change the videos at a certain point because it kept flickering, but I was able to fix it. I also had a bit of trouble where the videos didn’t change when they were supposed to, but I realized it was because they were in the wrong place for if and else if statements. I added some other functionalities like hovering over buttons to change it (making it clearer that it was a button). I also made it so that clicking on the video would play or pause it rather than having to show controls or press something else. I did this to make the website as minimalistic as possible. In addition, I don’t think I needed any more functionalities other than the play/pause button (although for the longer videos a timeline would probably be very helpful, especially for people who have not seen the video yet). Other coding included changing the opacity of buttons when other buttons were pressed so that we could force the user to go through the videos in the order we wanted them to go through them.
Teamwork:
Winny and I divided the work pretty evenly. She did most of the video stuff, like recording and editing. I worked on parts of the narration and the text for the website as well as the coding. We did come to some disagreements regarding how we wanted the website to be styled, but in the end, we were able to come to an agreement. Overall though I think the project went smoothly since we both wanted to recreate “The Perfect Human”.
Reflections:
While this project wasn’t the most coding intensive, I feel like I had more control over the art style and direction in comparison to the previous projects. I feel like this project somehow had more “substance” to it compared to my past projects. I think this was because I paired up with Winny who wanted to do something similar to my idea. In comparison to all of the other projects where we would be given groups and then decide what we wanted to do. While I do enjoy working with Winny and think she is a great teammate, I think I’d like to try working on my own website by myself after this semester when there are no deadlines.