Stop Motion Video

Taking the project in a new direction, I decided to explore the pervasiveness of the selfie as the digital equivalent of traditional Snapshot Photography as promoted by the Kodak company at the beginning of the 19th Century. This experimental stop motion piece was influenced by Effie Le Moigan et al's, paper Has Instagram Fundamentally Altered the “Family Snapshot”? They describe an inconsistency in parents' attitudes to posting images of their children on social media. New parents, especially mothers, post many images of their offspring with little concern, however, they also express anxiety at the prospect of their children posting images of themselves (Le Moignan et al. 2017)

Dr Devadas Menhon in their 2022 paper investigating factors influencing Instagram Reels behaviours, remarked that prior research identified the average Instagram Reels user to be in the 25 – 34 age range. In their findings, they name seven of the most prevalent motives for the use of Instagram Reels, of which self-promotion and surveillance were to my perspective the most concerning, and they further state that

“Narcissism has emerged as a constant positive predictor of online content generation amongst the young” (Menhon, 2022)

The drivers identified by Menhon and Le Moignan et al. underscore the self-promotional drivers for social media posting, especially by the young who are least equipped to recognise the risks associated with or the permanence of images once released on the internet. I suggest that most young people cannot visualise a time in the future when they may not wish their earlier images to be available, or the risk that such images may be misused or collected by nefarious social media lurkers.

I planned the short video to present a potential use of publicly posted images where the original context of the image is removed and replaced with another. To find images for the video I scanned public Instagram posts that had the hashtag #party. Suitable images were screen scraped into a directory on my computer, which is a very easy task to accomplish. I decided not to capture the worst of the images I discovered as it seemed inappropriate.

Using Adobe Premier Rush (Ru), I created a sequence of images. The original sequence lasted four minutes, but using Ru editing controls I was able to reduce the time to under one minute.

I selected a soundtrack to the video from Adobe Stock, using their “one-month free” offer, as this gave me access to music and sound effects files that could be licensed for use. I intended to satirise the sequence of images to raise the issue of loss of authorial control once published online.

The video went through an iterative development process that resulted in five versions. This process provided the following edits:

Reduced duration

Introduced text to the end of the video to anchor meaning

Introduced relay text near to the beginning of the video to connote meaning

Introduced a ticker text that reproduced part of Meta’s privacy policy. This had a further relay effect, appearing less prescriptive than the earlier statements.

Edited the intro/outro text to provide less of an anchor to the meaning.

Due to the technical limitations of Adobe Premier Rush, I had to switch to Adobe Premier Pro (Pr) halfway through the editing process. Premier Pro appears to use a different file structure to Ru but it has a menu option to open projects previously created in Ru. Once this was done however I found it impossible to reopen the Pr project back in Ru. I needed Pr to create the ticker text feature

The final video is of a length that is long enough to deliver a message and for that message to be considered whilst viewing but short enough to not become boring to the viewer. The linguistic messaging provides a relay function rather than anchoring the meaning, whilst the soundtrack creates an atmosphere of light-hearted mockery.

During the editing stage, I sought feedback from trusted individuals whose opinions I valued as a representative of average potential viewers.

The Published video can be viewed here: https://youtube.com/shorts/fqigDLzQLME

To continue exploring public videos on Instagram there are many hashtag searches available, some of which provide a surprisingly large number of images, including:

#firstdayatschool

#firststeps

#firstdate

#hotter

LE MOIGNAN, E., et al., 2017. Has Instagram Fundamentally Altered the “Family Snapshot”?. In CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: Association for Computing Machinery.

MENHON, D., 2022. Factors Influencing Instagram Reels Behaviours: An Examination of Motives, Contextual Age and Narcissism. Telematics and Informatics Reports

SHELDON, P., AND K. BRYANT, 2016. Instagram: Motives for its use and relationship to narcissism and contextual age. Computers in Human Behaviour, 58, 89-97,

SMITH, C., 2020. Animated Title Crawl / News Tickers in Premiere Pro [viewed 10/11/2024]. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zLLFlKhpDA