Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1334761
oignant, chilling and more relevant than ever today, the award-winning documentary The Social Dilemma turned a global spotlight on the addictiveness of social media and its role in radicalizing users. The film's format — fusing investigative documentary and scripted narrative — allows viewers to experience the dangerous human impact of social networking in a unique, compel- ling way, but its visual effects are what helped to heighten its cautionary mes- sage, taking viewers inside the personi- fied algorithms of a social platform. How did it all come together? The answer is a feat of motion design that in- volved a functioning faux social platform, in-camera device interaction and dynam- ically-built rigs that allowed for maximum flexibility on a tight deadline. The Social Dilemma's filmmakers tapped Denver-based Mass FX Media (http://massfxmedia.com) for the job, knowing they were a team capable of using motion graphics to humanize and bring emotion to complex, nonfiction content. Mobilizing quickly, Mass FX's ini- tial goal was to create a faux social me- dia network with all of the functions of today's major existing platforms merged into one, and then bring that interface into the narrative sequences. As the characters became more and more absorbed in the digital world of their phones, Mass FX would illustrate this by gradually filling any available space in the frame with an endless social feed of increasingly-radicalized con- tent as the film progresses. The phone elements and UI seen floating next to the characters here and there at first would ultimately line the rooms and overwhelm scenes, focusing viewers as much on the social media platform as the characters staring at their phones. To accommodate numerous shots and an aggressive post schedule, Mass FX uti- lized a prototype platform they could film practically with full interaction, offering the best on-set performances and giving editors a clear picture of how the phone cutaways would play in the scenes. To explain visually how a social platform works, the film presented characters' social feeds in the narrative sequences. And since a social media platform has an infinite scroll, Mass FX needed a way to flexibly build, place and animate hundreds of social media posts throughout the film in a way that appeared as natural as possible. The studio ultimately generated more than 350 faux posts in Adobe After Effects To assemble the feed posts and enable the screen to interact with the talent's gestures, Mass FX built a prototype mobile feed using a cloud-based mo- bile web-developing tool called Figma. Depending on the requirements of each shot, they would embed a transition or button state for the talent to scroll to and activate. Mass FX would cue the proto- type output preview to the talent's phone and trigger screen events in realtime. The director could then call for notifications, phone calls or social posts to arrive on the prop phones during the shoot. Facing a tight compositing sched- ule, Mass FX created and animated the floating UI graphics by coming up with a handful of expression rigs to adjust container sizing, view counts and post spacing in After Effects. This allowed for quick changes if the director wanted to swap out posts in any of the scenes or change the scroll animation timing. Rigging the feed itself was a deceptive- ly-complicated step. Because each post was a unique height, any rearrange- ment of the feed stack would throw off the placement of all of the posts in the After Effects comp. The studio built a JavaScript post stacker that would bring in all of the post pre-comps and dynam- ically arrange them based on their index in After Effects' layer stack. In addition to the social media platform, Mass FX also created a matching control panel representing the platform's be- hind-the-scenes operation in the world of Vincent Kartheiser's AI characters. Finally, on the documentary portion of the film, the studio was challenged to design info- graphics and visuals that could help sup- port the data from interviews and informa- tion the director was trying to make clear to the audience. This included infographics, graphics and an animated backstory of the main documentary subject. In all, Mass FX delivered over 100 shots for the film, including the title package, character animation, AI screen content and data visualizations used in the documentary. GRAPHICS www.postmagazine.com 29 POST JAN/FEB 2021 THE SOCIAL DILEMMA P MASS FX HELPS ILLUSTRATE THE ADDICTION TO SOCIAL MEDIA After Effects was used to help create seemingly-endless social streams. Mass FX Media founders Shawna and Matt Schultz.