Wear it like Phem
Wear it like Phem
Nothing fancy is required to digitally animate your clothing. We use off-the-shelf smartphone apps that composite videos into any fabric with green or blue hues. It works exactly like a traditional greenscreen system where the colour green is replaced with other video footage, except in this case LIVE and through your smartphone. Cool right?
Below we’ve outlined all you need to know about animating your own clothing.
STEP 1
FIND THE RIGHT APP
The two main apps that we use (with an iPhone) are Chroma Key Studio Pro and Veescope. We have tried many, many chroma-key apps, and these two worked the best for us. We have not tried chroma-key apps for Android yet but we know they exist. Between the two apps, we prefer Chroma Key Studio Pro because it produces the best and easiest results for social media. Veescope works best if you are looking to achieve higher-resolution videos and would like more control over your settings.
STEP 2
WEAR THE CLOTHES YOU ALREADY HAVE
Once you have access to a chroma-key or “greenscreen” app that works best for you, the next step it to find and wear garments with hues of green or blue in them. They don’t have to have an exact “chroma green” or “chroma blue” to work. As you will see, the apps work with various shades of blue and green–even pink. Actually, for Veescope it will work with any colour you want. In fact, we think it works best with colours that are slightly off from what the app is expecting (like light or dark green) because the results appear more blended with the garments instead of screaming Greenscreen! It will require a little experimenting.
Iris films Anne using Veescope. The green circle on her shirt is being keyed with a rainbow-coloured video.
Capturing an animated motif on our smartphone using PhotoMOSH
STEP 3
FIND VIDEOS YOU WANT TO WEAR
The apps work so that you can wear any image or video sitting in your Photo Album on your smartphone. So, what do you want to wear? For Phem, we preferred to make and wear original, abstract videos that we call “animated motifs” or “digital shimmers”. We made them in a variety of ways, but most of the time we made them by experimenting with the online glitching tool - PhotoMosh. Essentially you can drag any image or video into this tool, press MOSH and then it will do all kinds of crazy things. When we found something we liked, we filmed it with our smartphone camera right off the computer screen and voilà! The video will be on our smartphone–ready to be worn.
PHEM ANIMATED MOTIFS
If you’d like to have the same animated motifs we used for Phem, we’ve made several of them available on our Digital Shimmers collection page.
*STYLING TIP*
We really like wearing the animated motifs on fabrics with pieces of green or blue in them, as opposed to entirely green or blue garments. For example, using fabrics with stripes, dots, geometric or floral patterns…we’ve found the results appear more blended with the fabric. Here’s some early experiments: