My Two Cents on Sparks AR
Just here to share about a new skill / hobby I have picked up last year. Some of you know me as a photographer. I take photos @shotsbyseah, but I felt that account was a becoming stagnant and at the same time Instagram was rolling out new features like IGTV and IG Filters. I decided it was time to hop on the bandwagon (surprising I know) to see what’s the hype all about and in hopes of getting more interactions with my account. And so, I started creating filters for Instagram. I followed tutorials on YouTube and messed with the application to see its capabilities. Honestly, after a year into this, I still wouldn’t say I’m proficient when creating filters, but I have seen my fair share of hard work pay off.
The communities revolving around SparksAR is generally very friendly and like helpful when it comes to troubleshooting issues. Although there are many tutorials available online, those are just the generic ones you can create with the programme. There are much much more advanced filters with 3D objects / masks / AR / logic components included, but these are seldom taught online, for free. It’s like if you will only be able to create such filters if know what you are doing (maybe I just didn’t search hard enough). But yes, in a sense you needed a niche ability to stand out, although SparksAR claims to be suitable for people of all skillsets. And the rules for submitting a new filter were sooooo annoying and SparksAR had to be so prickly about the details. Tbh I’m jealous of those who just started using SparkAR cause they are so much more lenient now when it comes to submitting new filters.
The first few filters I created are the most generic ones, which were LUT filters (basically the ones which alter the scene / beautify the surroundings aka camera preset filters in live view). I created about 8 (? lost count lol) of them cause they were pretty simple to do. Literally only 1 file was needed and all can be created from Lightroom.
Then I moved on to the random generator filters which assign the user to a certain character/value. For this, I was kinda inspired by the pokemon and the angbao one which my sister showed me and tried to create some in the context of Singapore. The only difficult part was getting images and processing them. PNGs are definitely preferred over JPEGS (cause higher quality) and I still have to make each PNG transparent so they look presentable to the user. Then there were some logic behind the animation and when to stop playing the animation and that’s about it iirc.
How would I say my hard work paid off? Well, some of the filters got pretty high engagement with the public (and caused I promoted it) but the biggest takeaway was when I started working for others, and created filters for different (school) events, although some did not do as well as others. But still, the collaboration with the various group of people was never what I planned to do when I first started creating filters for fun. Even I don’t take photos for others unless its CCA duty LOL.
Somewhere at the start of the year, I decided to reach out and offer to create filters for orientation. I was surprised when they agreed and then I realised I had a lot of responsibility upon me to make the filters. But I managed to pull it off so yay. After this, a friend reached out and asked me to do a filter for friendship day in school, and it was the first time I was at a
loss of idea of what to do cause he told me to create anything which suited the theme. I was in a dilemma between choosing the easy route, which was to create the same type of filters I know and had experience with, or the difficult route, which was to explore and learn a new type of filter and incorporate it with my existing skillset. Yes this was during cts and I feel kinda bad now cause I contemplated about it for quite awhile until my friend asked me about the progress HAHA. Oops. But I got it done on time soooooo :)
What’s the moral of this sharing though? Honestly, I don’t know LOL. If you feel inspired to take on something new, then I will congratulate you in advance. I just felt like recording a hobby like how I talked about my phases with photography a few years back (and to let you know if you need any filters for an event you know who to find 😉) HAHA ok but I will take a break to focus on studies so maybe I will start again in December. Who knows what the trend would be like then?
