Thursday, March 28, 2013

Design Assignment: Black and White Picture

This one was actually really easy to do. I put the photo into Photoshop, used the lasso tool to draw out the shoes, then copied and pasted them onto the original image. I made the original photo the top layer, then decreased saturation until it was black and white (the filter needs to be applied only to the top layer, not the layer with just the shoes), and then lastly I erased the shoes on the top layer, revealing the color underneath. And viola!



An Album Without Sound

The idea for this comes from here, a blog called Albums Without Sound. This is how it works (from the blog):

1) Go to wikipedia and select "Random article". This article gives you the names of the band

2) Go to quotationspage.com and click on "Random Quotes". The first or last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your album.

3) Go to flickr and click on "Explore the last seven days". The third picture-- no matter what it is-- will be the album cover.

 
So I did that and put everything together using Photoshop. Really all it entailed was opening the image in Photoshop and then added text using the text tool, moving it around and changing the font to my liking. I think it turned out pretty well!






Roller Coaster Face Swap

This is what I did in class the other day for practice in using Photoshop. First I imported the original picture into Photoshop, used the lasso tool to draw around the funny face, and copied and pasted it onto the image for as many faces as there are in the picture. Then I dragged the faces over to the other faces, used transform (control+T) to resize them, deleted the face underneath, and then blended the new face with the rest of the old face. And BAM, here it is.



Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Favorite Cover from "Albums Without Sound"

Courtesy of: http://albumswithoutsound.tumblr.com/

I love this album cover. The past few weeks I've been obsessed with minimalism, so I'm a huge fan of the simplicity of the cover. The text on the top right is small and unobtrusive and colored with simply colors. It also strangely seems to fit with the picture. "Mass Flow Rate" makes me think of the movement of the water, and the title "It Goes On Forever" fits because the water and sky on the horizon seem to continue on forever as well.

The color are also awesome. Those shades of purple and yellow complement each other perfectly. The image is just a beautiful picture, one of the best sunset pics I've seen.

The album cover also makes me think that if this band actually put out this album, it would be maybe atmospheric, electronic, indie, that it would sound somehow nostalgic and emotional. It would be mellow, soothing music, and I'm a fan of that. So that's why this album cover stood out.

Monday, March 25, 2013

Weekly Summary

Sorry these have been coming in so late; I've been filming all weekend for my SAC 423 class (literally! Friday-Sunday from around 9 am to 2 am). Last week we finished up the audio section. I enjoyed making the audio projects, and I'm happy with how they turned out.

We also started the visual images section with a response and a couple creative projects, both of which I enjoyed. As we move forward, I'm looking forward to using this opportunity to teach myself Photoshop, since I'm not very familiar with it right now.

I really enjoy looking at online memes, and it seems like this section will give me an opportunity to make some of my own!

Response to "Sound Reporting"
Response to "Living with Cancer"
Audio Projects
Response to "Images" by Robert Hass
Picture + Vintage Filter + Helvetica Text
Turn a Photo Into a Comic

Turn a Photo Into a Comic


For this picture, I started with my current Facebook profile picture that was taken from the shoot for our nerf gun video a while back. I imported it into Photoshop and added the color halftone filter, then set the maximum radius at 4 pixels. It was looking a little bit dark so I added a sharpen filter too and used the preset "linear dodge (add)" which brightened it up a little bit. Then I exported it and uploaded it!

Picture + Vintage Filter + Helvetica Text



My Workflow:

I started with a photo from my iPhone camera roll -- I think this was on our way down to Florida during the long car ride. I emailed the photo to myself and then downloaded it to the computer. First, I opened it up in Photoshop and tried to add a filter, but I was having trouble finding one that I liked that was "vintage" enough. Maybe I wasn't looking in the right place; I'm not too familiar with Photoshop (yet).

So then I imported it into iPhoto and added one of their filters, then imported it back into Photoshop to add the text. And it's done! I hope it's pretentious enough.

Response to "Images" by Robert Hass

"Images" by Robert Hass is, predictably, full of images. He begins by describing his house late at night when everyone is asleep. And immediately, the reader visualizes the scene in his mind.

Hass then goes on to discuss several poems, namely haikus. He discusses the the images contained in such few words and tries to articulate what makes them so compelling. As I read through the various images Hass describes in the article, I kept thinking about something I had been told about writing descriptively: write using all the senses. Describe what can be seen, heard, felt, smelled (smelt?), and tasted in a scene. I think that, used correctly, this evokes an emotional reaction, a feeling.

For us Midwesterners, I'm sure this image evokes a very strong emotional reaction.

At one point Hass says:

"Images are not quite ideas, they are smaller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have that explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is" (275).
When I read this, I thought about my own process as a filmmaker. It's not uncommon for me to first come up with an image: an old man in a long coat and top hat, holds and umbrella waits outside at the shoreline in pouring rain as an old ship emerges from thick fog and begins to dock. The image comes first, and along with it a feeling, and then I develop a story based on that. Good imagery conjures up these feelings.