Photoshop Projects

Not to brag or anything... but these are pretty neat.

If you must know, the reason there are two of these butterflies is because it was specified to be in the GIF format, but I thought JPEG would look better.

Moving on.
All of these were--you guessed it--made using Adobe Photoshop CS6! Wow! Isn't it wonderful?

I'll start by touching on each project.
Project 1 is the last picture, the bottom picture, the picture with the huge semi-transparent "ONW" overlaid on a semi-transparent compass. I got to learn the basics of Photoshop, the very basic basics, and use transparency and overlaying skills. There was no difficulty in this project. In fact, a baby could do it with its hands behind its back while sleeping.
Okay, so maybe that last part is a lie.

Project 2 was our monarchs that we edited. We multi-selected symmetrical areas of the wings and modified the hues and saturation levels. The blur effect (which I accidentally made asymmetrical) was achieved through the use of the [Clone Stamp Tool], which is a pretty handy tool. By selecting a source point from which to copy, i.e. the wing, you can copy it and adjust how it is copied, i.e. the opacity and transparency levels. All in all, this was a fun project. Yes indeed.

Project 3 involved the [Mask] and [Gradient] tools. By utilizing the [Horizontal Type Mask Tool], and inverting the selection of the letters, I was able to "cut out" the letters from a gradient overlaid on a picture of the school.

Project 4, at the very top, took elements from all 3 projects to create a collage. Yeah, that was fun. Layer effects are fun.

All of the projects are pretty easy to do, and with basic knowledge of the Photoshop toolkit, normal people (i.e. anyone who isn't a photo editor or graphic designer) can do cool things with photos, like removing people's mouths from their photos, leaving them with blank skin.

Final

This quarter entailed a lot of filming and fun. I think I speak for most of us when I say the chase scene videos were the best all quarter. We had to make up the craziest of stories and do the craziest things on campus, and I thought that was great. Last week, I talked about it with Shane Dolan, and he commented on how he saw us filming our chase scene. You can actually catch him in one of our shots (cameo appearance for the win). I liked filming a lot, because the filming had to be done often in creative ways. Storyboarding allowed my artistic ability to shine (though I'm probably half as good as Maria Caputo or my old friend Dylan Sirivongxay) and that was pretty nice. I've learned a lot of things about filming now, and with "director of photography" under my list of possible career choices, the things I learned will probably help going forward.

The Chase Scene

I have now learned that cameo appearances are fun faking injury is fun acting requires collaboration. You can't just say "oh yeah, well we should do this;" you have to agree in order to really get your video moving. Collaboration adds more "life" to the video, if you will. This can be applied to every further project I undertake. [Also, we need to work on our sharing skills.]
I've learned to really cut back on the jump-cut issues as well.

In this video, our entire group was acting. This made the video a lot more energetic, and enhanced realism. I mean, in what universe can you have a person being chased by another without more people around?
We'll have to improve on our collaboration in a few more ways, though. We need to work on planning in advance for sure.

*Side note: Chase scenes are fun!*

A-B Sequence

The A-B sequence is kind of like a double six shot sequence; the hard part is framing each shot so as to avoid jump-cuts. Each of the usual six shots must be used at least twice throughout, but more may be captured to avoid jump-cuts. 
Keeping this in mind, I can go into my next video prepared with extra shots ready to capture. I must remember that two of any shot back-to-back make a jump-cut.
Collaboration is a fundamental part of all these video projects, as I am clearly not portrayed in these videos, but rather someone else is acting. Collaboration is, in a word, teamwork. Each of us agreed on how we would capture our shots and how we would act in them. Which is redundant; you'll see the same explanation in the blog posts of the others who conduct this same project.

Six Shot Sequence

The six shot sequence contains, as one could easily guess, six different shots. They are as follows (but can be in any order): close up, extra close up, wide shot, medium shot, extra wide shot, and an over the shoulder shot. 
Each one is slightly self-explanatory, but I'll describe each anyway:
--Closeup: Frames the face but without cutting any portion of the head out of the frame. This shot is used to capture emotion and reactions.
--Extra closeup: A shot focusing on the hands or feet, which must be performing some kind of an action. 
--Wide shot: Frames the entire person, with a bit of room above and below the person so as not to cut any part of them from the frame.
--Extra wide shot: Frames a person and their surroundings. The person is much smaller in this frame than in the standard wide shot.
--Medium shot: Frames a person from the waist up or down, with enough room above their head or below their feet to not cut them out.
--Over the shoulder: The easiest to describe by name. It does what it says; it captures what the person is doing from over their shoulder. This is usually framed so that the camera faces the direction the person faces, but can be inverted to where the camera shows things behind the person.
I learned that repetition is NOT good for video. Notice the really quick transition of the shots of the feet? Originally, they were each shots of [name undivulged] kicking the ball, but why jump-cut to 3 kicks? Secondly, some shots toward the middle of the video seem to be jump-cuts and are fairly noticeable. This was an error that couldn't be fixed for the time I had, but is easy to look past.
I plan to apply my knowledge of these kinds of errors to my next video so as not to encounter them again.