So let’s continue this exploration of Photoshop, a program I’m definitely warming up to the more I play around with it. In the last “Photoshoppin‘” post, I talked about doing a part 2 because I had another zip drive with some Photoshop projects on there. I got the drive, and I was surprised to find only one project on there. That project was my Final project in my Photoshop class (which I got an A in by the way).
The project was to use photos, photos we’ve taken ourselves, and try to work with a theme. We were required to post 3 related pictures, and that’s where the requirements ended. So I chose 3 pictures I took at MoMA in New York City and just see what I could come up with. And, here they are…
So the original photo/paintings were part of a 15 part series by Gerhard Richter, and that series is titled “October 18, 1977”. The photo/paintings are dark and dreary and they captivated me while I was at the museum. The shadowy paintings’ focus was the imprisonment of a West German terrorist group the Baader-Meinhof gang. It’s very intense source material, and the originals are so exciting because of it.
Anyway, I decided to use these for my project. So I imported them, worked with some Camera Raw Filters and was ready to go. It started out with me duplicating the photo/paintings and trying to make them POP somehow. I added the gradient, the black stripes, and while I enjoyed it somewhat… I felt that the stripes gave the project a corny/cheesy sort of vibe, so I had to think of something to retain the dreary jarring effect of the originals. That’s when I thought of hand writing the title and sprawling it across the image.
In the end, I actually think these came out really cool. I was basically DONE with them about a week before the project was due, and I kept going back and looking at them. I would adjust things just so, like the positioning of the paintings or the angle of the gradient layer. And ultimately I was happy with the 3 I have presented to you.
I guess my only issue looking at them now is that I probably should have cropped out the floor of the museum in 2 of the 3. We discussed this in my class when I presented the work, but I really loved having the museum floor in the picture because it just gives you a different perspective. It makes the painting sort of jump out at you because, I don’t know, it gives dimension to the image. However, the last of the 3 pictures didn’t have the floor in the original picture and I felt it threw off the consistency of the 3 part set. I don’t know, I must have just forgotten about it, but if I were going to go back and change them (I’m Not) I would definitely crop out the floor on the other two, just to make all 3 pics more uniform.
My teacher seemed to like them too. She said they reminded her of Pop Art, which in general I love, but with a different artistic layer on top of them. I was happy with that feedback because it made me feel like I did something unique that she doesn’t see often.
Hello People. HAPPY 2015! The new year is here, and for ME it’s a critical one. There are so many dreams and goals I want to accomplish before the end of the year, so it begins … YESTERDAY!
I bought the Adobe Creative Cloud a few months ago, and this past semester I was working mostly with Photoshop and After Effects. After Effects, which is motion graphics application, is very complicated but it’s somewhat easy to follow as far as using the tools and things like that. Photoshop is a totally different story though, I went through most of the semester with a “huuuh?” look on my face. There are just so many things you can do with the program, yet it’s all so overwhelming that it’s easy to just give up.
So, the next few weeks before the Spring semester begins I’m planning on doing different random projects on all of these programs (including Adobe Premiere Pro, the video editing program for which I’ve done a few things that I’ve posted to this blog). Right now, I want to share my Photoshop goods.
What you are about to see is a few of my class projects and a few of my personal projects I’ve worked on since the semester ended. I am going to post another “Photoshoppin'” post another day, basically I save most of my stuff to different zip drives and I don’t have both today.
So here we go!
This was my second Photoshop project in the class. I had an idea to use different pics of NYC, but I waited until the last minute to try to execute and this was the best I could come up with. Of course there were guidelines given by our instructor, and I managed to follow those guidelines and did this. Which isn’t really good, but it’s not terribly bad!
These are two personal projects, and two that I’ve been thinking about putting together ever since that “Greatest Hits” blog post I made MONTHS ago. The question? Am I happy with these mock-up album covers for Alicia Keys and Coldplay Greatest Hits? Well… mostly. As far as Alicia is concerned, I scrolled through loads of Alicia pics and I saw this one and loved it and knew it was what I would use for the album cover. Yet, when I finally decided to actually DO something I was disappointed to find that Alicia is STANDING and not sitting at the piano. So I had to figure out what to do.
Without getting into too many details, because I could be here for days, I basically played around with the images and different tools and blending options and came up with what I came up with. I’m about 80% happy with this, I don’t really like the background Alicia… I didn’t transform the size well enough so it looks weird to me. Overall though, I like it. I like the Coldplay one as well.
This actually started as a Glitche project and I LOVED what I came up with using that app, and I was hoping to try to recreate it on Photoshop. Obviously I’m not that advanced yet so I wasn’t able to do an exact replica, so I just played with the imagining and came up with this cool, sort of animated, look. The ONLY problem I have with this is the font. And I must say, finding the perfect font for the image in Photoshop is very annoying!
I LIKE BOYS! Now that we got that out the way, I have a Pinterest board titled as such. And between Pinterest and Tumblr, I’ve seen this model all over the place and it was through Pinterest that I found out his name (Serge Henir). So one day, I decided to collect as many pics of him as I could find and do a collage. This is actually only one part of about 4 parts, but I just loved these pics together so I decided to save just this layer. He’s HOT! And honestly this was an easy project. I love my Quick Selection Tool, and that’s basically how I put this together. I also put the pictures through Camera Raw Filters and voila!
I LOVE My Divas, and ultimately I hope to make a little money off my Divas this summer. In the mean time, I decided to pull some pics of Legendary Divas Diana Ross and Donna Summer and just play with them in Photoshop. I’m not extremely happy with either of these on the whole. I like Donna (below), but I need to figure out a good way to make her face more clear. I like Diana (above, obvi), but in all fairness I just started this last night and don’t think it’s TOTALLY finished (but I wanted to show you all).
So yeah. That’s it! I’m in the playing around stage at this point and I’m learning more and more but I’m still very amateur.
Hey, so I uploaded something to YouTube earlier today and I thought I’d go ahead and share it.
Now if you remember my post this past Summer, about me being in that Video Editing class. In that blog post I had three videos, one of which was a trailer for Martin Scorsese’s epic “The Aviator”. That was actually my Final project in the class, and I think I told you guys I was unhappy with it and wanted to try to revise it.
Well, I went ahead and did it and I want you to see it.
So now that you’ve seen it, I guess I should talk about what went into doing this revision and what I’m happy and unhappy about still.
If you watch my first trailer (which looks like a sloppy first draft at this point), you might notice that it was a bit rushed. A lot of the transitions are really sloppy, the text crawl is super basic, and the music is one note and boring. I think what bothered me the most about the original one I did is the time stretch sequences (mostly towards the end), which look incredibly cheap.
However I must pat myself on the back for the first draft, because I literally completed it from start to finish in probably 4 hours total. I ended up getting an A in the class, but I was super-disappointed with the result.
So moving on to the NEW trailer. I won’t go into the gritty details of the process, I just knew a couple of things I wanted to change going into it. Music was key, I wanted something about flying or being in the clouds or the sky. I had chosen a few songs initially (John Legend’s “So High” and Rihanna’s “Get It Over With”), but once I actually started editing I decided on two different songs. Here I used The Wombat’s “Jump into the Fog”, a song I fell in love with last year. The spur of the moment change ended up being a perfect match, especially how the opening of the song is PERFECT to the footage I used.
The use of Kanye’s “Touch the Sky” was a very last minute decision, but I love how it fits in. It’s a change in vibe and tone that was necessary, and I love how certain parts match up with the lyrics (“come up in the spot looking extra fly” when Leo swags his way towards screen). I have to say, Audio and the levels is something I need to master, because I can’t seem to figure out what to do in regards to lowering the music track to accommodate for the dialogue (I’ll be in Sound Design next semester though, so hopefully that will help).
The next big thing for me to improve upon was the text. I hate the text I used in the first draft, and the teacher’s feedback was saying that I should avoid using black backgrounds in the middle of a trailer because it takes you out of the mood. So I worked (semi) hard on the text on this new trailer. I have to tell you all, it took me FOREVER to decide on exactly what the text would say. What I ended up with is close to my original idea, but I went through so many different changes in that text to the point where I almost didn’t include text at all.
I am pleased with what I finally decided on, and the flow of the text. I especially love “to touch the sky” and how the plane and the text seem to dance with each other. There is one small glitch on “A Man who knows no limits” (the opacity goes down, then back up for a milli-second, then back down), but overall I love the text.
So after the music and the text, it was just an issue of dropping the right footage in, which is really the easy part of Video Editing.
So yeah, that’s pretty much it. I hope you enjoy, and hope someone can provide some feedback on my improvements.
My next two projects (which are now personal projects, because I don’t have another video editing class until Spring semester) will be Pixar’s “Brave” and another Scorsese/Dicaprio collab “Wolf of Wall Street”. “Brave” was one of the movies in my Video Editing package, but I didn’t want to use it until I heard a particular song that I felt would fit perfectly with the movie. And I just had a random/out-of-nowhere idea for a “Wolf” trailer and I hope I can execute what I’m thinking. Those should be done and up in the next two weeks (I HAVE the Adobe Creative Cloud on my personal laptop now).
For now, enjoy what I have. I am taking Photoshop and After Effects classes this semester and I expect to post my work online – including this blog where I’ll be able to go into detail about my edu-ma-cation! #STAYTUNED
My Video Editing class has come to an end and I am so relieved. Taking those classes at night and working full time in the day had me completely EXHAUSTED. I still have about a year and a half to go before I finish up all the classes for that Video Editing Certificate I talked about before, but at least this portion is over now. Anyway, the class is over and I’m not really sure how I did, but there are a few projects that I felt really proud about and I decided to share them here.
So let’s do this chronologically, to give you a sense of what the class was like.
We started out doing a basic overview of the Adobe Premiere Pro software before we actually did anything. It is a very cool program, with lots of great tools to make things a little simpler to navigate. Of course there are more technical aspects for the more advanced user, but I was mostly pleased with Premiere Pro though, especially after working on Windows Live Movie Maker, which is great but has lots of limitations.
Our first couple of projects consisted of us doing small projects with very very VERY amateur footage the Instructor provided us. Very simple stuff, just so that we could get more hands on experience using the software and understand different editing techniques. The next project was putting together a Music Video out of – again – very very VERY amateur footage. It was fun, even though the music was terrible and the “performers” gave us very uninspired stuff to work with. I’m obviously a big music person, so the idea of cutting a video was awesome.
Our midterm was a group project, and we were asked to edit a Movie (of the list she provided) of our choice into a 2 minute trailer. Me and my partner picked the classic musical “Singin’ in the Rain”. We decided what we wanted the flow of the trailer to be, and we decided that I’d do the first half and he’d do the second half. We worked well together, but unfortunately an issue with the different versions of Premiere Pro prevented me from presenting my half of the trailer. Luckily though, the next project was to refine that footage and make the trailer 1 minute and 30 seconds – and we could work by ourselves.
So here is MY “Singin’ in the Rain” trailer, which was really fun to put together. I love this movie, and my hope was to put something together that showed off more of the plot while keeping the viewers guessing about what they’d get when they saw the full movie. And here it is…
Our Final project was a tad confusing because of some miscommunication. At first, the Instructor told us the project could be “Anything”. So for pretty much all the semester I was thinking about what I could possibly put together. I wanted to do something challenging and creative and powerful to show my skills but the closer we got to the due date, the Instructor put more restrictions on the project. She gave us footage from different genres of things. There was documentary footage, there was random B-roll footage, and footage from a popular Crime series. She also said we could use the movies she provided for the Movie Trailer project, and we could use footage we shot ourselves.
Here’s what threw me off.
There were questions about why we had to stick to those specific restrictions, at first the Instructor said it was a copyright issue. Then another student asked if she could pull video from YouTube and use it, and the reason the Instructor gave for not doing that was because she wanted us to use HD quality stuff. Then my Movie Trailer partner (who sat right next to me) asked her in class if we could use HD footage of Movies or Videos we had in our personal libraries, and she sighed and said “sure”. So the next day, my partner was editing together footage from the movie “Para-Norman”. So I thought I was in the clear, because my first idea was to cut up Rihanna’s “We Found Love” video and make it look like it was a Movie trailer.
I changed my mind last minute and decided to use Beyonce’s video for “Superpower”, and I worked for three days on it. It was cool just pulling the images I wanted to use, and making a different sort of narrative of the video. My creative juices were definitely flowing. After a while, I felt it lacked a more powerful Audio message, so I went and searched for speeches about rebellion and revolution (because that’s what the video is all about) and I happened upon some great interviews with Angela Davis, a popular figure in the Black Power movement of the 70’s. The audio worked PERFECTLY with the imagery, and I thought that I was going to blow the class and the Instructor away with my project.
I was about 2/3 done with the project when I asked the Instructor to look over it for feedback. She watched it, and her first reaction was “this was supposed to be video I provided or video that you shot”, and I reminded her what she told my partner. She seems to have forgotten what she said, or misunderstood exactly what he was talking about. She said I could still use the footage, but she gave me a VERY lukewarm response to my footage. So I decided, one day before the project was due, to just scrap it and use some of the footage she gave us.
I moved on, but yesterday in our final class I completed the “Superpower” project because I wanted to share it. So here it is. What do you think?
What I turned in for my final, I’m really not that proud of. I was rushing obviously and I didn’t have those creative juices flowing, instead I had anxious last-minute fumes. I decided to do another Movie Trailer, and given the choices I picked Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator” because I love that Movie and had a vague idea of what I’d do. I focused mainly on the airplane aspect of the Movie, and this is what I came up with.
I think I suceeded in certain parts of the project, but failed at other parts. You notice how some parts are a lot slower than others, well I did that to stretch out the time to make the trailer it’s required 1 minute and 30 seconds. I was also having issues playing with the Title functions, I wanted to do something a little more creative with them but obviously time was an issue. I do feel like I succeeded in doing most of what I set out to do, which is mainly cutting the plane footage together and giving it a certain rhythm, which was one of the good critiques I got last night.
If given more time, I would have changed the title cards and probably used footage in the air for the backdrop instead of using just a black screen. I also would have switched up the music, because I really wanted to try to incorporate Rihanna’s “Get It Over With” (“it’s alright, we can float in the clouds”). It is what it is, and most of the feedback I got was good. So, I’ll pat myself on the back.
Overall, I enjoyed the class. Because it was during the Summer session, the entire class was more fast paced than the two classes I’ll be taking this Fall. The pace of the class was very tiring, but I got through it and learned some stuff. And I’m one step closer to be a certified Video Editor.
#PROGRESS
So… any Video Editors have any useful feedback for me? Leave it in the comments.