This new third quarter objective is to get familiar with editing video and audio files. An intro into the film aspect was this assignment to find examples of different camera shots. Then we would take these still frames of a camera angle and put them into a photoshop document. We then labeled each still frame with what movie or video game it came from and what example of a camera angle technique it displayed.. After that we gave a brief description of why the director decided to use this camera angle and what they were trying to display by using it. This was a helpful assignment that could be useful in other situations and especially later in the unit when we begin to work on things like creating and composing videos. After this assignment we worked in Adobe Premiere Rush or Pro depending on which one your computer could run. The assignment was to make a montage of pictures of only one color. After I created a folder I chose the color yellow and began to grab yellow images from royalty free websites. After I had about 30 I went into Adobe Premiere Pro and began to import the images. The video had to be exactly 15 seconds long but I couldn't have each picture last the same amount of time because I had to make the pictures increase in speed and amount of yellow shown. I inserted all of the pictures and properly adjusted the timing as well as the picture's order. After the video was in place I needed to add the credits, a title and an audio track. I didn't manage to finish this project before we had to leave school but I am in a good spot. These two assignments were helpful to see into how certain scenes can be enhanced through the use of different camera angles as well as how to use video editing programs.
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After working a little longer in Adobe Illustrator I have made new conclusions corresponding with the comparison of Adobe Photoshop to Adobe Illustrator in advertisement. I still like Adobe Illustrator better but there are some aspects of Photoshop that you can't beat. One of the biggest ones being the realistic aspect of the Photoshop graphics. Very recently we received an assignment that tasked us with making a realistic cheese burger in Adobe Illustrator (realistic within reason we are after all working in Adobe Illustrator). Although the burgers look realistic enough if you compare them to a burger in edited Photoshop you could easily see which one is real. Besides the fact that could easily tell the difference between a real food product and an Adobe Illustrator food product, you would definitely not want to advertise any food products using Adobe Illustrator (or at least not made by anyone at the level I am at right now) because they look unappetising and off color. If you were trying to advertise a food product in Photoshop you could simply take a nice photo of your food item of choice and then add different filters and lighting styles to make it look even more appealing. On the other side of that Adobe Illustrator would be much better for designing a company logo and putting it on merchandise. If you tried making a logo from scratch in Adobe Photoshop it wouldn't look as graphically appealing due to the realistic nature of it and how most logos are simple and cartoonish. As you can see there are ups and downs to aspects of both programs and you just have to figure out which one works best in your context.
I like vector graphics and think they can be useful in many different situations. There are lots of things you can do in photoshop with bitmap graphics but the thing I like the most about vector graphics is that you can create images completely from scratch without needing anything outside of the program. I also like that in Adobe Illustrator with vector graphics you can create something a little more practical than just a pretty photograph like you do in photoshop. I think that vector graphics are more useful for designing logos and non-realistic type graphics. They could be used by advertising agencies to make fancy advertisements or by designers to label their drawings or make certain points stand out. Even though we have only been working with vector graphics for a little bit I like using them more than bitmap graphics. I think that I can better express what I am trying to do with vector graphics and the Adobe Illustrator program than with photoshop and bitmap graphics. One big upside to the program is that you can work off to the side of the artboards. I really like this feature because it allows me to test things without having them overlap my artwork or interfere with what I am doing. A negative factor to using vector graphics is that there is a longer process to saving them even though they are usually smaller files than bitmap graphics. I like designing logos and seeing logos that other people design and the program/graphics that allow me to do more of this is Adobe Illustrator/Vector graphics.
Once we had gotten some understanding of photoshop and re-coloring pictures we were tasked with coloring a grayscale or a black and white photo. We had a range of photos to choose from and I chose one that I didn’t think would be too difficult (I was wrong). It was a wooden boat dock with wooden posts about every fourteen planks looking out onto the ocean with some clouds in the sky. After I had chosen this I searched for pictures of sunsets/sunrises over the ocean online until I had a sense of what the colors looked like and how they interacted with water. I began playing with the different tools until I had a good sense of what I was doing and then I began. I used the quick select tools to pull the sections I wanted and then made a new layer to color on (this was part of the masking we learned when working with sandwiches). This was extremely helpful because I could just delete layers when I made mistakes or thought my picture looked better without that certain element. After I had gone through and colored the big sections I did the borders with the pencil and paintbrush tools. I would use the eyedropper to take the adjacent colors and put them into my color palette then use the paint brush and pencil to draw in the pixels. In some sections the uncolored parts were so minuscule that I had to take the size of my paintbrush and turn it down to 1 pixel! This meant that I was coloring pixel by pixel which would drive me crazy if I had to do an entire drawing in that fashion. You wouldn't think that the little uncolored parts would be that important but, they were what held my entire picture together. It is very easy to spot little uncolored sections and the difference between the little spots and the color is an amazing change. When I was done with the cleanup and edges I tweaked the final colors a little bit and then my final product was complete.
These past weeks we have been learning about photoshop and for me this was the first experience I had ever had with photoshop. There were tons of different tools and options so at first it was complicated and it took me a little to get used to doing things fluidly. It was especially difficult because I would learn something one class period and then have to re-learn it the next class period because I forgot. Another problem I faced was when I would fumble with the controls and tools and do something weird. This was very inconvenient because I didn't know how to use the program and I would try different ways of fixing my problem sometimes it would work and others I wasn't too lucky. On one assignment we were tasked with making a sandwich using the different "layer" tools. I liked this assignment because the layers concept made sense it was almost like making a sandwich in real life. For this assignment we had to practice using non-destructive editing which was a new concept for me. Instead of deleting certain aspects we would just hide them so if we needed them later we could easily make them appear. We used a "quick mask" tool that would turn the things we selected a light, translucent shade of pink. I accidentally changed this selection color to a solid black and didn't realize it. I re-read the instructions multiple times and couldn't figure out what was wrong because I was doing everything correctly what I didn't realize is that I had changed the mask color. I got help and I finally got to work. Once I had cleared that roadblock things were pretty smooth. It was things like this that made me wish I had a little more experience in photoshop because I could be completely halted by a minor alteration. My overall experience has been one of learning and I am enjoying it.
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AuthorI am Giacomo Hardin and this is my blog. I will be reflecting on my time in Digital Design and Game Art class. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Archives
May 2020
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