Final Project

So for my final project I created GIFs from a few scenes of a video I made that I didn't end up using because I wasn't happy with the end result. The video was only about a minute and a half long and I also created a track to go with it using Garageband. I didn't really go into making this video with a specific story or anything, I just filmed what I thought would look visually interesting. I really just wanted to practice editing and playing with Garageband and I got a better understanding of After Effects and have a better grasp on how to do edits with it. I mostly finished the video in iMovie then used After Effects to edits the colors and change the contrast and brightness.

The future of photography

I think the future of photography lies hand in hand with the Internet and how video and photography is becoming even more accessible to people through phones, video game consoles, computers, etc. You don't really need an expensive camera to take pictures or video anymore, and I think because of social websites there are companies that are pushing their devices and products to offer better image quality. In ten years from now I think video will be much more prominent than still images because internet speeds will be vastly faster and content will be quicker to downloaded. I also think that GIFs may replace still images as profile pictures. Think of it as the moving photographs in Harry Potter.

The Project Glass by Google reinforces my idea that the future of image making is becoming more integrated into our daily lives.

Although it looks oddly familiar....

Woah, someone at Google must be watching reruns of Ned's Declassified, or maybe...

it's Dragon Ball Z.

Oops, late blog post! Sorry about that.

For my final project I'm still undecided if I'm going to make a video or make a series of GIF's, or maybe both? My inspiration comes from a video by Steven Klein (whose work inspires me greatly) he did with Madonna for W Magazine awhile back.

It's very eerie, weird and dark which are all the elements I love in art. What I'm trying to replicate is the cuts and slow motions and loops he does in the video. I'll probably shoot various  scenes; I'm trying to come up with a story to have them at least be cohesive to each other. I'm leaning towards creating GIF's right now. I want to bring surrealism into it too, maybe recreate one of my photographs into a video/GIF form such as this one:
 

I've made GIF's before and video but I'm still very rusty when it comes to video editing. I may use a combination of Final Cut and Adobe After Effects to do the video, then use Photoshop to create the GIF's. Either way I'm very excited for this project, I hope I don't mess it up!

retouching

 I found this picture to retouch from deviantart here
The first thing I did was straighten her head just a bit, then I elongated her neck and dropped her shoulders down a bit. I used the clone stamp tool to get rid of a few blemishes. I then used the liquify tool to fix her hair a bit. After that I decided to fix and add some color with selective colors and messing with the hue/saturation tool. Then I decided to touch up her make up a bit, so I darkened around her eyes with the burn tool, then dodged her eyes just a bit. To finish it up I cropped it so there wasn't so much negative space above her head.

making of

 As I began to work on this project for one of my classes, I didn't really have an idea of what I wanted to make. The assignment was to make a collage of images, and I've made photo manipulations in the past but I've become a bit rusty at it. So here are the steps I made to get to the final image:

 I went through Deviantart looking for stock images I could use. I was looking for an outdoor setting that wasn't too busy. I knew since the beginning of the project that I was going to composite a person into something, but I was just winging it at this point. I found this open field and figured I could do something with it. The only thing I didn't like was how tight it was, so I made it wider.

The next step was to try and find an interesting enough model that I can place in this field. The picture I found was great in the way that it has a solid background color so it was easier to cut out and also the pose of the model added a great dynamic to the image.

 I decided to add some extra clouds to add more contrast, I felt there was too much empty space at the top of the image.

 And the final steps were making the image in black and white then adding a bit of sepia; it's just easier to convert them to black and white since all the images had different color tones. I decided to add the house to add more of a story to the image.

With my work I generally focus on self portraiture, I've been doing this for about 4 years now. With these photographs, I try to create worlds and stories that sometimes reflect some sort of personal conflict I'm going through or at others times are inspired by many different other outlets. There's a certain satisfaction I get from shooting these images and then putting them out into the internet. I was really interested in the interactive GIF's that was shown on the first day of class, I've never seen that before. What I want to walk away with from this class is a broaden knowledge on how I can incorporate technology with art, and the future of photography in the way it continues to fuse with technology.

Volare (Outtakes & Extras)

I finally remembered to bring my instax to a photoshoot and here are some of 'em:

Smoke bomb didn't really work, the wind was working against us.
All in all, a very fun shoot. :)