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I have already made a post discussing the practical uses of Photoshop, but that was a while ago. When I say practical uses, I mean ways in which Photoshop can be used in everyday life to solve problems. As of now, I have used it twice for such reasons and I found it was quite useful in both. (Sorry, I would like to include a picture, but, since these weren’t art pieces, I didn’t use royalty free images.)
About a month ago, my family was talking about getting a new kitchen floor or painting the one we already have. I was opposed to this idea, but agreed to held visualize it. I took a picture of the kitchen and it’s floor and opened it on Photoshop. I selected the floor and moved it to a new layer. I then hid it and put different materials we were considering adding in its place in the place where the floor was. After that, I used blend modes to change the colour of the floor. Photoshop really helped visualize what different floor choices would look like and how hey would compliment the kitchen. A few weeks ago, I was doodling in a notebook and began drawing guitar designs. I drew to outrageous ones (a bat-bass and an electric banjo) and one slightly less outrageous one. It featured an original body shape and a pickup configuration I can’t say I’ve ever seen before. The drawing looked good, but I wondered what it would look like if it was actually made. Naturally, I turned to Photoshop, and began dragging in pictures of guitars. First I took a hollow body semi-electric guitar with a similar body to the one I designed. I used various tools to cut it up and shape it into the body I had designed. I then took a neck I liked and replaced the original neck of the guitar. I then dragged in guitars with pickup sounds I liked and extracted them. I ended up with a single coil Telecaster pickup and the two pickup’s from George Harrison’s “Lucy” Les Paul. I have yet to finish this project, but I plan to make the guitar a little thinner and add tone controls. Unfortunately, it hasn’t turned out exactly as I envisioned it, so I might redo it later on.
It’s been a little under a month since my last post on 3D modeling. At the time, we had learned about primitives and some about subobjects. Since then, we have learned a lot more. After the blog post, we began learning about other modifiers besides the edit poly modifier. In one activity we used modifiers like the taper, noise and mesh smooth modifier to create mushrooms and rocks. The ultimate goal of the activity was to create a scene with mushrooms, flowers and rocks. The mushrooms and rocks weren’t hard to make, but the same cannot be said about the flowers. My first flower took a while, but the second one took even longer. For some reason, one pedal refused to work with the array tool. I thought it was problem with the program, and later the computer, but, after wasting a whole day, I found making a new pedal fixed the issue. This helped teach me how temperamental 3DS Max can be when being used on a computer that isn’t necessarily equipped to handle it.
After learning more about modifiers, we worked with splines a little. I found splines weren’t very difficult to work with, and weren’t very different from what we had done before. After splines, we began working with materials. It took me a little while to get the hang of the material editor. I was a little confused at first, but once I figured the material editor out, I was able to get the activities involving it done fairly quickly. In my last 3D modeling post I discussed how I had enjoyed 3D modeling though I wasn’t used to it. I have grown to enjoy it more and more as I have gotten more used to it and learned more about it.
As of now, we have finished working with Adobe Premiere Pro. I have always been interested in film, and therefore editing, but I never had used Premiere before. So far, I have used Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator outside of class. Until a week ago, I hadn’t used Premiere for any non-academic purposes. I haven’t really taken time to explore it, and I haven’t done anything we haven’t done in class.
Last week, I used Premiere properly for the first time out of the classroom. I played around with it before I took this class, but last week I edited a full scene. It wasn’t a particularly simple scene either. It was a scene composed of several shots, as there are six different individuals present in it, none of whom were all there at the same time. The scene was from a movie I have been working on for a while. I edited some scenes from it in simple programs, but have decided to re-edit everything in Premiere. Before I even started editing, I organized all the raw footage I have so far into folders based on scene. Then I actually started editing. Unlike the videos we edited in class, the raw material is… well… more raw. It is more similar to the footage you would get from a real film- it starts with a slate, and then goes to a short period of getting the camera angle right and getting everyone in their places. Then the scene starts. It is usually redone several times until everything is right. As a result, a lot of the time spent editing is really spent sorting through footage. Once I sorted through the footage, I had to splice it together. Luckily, I made the decision to dub the audio in post, so I didn’t have to worry about that. I used three point editing for the majority of the scene, which I will be using a lot throughout the movie. I got done editing that scene and moved on to another, which I didn’t finish editing. I am excited about editing more of this movie in the future. I have a lot of fun things ahead of me, including interesting transitions, audio dubbing, foley, original music, chromakey, and ghosts.
A few weeks ago, we began working with 3D modeling. We have been working in 3DS Max, a program that, until now, I was unfamiliar with. Before this class, my experience with 3-D modeling was fairly limited. I hadn't ever found it particularly interesting, and I wasn’t really looking forward to learning about it. My first creation was a simple snowman made of primitives. After that, I created another simple model with primitives, and then I began learning about modeling with subobjects. My first subobject model was simple- it was a rudimentary tank. I then moved on to more complex subobject models- a cartoon head and a spaceship. So far, I have enjoyed 3D modeling, though I have struggled a bit.The first problem I faced when using 3DS Max was getting used to the interface. It was the first non-Adobe program we have used this year. That, coupled with the fact that it is also the first 3D program we are using this year, the interface is very different from anything I have used before. It took a few days to get used to it, and I still have a lot to learn. A lot of the problems I have had come from a lack of experience with the controls. While I don’t tend to make a lot of mistakes, when I do, I generally have trouble fixing them. I tend to struggle with finding out what I’ve done wrong, and often have to go back several steps to fix my model. Still, it isn’t very problematic on the whole, and now I have adapted pretty well to the new program.
While I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, I have enjoyed what I’ve done with 3D modeling. I look forward to doing more in the future.
We have just completed our unit on video editing. Personally, I enjoyed learning about editing and using better programs. Film and video making has interested me for years. I have always edited my own videos, though I wasn’t particularly good. I stuck to simple programs, and hardly used anything more than simple cuts. The final product would usually be okay, but I never really knew what I was doing. I had never received any actual education on how to edit, on things like where to use what transitions, but luckily some of that was intuitive.
I learned a lot of useful things during our unit on video. The most important thing I learned was how to use a professional program- Adobe Premiere. Beyond that, I learned how to edit for intensity, how to make something fluid, and the reasons to use different cuts and transitions. In addition to learning about editing, I learned some things about making videos that I never knew before. Before this unit, I can’t say I ever was aware of the 180 degree rule. I also learned more about when to use what types of shots. While I feel like I followed some of these rules intuitively, I think the quality of any videos I make will be greatly improved by what I have learned. I hope to use what I have learned a lot outside of class. Firstly, I plan to make any and all future projects in Premiere. When filming I plan to try to be better with cinematography. While editing, I plan to make better use of cuts, transitions, and techniques like 3 point editing. In the end, while it has been rather hurried, I think this will be one of the most beneficial units to me this year. While I greatly enjoy working with Photoshop and Illustrator, learning about editing will greatly help me as I continue to pursue film.
As of writing this, I have finally completed the idle animation project. For this project, we had to create an idle animation for an original character. The finished product depicts a turkey, named Turkey, casually looking from side to side, twitching his beak, raising a sword, and sharpening it. It includes a character and a scene from a short story I have been working on for a while which is titled “Turkey’s Odd-o-see.” The “Odd-o-see” is strange to a point where it can be described as psychedelic, which, in my opinion, would make it a perfect candidate for a video game.
Before I created the animation, I had to create the background. For the background, I used a scene from the book where Turkey was in the Arizona Desert. I put it into Adobe Animate and then began actually making the animation. I started out with him looking around. This, along with the the twitch of the beak and the raising of the sword was fairly simple. It took awhile for me to get the second wing, which holds the rock used to sharpen the sword, to raise properly. Unlike the first wing, the second wing needed to change shape slightly as it moved up. I originally tried to draw two different wings and put a tween between them. Unfortunately it didn’t work, and I was forced to do it differently. Instead of drawing separate wings, I used two versions of the same wing, though one had been stretched. I added another wing in between the first and last to make sure it stayed on the right path. In the end, it looked pretty good. I used frame by frame animation to create the sparks that come off the sword as he sharpens it. One of the most important things about idle animations is how they add depth to the character and help to illustrate their personality. Turkey himself is a fairly complex character. He is eccentric, wealthy, highly intelligent, and rather odd to the outward viewer, but, to himself, and to any associates, perfectly logical. I think I did a good job reflecting this in my animation. As he is himself, the animation can seem a little strange at first- it’s a turkey casually sharpening his sword. Still, his movements are crisp and casual- not at all wild or crazy. This shows how he knows himself to be perfectly normal. In the end, I enjoyed this project. I think I learned a lot about the process that goes into showing the personality of a character through their movements.
In this past week, we have started working with Premiere. This marks the third motion-based program we have used, with the other two being After Effects and Animate. All three have different purposes, and therefore many differences.
After Effects is what it sounds like- a program mainly for adding effects after filming. We used it to create motion graphics. It is fairly similar to Premiere in layout. One example of a shared feature is the stopwatch they both have to control timing. After Effects also shares some features with Animate. Both use keyframes and easing. Premiere is a program made for editing- not necessarily effects. Therefore it does not have as many tools or effects as Animate and After Effects. In fact, it features the smallest toolbar of any program we’ve used this year. (At least as far as I can remember) I haven’t had much time to learn about it, but from what I have done I have found it to be, as I said before, reasonably similar to After Effects. Adobe Animate differed greatly from the two programs I have mentioned. While Adobe After Effects and Premiere looked similar, Animate looked very different. The layout was more reminiscent of Illustrator, which reflects one of the main differences between the programs. In Animate, you illustrate pretty much everything yourself. All you make has to be from scratch, which is not necessarily the case for After Effects or Premiere. There are hardly any things all three programs have in common. The only that comes to mind is the timeline. It’s interesting how much three motion-based programs all made by Adobe can differ.
Though I’m a bit behind on my final project, we are supposed to have finished animation now. Animation has been a very interesting unit. At times it has been frustrating (see my previous post for more information on that) and tedious. Still, I have enjoyed it. I always liked the finished product, and I mostly felt like all the hard work was worth it.
The first animation we did was the ball animation. In it, a ball simply bounced on the ground. Still, it took forever, as we animated it traditionally. What I mean by that is every frame was done individually. This process was extremely tedious, and took a long time. Still, I was very happy with the end result. I didn’t mind that my attempt at squash and stretch ended up making a ball that looked like jelly. The hard work I put into it made the result much more enjoyable than it would have been if it was easy to make. The second animation we did was a motion graphic. I enjoyed learning how to make motion graphics, but didn’t really put as much effort into it. It took no time compared to the ball animation. When I finished it, I didn’t feel as satisfied. This wasn’t only because it didn’t look particularly good, but it was also because I hadn’t put the same amount of time and effort as I did for the ball animation. The third animation was the infamous monster animation. I already addressed my frustrations with this in my last post. The animation was made in Adobe Animate. As I said before, I found the program to be very frustrating. There were a lot of ways in which I could make mistakes. It took a long time to finish, but when I did, I was pretty satisfied with the result. Though I’m not sure if I will pursue animation much further than I already have, I have learned a lot from it. One of the most important things I’ve learned is patience. I think that, after animation, I will appreciate projects that take less time more. In the end, I’m happy we spent this time working with animation.
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AuthorI'm interested in film and animation. 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.
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