FMX210 Digital Media Blog

    Our final assignment was to create a portfolio with all our assignments throughout the semester. In keeping with the programming theme I made the text look like you were using the terminal to navigate a file system. In reflection, learning the Adobe Suite has a lot of similarities to programming. It reinforced for me that one of the most invaluable skills to have is knowing how to learn. 

  The last thing we had to conquer in Photoshop was creating an animation. I was instructed to create a 30 second animation at 10fps using rotoscoping techniques. As an avid baseball card collector I thought, what would be cooler than an animated baseball card? Well, I didn't know what I was in for because this project had me working almost all day everyday for a week and a half to complete.  Once I got done rotoscoping the animated card images, my deadline was just a few days away and I wasn't sure how I was going to have time to go through 400+ photoshop layers and manually mask my hand and add the images in. Enter After Effects. With limited After Effects experience taught myself how to use the motion tracking and rotoscoping features to get the effect I wanted. While the learning curve probably didn't save me much time, I'm glad I was able to figure it out. Because of my inexperience with After Effects I still had around 100 layers to manually adjust in Photoshop, b

      For the last assignment before our final project we were to take a scene from our favorite movie or tv show and insert ourselves into it. I tried to challenge myself by replacing a character in the scene instead of simply placing myself into it.  The above image has me replacing Marty McFly in a scene from my favorite movie, Back To The Future. It was extremely challenging to not only match the position of Marty, but to get the right lighting and look to the picture of myself. I went through a lot of trial and error to get the film grain and coloring right. While it may be a little dark for printing, I think ultimately this assignment turned out very well. 

  As a person who does something very technical for a living, this class really helped me to unlock my creativity. Later on in the semester I made a point to try and approach some of the more technical assignments in a creative way as a challenge to myself. This is an example of where I feel it paid off.  For this assignment I was to take six pictures of myself in the same space, and stitch them together to form one image. Instead of just taking pictures of me sitting in the same space, I chose to try and tell a story. One version of myself passed out and we can see the ensuing reactions of the various versions of myself. 

For the autoscopy assignment we were given free reign to modify an image of ourselves in Photoshop. I took this as an opportunity to explore layer blending. I tried to represent the feeling of being locked in and focused when coding. For submission, we were to export four different versions as gifs, which is what you see below. However, my favorite ended up being the above image, which I submitted as an alternate to the four required.   

For this assignment I was instructed to convert a photo of myself from color to black and white, then after picking three color palettes we were to mask parts of the images and apply color. This was our introduction to masking in Photoshop, which became an integral part of my workflow the rest of the semester.  Looking back I would have added color to my beard. I researched techniques to artificially fill it in to make it easier to select but did not get a suitable result by the time the assignment was due. 

  Above: Using Adobe Illustrator we were to create a poster with a message. There's billions of planets in our universe, do you believe life is out there? Below: Incomplete alternate version, while I do like the "light" better here, I felt as if it implied a religious connotation that I was not going for.