Self-Reflection on Project

I was really excited to start working on this project and combine a bunch of different mediums into one format (painting, music, and video). I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. Had I had more time, I would have tried to capture more frames and perfect the stability of the frames as well as work on the timing a little more of the change in frames and with the music. Overall, I'm really glad I chose to do the stop motion rather than regular video; I felt more passionate about being in control of the little details. I'm pretty happy with the product, and actually want to try to perfect it more over the summer and really clean it up with more time.

I decided to speed up my images to make it a little smoother, which threw off my audio cuts, but I'm working on refinishing them right now. The images look a lot smoother, and by speeding up the majority of them, the ones that I kept with a longer duration are exaggerated more which I wanted, like when the two subjects are reaching out their hands, or when the apartment buildings are introduced in the beginning and then removed at the end. So far I'm pretty happy with the video, I just want to do one final color correction and then I can export it as a quicktime.

I was able to finalize some edits on my video today in class and export it into a quicktime video so I could work on color correction. So far so good, I'm just trying to think of any last things I want to add to really finalize it and make it a strong piece. It's simple, but I really like it and am proud of the work I put into it. I'm going to show a few friends and get some feedback and opinions on anything I can do to strengthen my video before my final cut and presentation.

Song in video

This is the song I'll be using in my video.
Two Birds on a Wire - Regina Spektor

Story Board

 

Here's my drawn out story board. When I made this I wasn't sure about music cuts, so I didn't include that in the descriptions, but after doing some music editing in class yesterday I have a better idea of how everything is alligned.

I've been working slowly but surely on my final video stop motion project. It's based off of a song by Regina Spektor entitled "Two Birds on a Wire." The concept is two people speaking to each other on can phones across from apartment buildings, and how there's missed connections. I used watercolors and painted all the set pieces (apartment buildings, people, can phones, etc.) and just used a blue towel as the backdrop. I took about 180 photographs with a Canon SLR and set them up in my dorm lounge, shifting the pieces a little each time to get the animated, stop motion effect. Today I resized all my photos so I can add them into final cut, as well as added the song I'm using to my flashdrive so I can plug that in tomorrow. My story board is finished, I will probably scan that and post it here sometime at the end of this week/early next week. Here are some of my favorite shots so far from my photos:

Portfolio Piece #6 - Composite photo

This is an image from the NYC street of the art supplies storefront. I did a color correction to darken the image and add a little more contrast, as well as to bring out the lights on the store front. I then replaced the original lamp post with a paint brush from a photo I had taken of a box of paint brushes. The photo on top is the original.

Portfolio Piece #5 - Painting over photograph

This photo I took in an art supplies store in NYC. The first image is the original photo that I took. In my photoshop edit I edited out the bag in the bottom left corner and added a label to the paint bottle there. I tried to do a fade from black and white to vibrant color from top to bottom. And the space that was between the bottles on one of the top shelves, I tried to fill by exaggerating the glare I got from my flash, adding a white shape and blending it out.

Portfolio Piece # 4 - Color Correction & Filters

This was an image I took a couple of weeks ago on campus, and I worked on some color correction and filters. The sky and the grass were posterized after I did a color correction on the entire image, making the sign more vibrant as well as bringing out the red in the bushes.

Portfolio Piece #3 - Color Correction

With this color correction I tried to make the colors more vivid as well as increase the contrast to bring out the shadows. I felt like there was a lot of blue and green in the original which I tried to adjust and bring in a little more red.

Portfolio Piece #2 - Composite Piece

In this image I took a scan of an instant photograph that I had taken, and incorporated one of my abstract photos of the apple cut open. I used a filter on the apples which is probably my favorite part of the piece. The less opaque image laid on top of the scanned image is the underside of an umbrella, taken also from my abstract photos, and I mostly chose that for the pattern.

Porfolio Piece #1 - 60 minute painting

This was from the first assignment, the 60 minute photoshop painting. I chose this for my portfolio because I liked the use of smudging to add dimension, as well as the burning and dodging used on the two moons. Seeing as this was one of our first pieces it is not my best but I still feel like this was one of my favorites to complete thus far.

Color Correction 3

Original

Color Correction



This color correction I struggled with the most. I liked the aged look after I made some changes to the hues and brightness/contrast, but I was hoping to get a little more color and distinction in the leaves.

Color Correction 2

Original

Color Correction



I played with contrast to enhance the red in the bricks and take out some of the green hue in the original.

Color Correction 1

Original

Color Correction



It's a little hard to tell in the JPEG format, but I lightened the image in order to enhance the colors of the photo, particularly the red in the fire hydrant.

Composition photo 3

Photo of Hollman and Forcina, used an image from the bricks outside of centenial with handprints in place of the bricks on Hollman and then used a less opaque image of the handprints on Forcina, the first panel by the lion's head.

Composition photo 2

Roommate with cards. Duplicated the image and skewed it to spray them out. Used another image of here with cards as a less opaque backround.

Composition photo 1

The back of my suitemate in front of my desk. Manipulated the image on the computer with a photograph I took of a butterfly garland in my room. Added the butterflies at top and bottom with neon filters for different focal points.

composite photoshop piece 2

Combination of a picture of a spectra photograph of my brother in an apple farm, inside cuts of an apple with a watercolor filter and some burning around the edges, and the image from the inside of the umbrella overlayed with reduced opacity.

Composite photoshop piece

Blood oranges with a neon glow filter and a webcam photo of my brother.

absract photo 3

The underside of an umbrella. I really liked the shadow in the lower right hand corner and the metalwork pattern of the skeleton of the umbrella.

abstract photo 2

Front view of the faucet in my dorm bathroom. A little more blurred than I wanted but I couldn't get the settings on my digital camera to work out with the reflection on the faucet.

abstract photo 1

 Half of a blood raspberry orange, taken on my desk. I really liked the color, especially since the deep red is unexpected in an orange.

1 Hour Photoshop Painting

This is my 60 minute photoshop painting from after the first week of lab. I utilized the smudge tool, as well as the dodge and burn tools to create the comparison between the moon in a lighter sky to the moon in a night sky. I also used the eraser on the moon in the ligher sky to simulate the transparent nature of the moon in the sky during the day.

About Me

I'm Emily, and this is my first experience in the Interactive Multimedia department. Since I'm an English major, a lot of people ask "What sparked your interest?" I hope to become a librarian. Some people assume that "librarian" means a grey-haired woman shushing kids in a room filled with dusty old books. In our current climate, however, the library has become a great resource for technology and all sorts of media, and I hope to use this class and other classes in the IMM concentration to introduce me to that world. Not only that, but I've always been largely interested in exploring my creative side, and to learn how to do that digitally would be a great experience. I currently work on campus in the Instructional Technology department, so I have had to familiarize myself with some of the very basics in photoshop and IMovie but I hope to become more comfortable with this technology in this class. Besides that, some of my interests include music, art, soccer, reading (of course), and really just making anything creative with my own hands.