Drawing It Out In early September, we started with our walk cycle project. Our first task for it was to draw out body parts for a particular character and then outline them in Sharpie (I made a sexy astronaut :>). Afterwards, we had to scan in the sheet of paper to single out the body parts and give them color if we wanted to. It's Alive! When we had our character(s) and background ready, we then uploaded the files into After Effects where we had the character move across the screen. Although we were supposed to use the puppet tool to make the movements more realistic, I couldn't figure it out, so I just made my astronaut march instead (special guest star: extraterrestrial).
Sorry in Advance I will be uploading a few projects within the next day or so that I meant to put on here a month or two ago, but I've just been really busy and haven't gotten around to it. This is one of them! Bouncing Ball Our first project was to create a bouncing ball, even though we had already done that as freshmen. It was fairly simple, but we used a different technique that we did last year. This time, we used After Effects instead of doing it manually in Photoshop.
Inchworm Using basically the same scenery we used in the bouncing ball animation, we had to create an inchworm, and, using After Effects again, have it inch its way along the screen. We could make the worm look like anything we want, so I made mine look like Wormy from Spongebob :>. (Sorry this is pretty bad) - Brenna (っ• ◡•)っ
What Did I Learn...? All in all, I'm pretty sure I learned more from these tutorials than I think. There are still many concepts, options, etc. that I don't have any clue how to use. HOWEVER, here is a list of some that I do know how to use because of the tutorials :> :
Healing brush
Patch tool
Layer masks
Inverting selections
Hue/Saturation
Cropping canvases
Probably more
Most Important Tools (For Me)
Three key tools out of all those up there ↑ would definitely be layer masks, the patch tool, and the healing brush. To me, these are the most important tools because not only are they pretty easy to use, but they can help your picture look all dolled up and fancy, like cleaning up the kid's face in the black and white picture. The patch feature can help replace a certain area with another so it will blend in more with the background (if that makes sense), the healing brush can make your face look less greasy, etc., and the layer masks can just make your picture look super neat like in the picture below ↓ with the tree coming out of the guy's neck. It's really not as hard as it sounds!
Favoritism There definitely are so many Photoshop tools that I really value, but my favorite has to be the layer mask. It was tough to learn, especially with a project as big as the one with the girl in black, but as soon as I got used to using it, it was a really interesting tool. When I use it in future projects, it will certainly be helpful if I need to get a picture of someone or something and a fancy background to go with it. I can't really explain it all that well to be honest. Strengths/Weaknesses I honestly think that I have more weaknesses than strengths when it comes to this, but I can't tell you what they all are. I'm a slow worker, especially with programs like Photoshop. However, I think this is sort of a good thing because it shows that I pay a lot of attention to and care about what I'm doing. Another one of my strengths is that if I didn't understand how to do something that was done in the video (more specifically, the videos about the girl in black haha), I looked it up online instead of complaining about it. I also kind of had trouble figuring out the Hue/Saturation layer after being finished with the girl in black, but after messing around a little bit, I figured it out. Other than that, nothing specific (i.e. certain tools, etc.) really comes to mind. Pick Something Different! I'm assuming that with the question, "What would you do different? Why?" you are asking about the final challenge to just do whatever with the pictures given to us. Well, sort of. I kind of wish I cropped the picture a little bit on the left so that the man would be more in the center. There isn't much else I would change about it.
Stay the Same! The roots! I would definitely keep the roots. Before actually making them come out of the man's neck, I thought it would really neat, but not so much afterward. I was in a rush to finish it, and I wish I made the neck and the tree blend in better with each other. Although, now that I think about it, it looks pretty cool and I don't think anybody else did it. Et Cetera As much as I didn't like doing this project, I sincerely think it helped me learn the Photoshop skills I've wanted for years. - Brenna (っ• ◡•)っ
BabyVac by Team 1 Nearing the end of the school year, finals are bound to come up. For e-Comm, our final was to present a made up product with a pre-assembled team. Our product was the BabyVac (the Baby Mop was already taken), which is basically a portable vacuum attached to a onesie. When the baby crawls around, it cleans your floors (amazing am I right????). Totally original.
Team Work Overall, our group effort was alright; it wasn't good, but it wasn't bad. Distractions would come about every so often, but for the most part, we worked hard to make our presentation funny and well-designed. Next Time... I think that if I were to be put in a group like this again, I hope that I would try to get people more on track rather than just sitting there and watching a couple people in my group slack off. I don't want to have to work as much to get other people's parts done tbh!! Improvements Becca and I spent a lot of time working on the commercial, so I think I know a lot more about Final Cut than I did before (merging clips, etc.). I now also sort of know how to make a sphere in SketchUp, but since it didn't end up in the final animation, that doesn't really matter.
Production Making this really didn't take all that long, somewhere around an hour I think. Anyways, making this was pretty easy, but I have one thing I would like to complain about. The oNE THIng I wanted to do as leader was make the gunshot a fart noise but NOOOOOOO. That didn't happen. :'> How Did It Turn Out? The video's pretty ok actually (other than the fact there wasn't a fart noise in it). We all agreed that the main music that should be played should be kazoo music, because it's really funny of course. Other than that, you can watch the video and see for yourself.
Video Instead of just taking pictures of what a shot was supposed to look like, we had to make a 30 second video (with a story-line) that includes all 6 camera shots, which include:
Dreamweaver Near the end of second semester, my class and I worked with a somewhat complicated application (all the button things were too hard to find) called Dreamweaver. This software made it so that you could create your own website!! Isn't that neat!! \ (•◡•) / Making My Website The whole point of this was to make an "about me" page, so I copied and pasted my elevator pitch, a swaggin' picture of my good looking face, and my mini bio. To make it look not-boring, I played around with the background colors to make it have a fun atmosphere even though there isn't that much to talk about. To make the text fit in with the colors, I made changed the font to make it look softer and made my descriptions pink. Afterwards, I added a project page where I could put my favorite projects from each section of e-Comm and made the colors the same as the home page.
ごめん！ I'm not going to apologize for acting like a huge weab when I did that, but I'm sorry for not finishing this before school ended!! I meant to do it over break but I kept forgetting to. I swear. - Brenna (っ• ◡•)っ
