Christian's Strange and Nonsensical Thought Process

 For the third and final section of our tea making film assignment, we were tasked with editing together the collection of sequences and shots we had accumulated over the course of our shooting sessions into a video exactly 90 seconds long. While the footage we gathered during all 3 shots was admittedly not the greatest material we had to work with, it was at the very least still usable for creating a passable end result. To edit the video together we used Adobe Premiere Pro 2024, one of the video editing programmes installed on the university computers, each of us being tasked with editing together out own versions of the short film. After porting over the video files from the video camera's SD card onto the computers, I went through the process of singling out the shots from our second and third shoot sessions, as our first shoot's footage was unusable and therefor non-applicable to the others without large inconsistencies.  Once I singled out what I believed to be the best ...

 Continuing onward from the first session of the Cup of Tea assignment, Kavinayaa, Quevin and I began the process of filming out 90 second film, a process which took us about a day to get right. We were lucky enough to be lent the equipment that would be needed for the filming, mainly a camera to film with, a tripod, a kettle for boiling water to make the tea, and a microphone with a windscreen to record close-up audio of the tea being made. We all decided it would be best to work together for each shot, and had a conversation about how each of our storyboards would need to be acted out. During our first attempt at filming the piece, we admittedly made several mistakes that rendered the footage unusable for the assignment. The camera's aperture was far to high, causing the background to be far too bright and blend into the props. It was also shot without any focus on the person pouring the tea, which goes against what we were told to establish based on the shots seen in Gattica. As...

For our first major filming assignment of the course, we were tasked with filming a 90 second film about the making of a cup of tea. For how the shots were composed, we were encouraged to take inspiration from a film we had watched previously named Gattica. Being split into groups, I partnered with Kavinayaa and Quevin to help with the acting, audio recording and filming of the short film. My initial ideas were of minimalistic shots of the process of making the tea, with no dialogue and as much focus on the tea as possible, thought this decision was later changed to include more focus on the person making the tea. The audio design would be solely focused on the sounds of making tea, partially inspired by the ASMR video genre popular on social media. As a storyboard I wrote down the ideas for how the shots would be laid out in order, mainly the action that would be filmed instead of visual depictions of events due to us not yet knowing the exact location we would be filming in. We initi...

In today's session we worked to combine several images that we were given together in order to create the image of a dancer inside a cave with a wooden floor and bats flying in the background. To do this I used Adobe Photoshop 2023 and all the tools it provided. Below are all the images I was given to combine, as well as the final product. Firstly I removed the break-dancer from the city background by using the object selection tool to remove the background. In places parts of the dancer were semi-transparent or still had parts of the background attached, so I manually removed these parts using the eraser and polygonal lasso tool. Once I had the dancer cut out I created a separate canvas to work on removing the dance floor. To do this I selected the floor using the Pen tool, rounding the edges slightly before selecting the floor as a mask to take out the background. I also added a slight feather to the mask for easier blending. The cave required the least effort, only needing the m...

  Chosen Website:  eboy.com  https://www.eboy.com/ © 2023,  eBoy Shop   Ecommerce Software by Shopify 1) Whose website is it and what sort of creative work is it presenting? The website is for the German graphic design company "eBoy",  with the website's homepage presenting many prints and puzzle activities of their designs and work, mainly pixelated designs of characters, company mascot and landscapes of cities. 2) How would you describe the overall aesthetic / mood / tone of the website? The website has a very retro aesthetic in general, due to the pixelated artwork commonly displayed partnered with the blocky layout of the page and company logo. It also appears very minimalist due to the lack of complex features and due to the orderly, neat layout of ever page. 3) What colour scheme does it have? The website is mostly a flat white background of each page, but most of their displayed works heavily feature blue, green and red. These colours were likely cho...

 Today in class we learned the basics of how to edit a webpage using Adobe Dreamweaver, as knowing a decent amount of coding is considered a necessity in the digital media world. Shown below is the original webpage we were given, as well as my edited version created after today's session.   Many values in the webpage's code were replaced with "xx" placeholders, and it was our task to replace them with actual values. For example the buttons reading "Part 1", "Part 2" and "Part 3" all had a width value of "xx%" which i changed to 25 %, increasing their width on the webpage. As for the images in the header and background, these images were provided to us in the folder containing the original webpage template we worked off of, so it was only a matter of replacing the "xx" image files with the correct pictures. For the copyright info,  I assumed that due to the nature of our task being "Down the Rabbit Hole" we we...

  1 - Definitions Communication theory and cybernetics Feedback: "...Sensory members which are actuated by motor members and perform the function of tell-tales or monitors that is, of elements which indicate a performance." Norbert   Wiener (1955) The Human use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society Noise: "...A  dysfunctional factor: any interference with the message travelling along the channel (such as 'static' on the telephone or radio) which may lead to the signal received being different from that sent." - Chandler, D. (1994) ‘The Transmission Model of Communication’ Redundancy:  “The fraction of the structure of [a] message which is determined … by the accepted statistical rules governing the use of the symbols in question.” R.D.Corimer (2016) Redundancy and Slashes in Bateson Cybernetics Entropy: The measure of the probability of a limited number of questions with an ever expanding set of probably answers among a world or set of worlds that natural...

 Today's session of Adobe Illustrate was spend further familiarising ourselves with the programme and how to compose visually appealing album covers, both requiring to have the title "Future Alignments". Both in Uni and at home I conceived two different album covers that I spend around an hour and a half on each. The two album covers are seen below. The inspiration for the first album cover I made was the album cover for the Rolling Stones "Tattoo You" album, which heavily used black and red as its main colours. The album cover is shown below. The Rolling Stones "Tattoo You", Rolling Stones & The Glimmer twins, art by Craig Braun I chose the imagery of a crying man holding an apple, of which is seen staring back at the man. I chose this due to the connotation of the taking of the apple from the biblical story of Genesis, in which an apple is the thing that dictates the future of how humanity would live.  The inspiration for the second album cover I...

 In today's session we practiced using Adobe Photoshop's features of Clone Stamping and image manipulation to remove a man from a picture of a street. This exercise took approximately four and a half hours in total. Additionally, we were given the task of adding text to the blank road sign in the right of the image with our own street name, whilst keeping the plant covering the sign overlapping the text. Seen below is the original image of the man and the street we were given to work with, as well as my end product after removing the man and editing in text onto the sign.   First I set the image as a layer, changing it from a background. Then I began to remove the man by selecting him with the object selection tool and removing him, as well as the bag he was holding. To fill in the space he left I mainly used the clone stamp tool to replace the bricks of the wall and pavement. One of our tasks way having the wall stay the exact same as it is in real life, therefor I used other...

 Today on Adobe Illustrator I practiced getting familiar with the tools the programme offers so that I can use them for future digital media artefacts. I was already familiar with many of the assets the programme provided, being an avid user of Adobe Photoshop for many years now, so I was able to luckily grasp the basics fairly quickly. I used a reference of an espresso machine to trace as an image, and a principles of design I additionally familiarised myself with today in order to attempt to create a poster of sorts. Bellow is the drawing I created using Adobe Illustrator's pen, pathfinder and angle point tools, as well as the original image I used as reference. I chose to leave little space within the image to try and keep the silhouette of the espresso machine the most prominent aspect of the image, additionally since most of my time was spent trying to keep the design of the espresso machine as close to the original image as possible without taking too long. The espresso machi...

  Using 4 Design Principles The use of the 4 design principles of Alignment (& proxy), Space, Colour Choices and Hierarchy are integral parts of visual design when it comes to things such as posters for movies and television series. Although there are many more principles to consider when creating a piece of media, these four are some of the most important to consider when composing your composition.                                                                                                                     Shin Godzilla (2016), Funimation Film & Toho Co. A poster that I like that displays these four principles extremely well is one of the posters used to advertise the movie "Shin G...

Original Image created by Anja W. Credit to Getty Images/iStockPhoto, Edited with PhotoMosh   Introduction "Who are you?" Hello! My name is Christian, I'm a student at The Hertfordshire University Creative School of Arts. I like drawing, writing stories, fashion, and have had an interest in video games and animation since a young age. My style of writing these blogs is going to be fairly to the point, so try not to put your hopes too high for any extreme levels of insight and analysis on any of my work. "Why are you taking this course?" My interest in Digital Media Design is mainly related to how it can help me both enhance my own work in ways I wouldn't have the skills for otherwise, and to help me widen my options for work in the ever-growing demand for digital media jobs. I'm also very interested in the ways that this course can help me to advance my ability to bring my stories into reality, something I have been doing since my early teens. I also pre...