Christian's Strange and Nonsensical Thought Process

 This week we were tasked with creating a short film piece under the theme "Strangers in the Park" with visually appealing shot composition and visual consistency. For this we were placed into groups for which the film crew roles would be split up within. For me I grouped up with Quevin, Kavinayaa, Joe and Thomas, and we immediately started with pre-production. I was assigned to be the camera operator, Kavinayaa was originally on sound, but later swapped to directing the project, Quevin stayed as our main sound operator, and Joe and Thomas were assigned to be the actors in our project. While I originally storyboarded a plot revolving around a strange otherworldly entity, we were encouraged by our lecturer Steve not to create a, as he put it "hallway chaser" piece, and so my concept was scrapped. After some brainstorming amongst the group, we eventually decided on the plot of two students meeting each other in a park, one being outspoken and friendly with the other b...

 Today in our lesson we experimented with more animation in Adobe Photoshop 2023. Our task today was to create a rotoscope style animation of someone walking, and turn it into a looping GIF file. Rotoscoping is the process of taking real footage of a person, animal or other real world object and tracing over it to create a fluid, realistic animation of something. The footage we traced over for our task today was stock footage of a man walking listening to music, which can be seen below.  For my animation I chose to set the framerate to 12 frames per second, in order to make the task of rotoscoping the footage easier while still maintaining the most important parts of the walk cycle to keep it fluid. The process of rotoscoping the footage took about an hour, eventually being made up of 13 total frames for my animation to be complete. Below is a screenshot of the workspace I used while animating my rotoscope in Photoshop. We were also told to have our rotoscope on a dark backgro...

 Today in Photoshop continuing onward from our bouncing ball project, we moved onto more complicated animation, namely being the animating of a simple walk cycle. To do this we used a template from AngryAnimator.com as a base for our initial animation. Below is shown the template we used for our initial animation. To animate our person taking each step we first separated each part of their body into their own layer, the head, the torso, and front and back arms and legs. This was done to make animating far easier and to prevent unwanted squash when warping the limbs, additionally converting each layer into a smart object for easier animating . In order to make the arms and legs move we utilised Photoshop's puppet warp tool in order to establish joints on the arms and legs to manipulate and animate. One again using Photoshop's timeline feature we created a 25 frames per second animation of the walk cycle. After that was complete we then created a background for our person to walk...

In today's session we experimented with animating a basic animation of a ball bouncing using Adobe Photoshop 2023. This was meant to server as a basic introduction to animation by learning the basics of squash and stretch, tweening, in-between frames and other aspects of animation. To animate the ball we utilised a template provided by the AngryAnimator.com website, which provided the guide for how to animate the ball. The first step was to use the ellipse tool in Photoshop to create a perfect circle and place it over the initial frame of the animation. To actually animate within the programme we made use of the Timeline tool included with Adobe Photoshop, which for all my years of using it I hadn't discovered until now. We chose to animate at 10 frames per second to make the work today a little easier, and kept our workspace relatively small, at only 12 by 6 centimetres. When animating the bouncing of the ball we made sure to have the circle set as a Smart Object to keep it...

  FIRST CONCEPT My initial collage concept was based around the idea of what it means to be human, more specifically what makes us individuals. The main focus of the collage is that of a wooden manikin, these are mainly used for references in artwork, a form of imitated humanity that we use to depict ourselves. It's multiple arms is inspired by the depiction of several Hindu gods, as many religions believe that we as humans are related to God or the gods by being made by them and/or in their image. The head is that of a polystyrene manikin head with several parts of real human anatomy, as a means of somewhat showing how we tend to place human characteristics to otherwise inhuman things. The legs and central arms of the manikin are also covered by real human arms and legs, edited in a way to appear like paper cut-outs stuck onto the image. These are meant to show the progress we have made in the attempt to replicate ourselves, mainly through making things such as more human-like rob...

 During today's session we were tasked with utilising the programme Adobe Audition to create a pattern-like sound montage using many different sound samples of television recordings provided to us by our lecturer Steve. Previously we had experimented with sound patterns in Adobe Premiere Pro using audio clips we recorded both around the university campus and from the previous weekend outside of the uni. For me this mainly consisted of sounds such as footsteps, wind sounds, the sounds of a train and some construction noises I recorded while out in London. Today however we were instead using the aforementioned Adobe Audition, a solely sound design based programme, using sound samples from television shows and advertisements Steve recorded and provided to us. Below is a screenshot of the multi-track view of my attempt at creating a pattern-like sound composition. My main idea for the pattern was mainly to use certain samples to create a melodic base for the rest of the composition to ...