Project 2

Oct 12 2022

Project 2

Collages

When I first began looking for inspiration for the three collages, I immediately thought about relating this project to my first project. Therefore, I created this collage which features Montana’s mountains as well as one of the most common animals in the state, the elk.

Montana mountains with elk grazing overlay.

This design was interesting to me, but I was unsure of how to make it unique and where I could add my own influence into the piece. Because of this, I decided to create the second collage with more of a personal influence. I chose to make it of Truist Park and the Atlanta skyline to keep it closer to my identity.

Truist park with atlanta skyline overlayed.

After spending a good bit of time and energy creating this collage, I was so invested in it that I just decided that I was going to build off of it for my flat design and gif. This led to me using a similar technique from my first attempt on something completely random that came to my mind, the Rock.

I definitely could have spent more time manipulating this to be more interesting and complex, but as stated before I just decided to move along with my second design.

Flat Design

When I started thinking of ideas for how I could add my own influence into the design, I thought that integrating the skyline more into the ballpark would be a good place to start. From there, I began flat designing the field, which then led to me flat designing the skyline as well. I also took inspiration from a classmate for the background and added newspaper headlines from each year the Braves won the World Series.

Final GIF

After finishing the flat design of the skyline, I decided to alter the colors of the city in different frames for the gif. Each frame also brings the newspaper articles from the background into focus. I used the background clippings to choose the colors within the skyline so the colors match whichever article is in focus, with the black and white article corresponding to the default colors.

Sources:

Atlanta Journal Constitution. 2020. “1995 Braves: About the Series.” Atlanta Journal Constitution. Atlanta Journal Constitution. January 21, 2020. https://www.ajc.com/sports/baseball/1995-braves-about-the-series/rmZl3GUQQ6cTKkOL2P4m6M/.

Image of the newspaper article about the 1995 World Series.

A Braves Celebration Section for AJC. 2021. Atlanta Journal Constitution. Atlanta Journal Constitution. https://www.ajc.com/sports/how-to-find-the-ajc-sections-and-other-collectibles-from-the-braves-season/Q5JFOH4ZNFEG5J7AIUEJ5ICK2M/.

Image of the newspaper article about the 2021 World Series.

“Draw and Edit Shapes.” 2022. Draw Shapes with the Shape Tools in Photoshop. Adobe. July 1, 2022. https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/drawing-shapes.html.

Adobe tutorial that helped give me an overview of the techniques for drawing shapes.

Jerome, David. 2021. “Del Crandall, Fullerton’s Favorite Son during Baseball’s Golden Era.” Orange County Register. Orange County Register. May 11, 2021. https://www.ocregister.com/2021/05/10/del-crandall-fullertons-favorite-son-during-baseballs-golden-era/.

Image of the newspaper article about the 1957 World Series.

Kost, Julieanne. 2020. “Photoshop CC 2021 Essentials.” LinkedIn. October 20, 2020. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/photoshop-2021-essential-training-the-basics/welcome-to-the-photoshop-essential-training-series?u=57694177.

This conglomeration of tutorials helped me with various tools in Photoshop.

“Paul Pfeiffer.” n.d. Art21. Accessed October 12, 2022. https://art21.org/artist/paul-pfeiffer/.

Paul Pfeiffer’s art gallery that helped give me the idea to put the skyline where the flag originally was.

**All other images from public domain, no authors or source information was available

Sep 27 2022

Project 5

In My Room – Edward Shores

For my final animation, I chose to do a sort of autobiography by focusing on my desk setup in my apartment. Throughout the semester, I spent a healthy amount of time sitting at this desk as I would watch sports, play video games, and do most of my schoolwork in that chair. I chose to include the sports and video games into the project, but decided to omit any schoolwork in favor of showcasing the photo cubes that I saw every time I sat down.

In contrast to Liz Blazer’s advice from her piece on sound that we read as a class earlier in the semester, I made the mistake of coming up with an idea prior to finding what audio I wanted to use. I had also already decided on a title, which I ended up keeping the same. If I had not come up with my specific title, I never would have found the sound that, in my opinion, fits perfectly with what I had in mind, “In My Room by The Beach Boys.” Once I added the sound to the project and marked the important points within the audio, I then began the process of animating the project.

At first, I struggled finding inspiration past my base idea, but Professor Dietrick helped me by showing me some of Yasujirō Ozu’s work with frames within frames. Because my desk consists of two screens and two photos, this suggestion gave me a direction that I knew I could follow within my animation. I looked up some YouTube tutorials about how to effectively animate a zoom effect in order to use each different frame to its maximum potential. To begin, the monitor was pretty simple, as the screen was so big relative to my source photograph that I barely had to worry about anything relative to distortion while zooming. For my laptop and the photos, I ran into some issues with the zooming as the orientations of each of these items were not directly parallel to my desk. This caused some distortion, so I had to use some of the information I learned in my Computer Graphics class about three dimensional views relative to 2 dimensional camera space in order to make each frame look as 1:1 with its actual size as I could.

Delwama, dir. 2022. Yasujirō Ozu: A Frame Within a Frame. YouTube. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVA83KAbkwA&t=2s&ab_channel=delwama

This video contains a conglomeration of various clips from some of Ozu’s movies in which he uses the framing strategy I ended up employing throughout my project.

Crescent Tech, dir 2017. Camera Zoom in After Effect. YouTube. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpi1j3qDGYk&ab_channel=CrescentTech

This is a relatively easy-to-follow tutorial about how you can achieve a Camera Zoom Effect in After Effects. It is just a basic introduction, but I enjoyed how it left me room to explore for myself and find my way through the nuances of the effect.

Odisho, Justin, dir 2019. After Effects Simple Line Text Reveal Intro Animation Tutorial. YouTube. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XJt9uXwMwM&ab_channel=JustinOdisho

Justin Odisho led me through how to do the text effects I used for both the introduction and credit scene of my animation. He goes into enough detail about every aspect of After Effects that he used for this that I was able to manipulate it in more complex ways after watching his basic video. I decided what he did looked best, but this tutorial was very helpful in my understanding of matte, text, and just introductions in general

Sep 27 2022

Project 4

For this piece, I chose to use an instrumental version of one of my favorite songs, “Puffin on Zootiez” by one of my favorite artists, Future. While the subject matter and content of the original song itself may not be classroom appropriate, I felt as though the simple melodic tone of the beat itself would work perfectly for this project. I am not familiar with many instruments, but whichever instrument was used in the creation of the simple “dings” throughout this excerpt is, in my opinion, amazing. With the bass and snare in the background juxtaposing the melody, I immediately had the idea of only manipulating the background based on the amplitude of the sound.

As you can see in my wonderfully descriptive storyboard, I only had a hazy idea about what I wanted to do to bring this sound to life. Within this basic outline of my animation, I knew that I wanted to have a moving background to keep the viewers stimulated without making it too busy. I also knew that the main focal point of the piece would be two circles moving along to the melody as described earlier. While most of the elements I originally thought to add do appear in the animation, one of the main parts of my piece was not originally in my plans. When I first began creating the project, for some reason I decided that straying away from my storyboard would be a good place to start. Future Hendrix, a prominent rapper in today’s hip hop scene, is known for almost always wearing sunglasses. Therefore, this was the first manipulation I made to the storyboard. I found this image of the hip hop star,

and used it to create a composition in Illustrator of his trademark sunglasses. As soon as I had the object imported into After Effects, I knew that I wanted the shades to be an integral part of the animation so as to give credit to the creator of the song. In addition to this, I wanted to pull from Future’s purple aesthetic that he is known for. As early as storyboarding, I knew that cooler colors would be beneficial to my animation. Therefore, I looked at a few of his album covers, fan art, and performances for inspiration:

With the obvious emphasis he places on including purple into his looks and creative explorations, it felt only right to continue that into my work. I took the most inspiration from his DS2 album cover, as that is one of the first of his albums that I ever listened to. Without risking losing the purple tones, I was sure to incorporate the blue into the background of the animation and even structured it in the same color configuration as he did on the album cover.

For my first draft, I really focused on just trying to get everything I had on the storyboard into the animation. As mentioned previously, I did not restrict myself to my original plan, but even so I was still sure to use that plan as the backbone of my piece.

I used the “woop woop” sound (that’s how I described it in the storyboard, so I guess I’ll stick with it) as a way to bring the sunglasses into the scene. Aside from that, the animation was not very complex; I still had not grown entirely comfortable with Adobe’s interface. Despite its simplicity, I chose to keep most of the elements of my first draft within my final. The two elements I chose to add reflect my increasing confidence in my After Effects capabilities: the smoke and the second two sunglasses animations. The smoke effect is a personal addition, as I vividly remember the crazy smoke machines at the Future concert I went to, so I still associate that with him. Also, as I have been sure to reiterate, the sunglasses are one of the main aspects of Future’s style that I anted to include For both of these, I followed tutorials that not only showed me how to do this, but provided me with two expert After Effects animators who unintentionally showed me some tips and tricks to navigate the application. Using pre-comps made the organization of my timeline much easier. Also, while they refrained from explaining fully, both men used a bit of code in their videos. As a computer science major, this intrigued me, and led me to do some more research into the terminology and functions that they used. Some of the code, mainly maintaining consistent stroke width, seemed obsolete to me, so I refrained from using them in my final piece. Regardless, I will include links to both tutorials as well as the explanations of the code in my annotated bibliography below.

Code, Clear, dir. 2021. An Introduction to Programming in After Effects. YouTube. YouTube.

This is a 3 hour long tutorial about coding in After Effects. While it went out of the scope of my project and I’m sure many others’ I still found it interesting and helpful, though I have not watched it in its entirety.

Demafiles, Alan. 2020. “After Effects Video Tutorial.” LinkedIn. December 1, 2020.

Professor Dietrick supplied us with this LinkedIn tutorial collection which helped me understand the basics of After Effects.

Demi. n.d. Future Rapper. Pinterest. Pinterest. Accessed November 8, 2022.

Image of Future performing

“Future.” n.d. Rap Wiki. Accessed November 8, 2022.

Source image of Future’s sunglasses

Greene, Jayson. 2019. “Future Hndrxx Presents: The WIZRD.” Pitchfork. Pitchfork. January 24, 2019.

Image of Future’s project “The WIZRD”

Olufemii, dir. 2020. Echo Outline Effect | After Effects Tutorial. YouTube. YouTube.

I found this tutorial to be extremely easy to follow, and it taught me about a bunch of different stroke effects you can use in After Effects. This entire YouTube page is full of random helpful After Effects tutorials that I would highly suggest browsing if you’re stuck looking for some inspiration.

Tuts, Envato, dir. 2019. Create an Atmospheric Smoke Effect in Adobe After Effects. YouTube. YouTube.

Just like the account above, this YouTube page has a vast collection of After Effects tutorials for random effects you may want to use.

Sep 15 2022

Project 1

With joining the class the day of the sketches, I did not know to save the sketches I created, and ended up losing them. Therefore, I began with the first draft. While doing my first draft, I wanted to capture the vibrant colors as I remembered them, making sure to represent the intricacies of the mountains as well as the pond, fairway, green, and trees. At the very end of my work on this draft, I decided to add my floating head as a placeholder for future drafts, as I wanted to portray my current self looking back on the memory that I am representing in the scene.

Next came my final draft. My main goal of this draft was to finalize what was just a floating head in the previous draft. I referred back to previous students’ work in order to get some ideas for how to create a face shape, but ended up going my own way so as to stylize it in a unique manner. Another goal of mine was to make it look as though my current selves were coming out from the mountains. At Professor Dietrick’s suggestion, I adjusted the coloring of the mountains to make them cooler, and adjusted the color of my body to be much warmer in order to achieve a semblance of depth.

My biggest jump was between my final draft and my final piece, as I wanted to look closer at each aspect of the portrait in order to refine as much as I saw fit. Going back to my ideas from the previous image, I adjusted the coloring further, adding gradients in the grass, trees, green, and sky to make it seem even more three-dimensional. After this, I added a few more minor details such as the bunker I had forgotten about, more trees, and another version of my current self further back into the mountain range. Aside from the coloring, one of the biggest changes I made was adding hands giving a thumbs-up to my current self. In doing so, I wanted to visualize me in the now communicating to me in the past that I was proud, and that he should just enjoy his time on the course.

“Golf.” 2021. Spanish Peaks Mountain Club. November 11, 2021. https://spanishpeaks.com/golf/.

This is the golf course’s website. I used it for references to the landscape of the mountains.

Harmer, Tony. 2020. “Illustrator 2021 Essential Training.” LinkedIn. October 23, 2020. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/illustrator-2021-essential-training/welcome-to-adobe-illustrator-2021-essential-training?u=57694177

I used this page to watch tutorials about how to use Illustrator.

Winnie, Doug. 2016. “Image Compression and File Formats.” LinkedIn. July 14, 2016. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/computer-science-principles-digital-information/image-compression-and-file-formats?u=57694177.

At the end of the project, this retaught me what to look for while exporting the Illustrator files to PNG format.

“Gradients.” n.d. Create Gradients in Illustrator. Accessed September 26, 2022. https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/gradients.html.

This site, from the Adobe Help page, taught me just about everything I needed to know about mastering gradients.

Rise, Mark. 2016. “Speed Drawing in Adobe Illustrator.” YouTube. YouTube. November 30, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1LpFn1OHa0.

This tutorial video gave me the idea of what shape to use for my head. I wanted it to be a bit more realistically shaped, but not overly detailed.