Stop Motion with Sound

 

I actually didn't use GarageBand for this assignment - I used Ableton Live instead. I'm currently taking Sound in Media and have been using Ableton since the beginning of the semester, so I thought I would just keep up with it since it's been a pretty hard software to learn. I used five different midi tracks to create the piece so there are five instruments - most of them are piano or plucked tracks but there's also a sitar track in there as well. I wanted to go for a more upbeat sound but ended up creating more of a wandering, ambient soundtrack instead (I seem to have an affinity for making those). I usually go by what I hear when previewing a track; if I like the way it sounds, there's a 99% chance I'm going to use it.

Stop Motion

 

Here's my stop motion video! I couldn't think of anything super unique to do, so I just grabbed two of my little stuffed horses and my candle and made it look like they were jumping on top of it. I took the stills with my digital camera since I figured it'd look more satisfying, but obviously some of the picture quality was lost from resizing the images. The video might looked looped, but it's not; it's just 60 separate stills of the horses following each other over the candle!

Age Progression

 

It was hard getting the age progression to be exact since I didn't have two photos from exactly the same angle, so I tried to line them up as best I could. My face shape has obviously changed from when I was little too, so that didn't help. I'm not used to anyone outside of close family and friends seeing my baby photos so enjoy the preview😬

Famous Artwork

 

Fun fact: we actually did a recreation of this portrait in cinematography where I was the model! I figured it'd be funny to actually Photoshop my face directly onto the painting, so that's why I chose it. This one was definitely more frustrating to figure out because of the angle of the model's face and the lighting. I took a while trying to figure out where to blend it so that it made the most sense. Trying to color match it was really hard too; obviously it's not exact, but I got it as close as I possibly could. For having never done something like this in Photoshop before, I'm pretty satisfied with it!

Announcements

 

Not too shabby for someone who has never photoshopped herself into a background before! The background is a picture of a Scottish castle; I chose it because I've been dying to go to Scotland for years. I was supposed to study abroad in the fall, but Covid-19 canceled the program completely so I wasn't able to go to England like I had wanted. I had really been looking forward to being able to visit my ancestral stomping grounds (which are technically both England and Scotland), but I'll get there eventually! Using the pen tool for this assignment was interesting because it's definitely not the same as the pen tool in Illustrator. It took me a few tries to really get things right, so hopefully the next assignment will go a little smoother! I'm glad to be working in Photoshop like this though.

Photofilters

 

I had a lot of fun doing this project, especially when it came to playing with the colors and different grains/effects. I somehow forgot to do a self-portrait in the original 10 photos, so I went back and added myself into the mix. I guess I didn't want to go super abstract with these because I liked being able to still see what the image was, but in a different light. Since I didn't have time to go out and take 10 new photos, I just used stills I had taken from the past few months (except the self-portrait). I honestly probably could've kept making these if I had wanted to!

Recreating Vector Art

 I had so much fun doing this project that I ended up wanting to do more than one poster, as seen above. If you can't tell, I'm a huge Star Wars fan! I came across Captain Rex's helmet first and immediately saved the image to my laptop - Rex is one of my favorite characters from The Clone Wars. I absolutely love and have massive respect for his character, which is saying a lot since there are very few characters that I hold in such high regard! I came across the Hoth image shortly after finding the image of the helmet and couldn't resist saving that one as well. It's just a small recreation of an iconic scene and an iconic vehicle, but it makes a nerd like me very happy🤪the Hoth image definitely took longer to recreate since there were more parts and shapes to it than Rex's helmet. It also had an actual background and required me to create a rectangle over the whole image, then move it to the side and create a gradient mesh to get the colors right. Everything else, except the text, was recreated using the pen and curve tools. I tried to get the font of the text to match as closely to the original as possible. The only difference is that it's a little thicker.