Entry Seven: Animation
'One Man Band' Animation Short by Pixar.
I've seen a lot of Pixar animations and this has to be by far one of my favorites. The narrative opens with a little girl going to throw a coin into a fountain to make a wish but she is quickly bombarded by two musicians, each who are one man bands. They compete feverishly for the young girl's attention until she becomes frightened and drops the coin down a sewer drain by accident. She mourns the loss of her coin quickly before becoming enraged at the musician's foolishness and demanding payment. She demands a tiny violin off of one of their instruments and begins to play it, at first terribly, and quickly (after some quick tuning), quite well. Someone then drops a large sack of gold coins into her begging cup where she removes two and taunts the musicians as though she plans to give it to them. They approach her and she chucks the coins into the top of the fountain, much to their dismay.
This narration is told completely without the use of dialogue, and simply through the use of music, sound effects and visual elements. Especially notable is the strong character compositions and distinct facial expressions that communicate personality to the viewer. These help tell the story and propel the plot and conflict along.
Entry Seven: Anything
For this blog, we can write about anything related to our project so I decided to blog about Interactive storybooks since my project is a type of interactive storybook.
I found this website that has an interactive story book
here.
I really think that interactive books of "e-books" will be more popular in the future and have already started showing a trend in sales.
As for this website's interactive story book, I think it leaves a lot to be desired. It's framed in a sort of screen with little controls that tell a story with sound and images. I guess it's good for what it's supposed to do (tell the story of creation according to the bible) and perhaps it's simplicity was what the designer was going for, but I still think there is a little more that could be done to the border of the screen and controls.
Entry Six: Web Art
The website above is an online portfolio to showcase some artist's work and I think it definitely falls under the category of webart. It's very artistically done and includes a lot of elements (i.e. Photoshop, 3D, interactivity) that make it a functioning, smart looking website. It interweaves a lot of these elements together to create a cohesive space that invites the user in and keeps them clicking. It also has decent navigation that is present on every page which I think is something that's very important for a website.
Entry Five: Our Own Choice of Topic
Awesome Photoshop Disaster Site
This site is fantastic. It's all about photoshop flubs done by mostly magazines that seem rather unnoticeable until they're pointed out. To be honest, I really had to do a double-take with some of them to see the error but when it's noticed, it's hard not to stare.
It's interesting because these pictures aren't from someone's computer who just got photoshop. They're often covers of well known magazines or well known ads and you can be sure that they have professional photoshop artists working for them, yet still there are these mistakes.
What gets me is how bad some of the mistakes really are. And they seem to be made for really silly reasons too. Like, do you really have to edit a hand if it adds fingers or makes it look extremely unnatural? I mean, how bad was it before that you have to go in and do this stuff to make it look possibly worse than before. Probably not THAT bad.
Interesting site that hopefully keeps photoshoppers on their toes when they think no one notices small mistakes like this. Obviously they do if there's an entire site devoted to it.
Entry Four: Abstract
I found this abstract digital art piece by artist, Larry Carlson and it seems to be untitled. There's a lot of different elements in this image, mostly abstracted, but some that are still realistic (i.e. you can make out the human face in the ground and the silouhettes of the birds in the clouds). The background with the sky and the far background elements that make up a sort of landscape look almost mechanical instead of natural and the sky seems to overlap with the foreground in a very unnatural way which plays with depth and creates a bit of an illusion. The colors are really all over the place. There's a lot of things that have a blueish tint cast over them but there's also greens, pinks, purples and even some oranges. The colors really act well with the textures of the objects in the piece. As expected, the clouds are lighter and more highlighted which give them a fluffier appearance and the landscape is more of a shadowy mass which gives it more of a weighted feel. I think this piece evokes the emotions of tranquility and peacefulness. Through the calming colors and the way the elements blend into each other, it really evokes a feeling of calmness.
Entry Three: Digital Art
I found this digital art piece called "Drug Free Zone" by
David Fuhrer. I think the reason I was drawn to this piece is because it depicts a miniature world that's very fanciful and different from reality. I like how at certain parts it's very packed and crowded and then at other parts it's very open and spacious. I also really like how it combines nature elements (the sky, the tree branch things) and the human-made elements (the houses, the barbed wire and the street sign). It has a good message and I'm going to make the assumption that the graveyard and barbed wire before the sign represent life with drugs and the happy little village beyond the sign represents life without drugs but I'm not going to lie, I often don't really care very much what the message of certain things are, especially when they are as cliche as this one seems to be. But aside from the obviousness of the message, I still really do like the style of this piece.
Entry Two: Materials for Project One
For my first project in this class, I decided to do a little research on how to change the tones of my pictures. Although I have had some experience with changing the hue of pictures, matching tones and shades through the 'curves' menu selection is something that is a bit new to me. I found an interesting tutorial here that goes over a bit of what we saw demonstrated in class but goes a bit further too:
I was concerned about matching the dog in my picture to the human figures because several of my human figures have some form of bright sunlight hitting them whereas the dog picture was taken on a cloudy day. I found this superb quick, easy and to the point video tutorial that shows a way to add sunlight. I figured out a way to make a few adjustments to it to apply it to what I'm doing. Instead of the regular lasso too, I can use the magnetic lasso tool to make a selection around the part of the dog I want the sunlight to hit. I didn't have to use a gaussian blur, but instead was able to change the lighting to overlay and I got the effect I was looking for. I'll need to really lower the opacity to make sure the dog isn't too bright on one side. After lowering the opacity, I was able to really tone down the contrast from each side of the dog but there was a still a dividing line from where I drew the magnetic lasso tool. This can be fixed by selecting the smudge tool and going over the line and a few other places to hide it away. The change is subtle but it really makes a big difference overall.
I'm probably going to do a little more work on the human figures in my picture and I want to possibly add flowers that some of them are holding so I'll have to go dig up some old pictures I took over the past summers since we're kind of in the dead of winter.
