Video Final

For my final video project I wanted to create a stop motion video.   Inspired by my unwillingness to ever clean my room, I decided to create a video that looked like I commanded the room to clean itself. The initial storyboard is below, where I outline the major parts of the video: Me seeing my dirty room, the bed making itself, the clothes putting themselves away, the garbage taking itself out, and a shot of the clean room.

Filming: To film the video, I used my iPhone 4's built in camera.  For lighting, I made sure to do the entirety of the filming with my room's light on while it was dark out to ensure it was consistant.  For the first shot of the entire dirty room, I made a pseudo-camera rig out of a soda holder that I attached to my door frame.   Then for each of the 3 stop motion scenes, I placed the rigs in various positions.  I then kept the camera rolling as I went in and out of the scene, moving each piece a little bit at the time.  I made sure to exit the scene long enough after each move to ensure I had a shot to use in the video.   Then for the final scene of the video I simply held the camera at the corner of the room and panned around at the clean room.

Editing:   To edit this video, I used a combination of iMovie and Final Cut Pro.  I knew since my video was stop motion and didn't require many complex edits I could use iMovie for the majority of it since it was already installed on my laptop and I had issues finding time to get to the lab.  To create the stop motion effect, I took the raw film and simply clipped out all the parts that included me in the scene adjusting things.  This left me with many small clips of the room itself.  While most stop motion videos are compilations of still shots, this is actually a compilation of really short, .4 second videos.  I chose to do it this way for one big reason:  lack of sturdy camera rig.  If I took still shots, I risked moving the camera ever so slightly every time I hit the button.  That's a huge no-no for stop motion. By just filming continuously, I avoided this.  Once I had my stop motion scenes complete, I bookended them with the video of me entering the dirty room and then the panning of the clean room.    I noticed that the video I had taken was pretty washed out.  So I took my scenes and loaded them into Final Cut Pro once I was in the IMM Lab.  I adjusted the color balance of each of the 5 scenes individually to give them a fuller, darker feel.   Back in iMovie, I added an end credit scene which included my name and credit for the music.  The music I chose was the song "Sore" by the artist Arrange.  I know the guy personally, so I contacted him asking if I could use the track for the video and he gave me permission (it's a bonus track off a self released album so there's no label who I'd also need permission from).  I felt the upbeatness of the song, which is set of chopped up set of Soul samples, fit the novelty of the video perfectly.  I made sure to time the music properly so that the drums kicked in once I snapped my fingers to activate the cleaning.   I then made sure to fade out the end of the song at a natural feeling time.   

Evaluation:  Overall, I was happy with the outcome of the video.  My favorite part was how much the music added to the video, and how well its timing worked out.  I thought the video was nice and simple and to the point.   However, if allotted the chance to do it over, I would make a few changes.  For one, I would use a better quality camera.   The iPhone 4 camera is good, but not nearly as good as the 4s or a normal video camera.  Next time I would like to get better quality footage.   Secondly, I would work on making the lengths of the three cleaning sequences more equal.  The garbage scene runs much longer than the clothing or the especially short bed scene.   Lastly, I would try to find a way to make the last scene where I pan the camera around the clean room a little more steady.   Doing it by just holding the camera was a little too shaky and uneven for my liking.   Overall though, I was very happy with the outcome.   I feel as though it captured the novel feel I was going for, and came out great.

Midterm

Abstract: The National’s 2007 album Boxer focuses on the mechanical feeling of a privileged yet humdrum middle class life: waking up, putting on a shirt and tie, and trudging through your day job. In this series, I designed six album covers for six songs featured on the album. Each cover will follow the lyrical theme of the song it represents as well as maintain the artistic elements from the original cover of Boxer (Picture below).

All pictures (except for Fake Empire) were taken using my iPhone and edited entirely in Photoshop. Each cover includes the band name and song name in proper typography consistent with the original album artwork. Each image has a 6cm wide black bar at the top and bottom where the band name and title are placed respectively.

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Slow Show: This track is mainly about how the only thing the narrator wants to do after a long day of work is go home and drunkenly entertain his wife (hence the title). So to capture those sentiments I took a photo of myself angled to be looking down my dress-pant legs, past the bottle of wine I’m holding, and to my dress shoes.

Production: The original photo was actually taken rightside up, but I decided to rotate it 180 degrees because I felt it gave more of the dizzying feeling associated with being drunk. Next, I wanted to make the floor uniformly tiling, so I used the clone tool to cover up the non-tiled portions of the floor on the edges as well as a piece of toilet paper that got caught in the shot. Next, I used the blur tool to blur each of the four corners in order to create a more fisheyed, dizzying feel to the picture. I also used the clone tool to touch up the shoes. Lastly, I used the black and white adjustment to get the desired coloring, and the curves adjustment to make the pants blacker and shirt whiter to provide a better contrast.

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Mistaken for Strangers: This song explores the feeling of the narrator being unrecognizable to his friends now that he's a working stiff. I wanted to capture the essence of putting on that working-mans disguise by shooting a bunch of products you use to get ready for work. As I expain below, I ended up zooming in on a specific section of a larger scene which included a razor, comb, hair gel, and cleaning product.

Production: The first thing I needed to do for this piece was remove all the logos. I accomplished this by using a combination of cloning tool and paintbrush to cover all the commercial designs as well as the directions on the hair gel. Next I used three adjustments to get the desired coloring: black and white, curves, and brightness/contrast. Once that was complete, I wasn’t very satisfied with the picture. It just looked like a bunch of items on a counter. So I decided so isolate and enlarge a small section of the picture, between the hair gel and razor where the comb lies. I thought it gave the picture a much more interesting feel and kept it that way.

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Guest Room: The original photo used in this image was a shot of a mansion being constructed in my town. For this image I cropped out a specific section of the construction, focusing on the garage of the home where the lights and shadows are most dramatic. Like the "Mistake for Strangers" photo I thought more intrigue was added by zooming in on a specific portion of a larger shot.

Production: After the initial crop of the photo I did some touch up. I used the clone tool to fix up the dirt and grass and get rid of debris as well as fix some of the shadows on the paneling. Next, I used the free select tool to delete the sky and trees behind the house. Afterwards, I used the Black and White image adjustment and Contrast/Brightness adjustment in order to get the desired feel. The lighting above the garage doors was rather bright for a scene was supposed to be only lit by outdoor/moonlight, so I used a a grey paintbrush with low opacity to tone it down. Lastly, the skyline inserted behind the building is a heavily altered picture of clouds lit up by moonlight. I used the clone tool to morph the clouds to my choosing adjusted the brightness/contrast of them.

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Apartment Story: This song comes at a point in the album where the narrator expresses his desire to just spend his days mindlessly relaxing in his apartment with his significant other rather than deal with the stresses of real life. To capture this I enlisted the help of two friends who I photographed in the lounge of my apartment complex as they sat staring at a television screen. I liked the idea that instead of the television being on, you can instead see the man looking at their reflection on the inactive screen.

Production: When taking the photo, I made sure to align the males head at the 1/3 line in order to follow the rule of thirds. Then I wanted to get an angle where you could see three things: the woman’s head resting on his shoulder, the beer in his hand, the television they were watching. An pleasantly unexpected result of this was the reflection of the two onto the television. However, I preferred the reflection cast in another photo form that angle I took. So I cropped that reflection from the other photo and pasted into this one. I then used Auto-tone to make the reflection properly match the lighting of the new photo. Then I did a few minor adjustments to the scaling of the reflection in order to get the perfect fit. Next, I used the clone to make a little adjustment to the man’s facial hair. Last, I used some adjustments to fix the lighting/coloring. Black and White was used to change the coloring. Then I used the Curves adjustment to tone down the bright whites that were coming from the windows. Lastly, I finished with a little Contrast reduction.

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Fake Empire: This was the only piece where I did not use original photography. Credit goes to Phillip Colla for the skyline shot and Hatje Cantz Verlag for the ferris wheel. I came up with the idea for the piece after stumbling upon the original ferris wheel image and falling in love with it. I decided it would be fitting if I placed a city skyline in the distance behind the structure. As a result the image shows an interesting dynamic between an abandoned and dilapidated source of fun (the ferris wheel) and the budding city in the distance.

Production: The original ferris wheel photo was an incredibly wide panoramic shot of a lot of landscape so I cropped it down to feature just the ferris wheel and placed the focal point of it 1/3 of the way into the canvas. To obtain an appropriate skyline, I had to edit out a lot of the original city shot. I used the free select and magic wand tool to deleted all of the sky and mountains that were behind the city shot. I also edited it so the buildings at the left end trailed off to make a more natural ending to the ending of the outskirts of the city. Once I pasted that image into the ferris wheel shot I was faced with the issue of getting the skyline to be behind the wheel. To do this I created a duplicate layer of the section of the ferris wheel which needed to be brought in from of the skyline. Then I deleted all the sky from the image using the magic wand so that only the structure remained, and thus the city skyline would be visible behind it. I then used the clone tool to do some touching up with the grass. Then, I use the clone tool at very low opacity to put some sky over the buildings in order to make it look hazy, as if its very far away. Lastly, I used the black and white adjustment to get the desired coloring, and then used the curve adjustment to tone down the bright white sky.

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Squalor Victoria: The title of this track loosely translates to “filthy triumph” in Latin and refers to the songs narrative about a man who feels in over his head at his job and only puts up the illusion that he’s keeping up/cares. So for this shot I used a friend to model in a shirt and tie and stand in front of a closet full of work clothes in order to capture that feeling of being trapped in the day-to-day routine.

Production: Most of the work done by the framing of the photograph itself and the positioning of the model. The biggest key for me was making sure to line up the model’s tie to be exactly one third of the way in from the right so that it follows the rule of thirds and becomes a focal point of the piece. Once the photo was taken, I first want to change the color of one of the shirts in the background because since it was also white it was blending in with the shirt of the model. To do this I used magic wand/free select to outline the shirt. Then I used the paint bucket with low opacity to fill in the color of the shirt blue while still keeping the creases in the shirt visible. Next, I used the Curve and Bland and White adjustments to get the desired collation effects. Lastly, I made sure to put the lettering of “Squalor Victoria” right below where the tie cuts off in order to draw the eyes down the tie and to the song title.

Color Adjustments

For this assignment I have two sets of color adjustments. For the first two images, I did destructive adjustments where I edited the images themselves. For the first, the original picture was extremely foggy. In order to eliminate that and focus on the thick for on the left I used the color adjust tool. Afther that I used the contract adjust to bring some more life into the photo. Lastly, I added pupils with the paintbrush because his eyes were so overexposed.




This photo was originally incredibly yellow because and looked very unnatural. The only adjustment I needed to do was color adjustments in order to tone down the yellow and give it a much more natural feel.
















These next two photos were adjusted using non-destructive new layers for adjustments. The first shot if the the TCNJ carnival that I took form the Ferris wheel. The photo was originally very dark and shadowy. First I adjusted the levels of the colors. Next, I used the curves adjustment in order to add some more white to the photo. Lastly, I used the vibrance adjustment in order to really bring out the color and brightness of the shot.





This last photo is simply of a piece of cake but it orginally came out very dark (so dark the bag was barely even visible). First, i adjusted the levels of teh back and white using the curves tool. Afterwards, I enhanced the brightness and contrast. Lastly, I lowered the exposure in order to tone down the whiteness of the plates.

Composition #2

For my second composition, I chose a picture of the Capitol Building I took back in 2008. The first thing I did was center the Capitol Building by cropping the photo. Next, I wanted the man in green to be centered so it would be in line with the point of the Capitol Building. To do this, I copied and pasted the man to the right. Then I used the cloning tool fix the grass in the old and new areas. Next, I only wanted spectators to be in the bottom corners to give a better feel to the composition. To accomplish this I used a combination of magic eraser and cloning tools to delete to people and replicate the landscape beneath them. The final step was to increase the size of the trees in front of the building. I wanted them fill in the space between each "third" of the image, so that it would take up the whole middle portion the the center third of the image. Overall, I think the changes to this does a good job directing focus to the main part of the image, the Capitol Building, while removing the distractions that would divert your attention.

Compoition #1

For my first composition I took a shot of an entrance to Lot 6 of TCNJ. The bottom photo is the original photo and the top in the edited. I wanted to create a better sense of symmetry in the image so my first step was to replicate the tree branches from the top left corner into the right corder. I selected the original branches, copied, and mirrored it and placed it accordingly in the top left. From there I had to do a lot of touching up in the sky and bricks. In addition, only the right side originally had signs on each floot of the parking garage. To replicate this on the left I used the clone tool to add one on each floor on the left. Overall I felt this came out well. The focal point of the picture, the shadow of branches on the entrance, in nice and centered. The branches on the top create a nice frame of the image as well.

Composite TCNJ + NYNY Casino

This photo is a composite of two scenery photos I had. The first is an ariel shot of TCNJ that I took for the top of a ferris wheel. The second was a pictuure of New York New York Casino I had taken in Las Vegas. I decided it would be cool to place the NYNY Casino in the background of the school, coming up behind the trees.

To do this I selected all the sky area in the TCNJ photo and pasted in the NYNY Casino and scaled accordingly. I also used the clone tool to make the two towers on the far left go up as high as possible. In the original photo they cut off. The composite was fairly easy, with the main difficulties being the tree line and making the towers taller.

Composite of my dog at the Beach

This is a composite of two photo. The first(background) was a scenery shot of the Jersey Shore. The second was my dog Kodi laying in my back yard. There were a few difficult aspects of this composite. The first was that in the original photo, the dog was laying in grass, so in the feet and body area there was a lot of blades of grass to edit out. In addition, the dogs fur was a bit of an issue. It was tough selecting all the stray hairs of teh dog to give it a natural look when it was placed on the beach. Lastly, the picture of the dog was a much brighter photo with higher resolution, so I did some adjustments with filters and brightness to help it match the background as closely as possible.