Year 1 Tech--Stop Motion

For this weeks blog post we needed to find a stop motion animation, and describe what makes it an effective animation. After some youtube browsing I found one I quite enjoyed. It's called "NIGHTMARE" and it's a claymation set to music. What I liked about it is, there is no voice acting, yet it establishes a quick plot quite effectively. The sets look great, and the animation looks pretty fluid. It also does a great job of setting characters. The characters are extremely basic, but the creator did a great job establishing their roles. Another really cool feature of this animation, is the blood/gore FX. They are very well done and the death scenes are gruesome, and original. The majority of the animation takes place in the same area, and all the light comes from one light source. The lighting is slightly dim, creating a good atmosphere. Another thing I thought was really great here was the panning, it had this effect on it that created speed. One last thing that I thought was really creative is that some of the shots are from the characters camera, which added a cool new point of view.

After watching this animation I can't wait to go more in depth to this unit!

Digital Surrealism Project

In this assignment, we needed to learn how to answer this question. “How do I create a photographic art piece, in the surrealist style?” The answer I believe is SYMBOLISM. It’s a word that comes up quite often when discussing surrealism, and that is for a reason.  Symbolism is used extremely often in this style. Effective symbolism rarely makes sense to anyone else other than the artist, which leaves it up to interpretation.

I used symbolism in my piece mainly with the masks. They symbolize the fake emotions that people who are suffering use to get people not worry about them, but everyone has a mask. Everyone’s dealing with something. Whether it is selth loathing, troubles at home, or even homosexuality. The reason people have these “masks” is that they’re afraid what people would think of them if they saw what was behind.

For this project I was very inspired by the photomontages of Jerry Uelsmann. When I learned that he did none of his work on Photoshop I was extremely impressed. I have actually done a few of Uelsmann style photomontages in Photoshop so when I saw a master at work I’m determined to get to that level.

I personally thought I did a great job on this assignment.  All of the pictures I took were planned shots to get the lighting perfect.  I did little things like adding slight shadows under feet, and making subtle reflections to make the blending as seamless as I could possibly do at my level. I utilized the pentool constantly, and used masks as well. One thing I could have done better is utilizing masks a lot more. There were points where I just wouldn’t bother even if there was no point not to use a mask. In my future work I will make sure to use masks to my fullest advantage.

One thing I was very happy with was the tear, on Diana’s face. No one brought eye drops the day of the shoot so I had to make it in Photoshop. I used a mixture of the pentool, gradients, and bevel & emboss to create something I was eventually quite happy with. This was an achievement for me because I’m not used to creating elements in my photo manipulations, so this was something new for me, and I was proud of how it turned out.

All in all, this piece was meant to communicate a very important issue. I thought the name “Our Masks” was appropriate, because everyone has a “Mask”.