Final Reflection: The Movie, The Ghosts, The Semester

One of my favorite things to do during the open house on Thursday was watch visitors’ reaction to The Hunted Movie Trailer. People would spook just from watching it, which was definitely the intention. It was definitely an experience taking something sugary sappy sweet–like children playing–and changing it into something horrifying. Overall, I think the final product came out well. Though the movie wasn’t in the time limit, I found that most movie trailers–even teaser trailers–last only 30 to 60 seconds; I believe that I was well within the means of my genre.

As for the ghosts, I really which that I had more time to work on this project. I really wanted to hand draw the images like Naka, but knowing my personal and time limitations, I had to redirect my process. The ghosts communicated as they intended; they are haunting, daunting, but passive unless approached. They are not necessarily friendly, but also not necessarily harmful. These in-betweens–just like the use of opacity and lighting–I think is what makes this final composition work. Had I had more time with them, I would have wanted to add more to the series. However, as of now I think that the four images look great together.

The course–Art 250 that is–proved to be a learning experience in a variety of ways. First, it confirmed that I definitely have a passion for digital design and that I could actually have a future in the digital design industry. The course also confirmed that I have a long way to go. There is so much that I have to learn before probably even qualifying for grad school. I am always really nervous about my artwork, so the positive feedback from the class about both my creativity and for the final products meant the world to me. The constructive criticism and work of others led me to alter my work to be more aesthetically pleasing and strategically deep. I wish that I could have more time to build my portfolio. As of now, I am hoping for year five to do so.

 

JUST. KIDDING.

Okay, so I took off Ghostbusters. Perhaps a hasty move. FINAL PROJECTS TO BE PRINTED ARE (drumroll please):

Ghostly Advertisements (Who You Gonna Call)

Well the semester is drawing to a close and I have finally finished my lovely ghost project. In the end, I thought it would be fun to make this a project about contrast. I have really nice images that I am turning into advertisements for… get ready… Ghostbusters. Though I feel like my images are classy enough to be used to mockingly advertise “barely there” make-up, or skin whitener for the Asian market, I thought it would be fun to play with the idea of taking something classy, like my lady ghosts, and contrast it with something juvenile (yet fun!) like Ghostbusters. In the end, I ended up rebranding Ghostbusters to appeal to more upperclass members of the ghost-hunting market, who were not previously sought after by Ghostbusters Inc.

 

That being said, here are the final four pictures of my lovely ghost.

 

There will only be one.

So in working with my ghosts, I’ve decided to do a profile of a single ghost. The first ghost is here. Here is the second of my dear ghost.

 

Another Ghost

I’ve made my second ghost in my series of… however many I feel like making. I’m thinking of aiming around four, but we’ll see if I can stop there.

Here’s the first version of what I came up with:

 

But I like the second version better. The fog is too cliché.

 

And I did pretty much the same thing as before. Here are my original images:

There’s a Ghost in My Forest

As much as I love the idea of drawing my final image, I’ve really come to enjoy seeing what kind of image effects I can do with the computer. I’ve enjoyed making my latest spectre, and I’m pretty sure I could turn it into a series. We’ll have to see what Nell and the class says tomorrow!

So how did I get from these images to there?

 

 

The first thing that I did was open the background scene in photoshop. I duplicated the original layer and set it to color burn, 30%, and outlined my details with high pass at a low opacity. I then added my woman after cutting her out of her original picture. I layered her with blur masks and overlays, and adjusted her to the ghostliness of my content, frequently using the burn and soft brush eraser tool to erase extra hard lines. I then reduced her opacity group to 80%, duplicated the background layer again, stacked that layer on the top, and set its overlay to 26%. After lots of tweaking and an hour of flustering with photoshop, my image was complete!

The Smoke Lady

Sadly, I spent way too much time seeing if I could digitize the person in my picture with smoke. Though the final image was awesome, I couldn’t figure out a good way to put it into my final pictures. Grr….

How did I do this? A strong mix of patience, glowing edges, smoke images, the burn tool, and more patience.

 

You Know You’re a Designer When…

(Blatantly stolen from http://youreadesignerwhen.tumblr.com/. More there if you want more!)

Final Individual Prints

After changing a few things, I finalized my project. I chose not to print a calendar on the back because I thought it cheapened my project. I did, however, remove the more graphic pornography (see old November), lined up the text for the months, added dates in front of the overlapping models, and rearranged some quotes so that they didn’t push their boundaries on the models’ figures.

Please note that these images are grainy and a little off-color because I had to convert them to .jpegs to post them on wordpress :(. Without further ado, month by month:

The Final Project