I think my most significant accomplishment in this class was my final project. I chose to do a movie poster mixer, bringing together a chick flick-and guy pick. I made the movie poster for "When Dirty Harry Met Sally." To challenge myself instead of starting with one movie poster and pasting in images from another I started from the ground up and built the poster. This included making several layer transparent gradients to set up the background, doing extreme modifications to a shot of the New York skyline to match the original poster, making photos taken 20 years apart look the same, and mimicking text styles and fonts with custom messages. This project brought together all of the photoshop knowledge I gained this quarter, and I think that more than anything thing else the finished product looked like an original poster, not a Frankenstein stitching of several works. I was quite proud of this comical work.
2) Most Challenging Learning Experience:
My biggest challenge for the quarter was without a doubt the project I chose for blog entry #2. We were challenged to learn a new skill by doing a tutorial on Worth 1000. I picked one that I thought would be fun and fairly easy to learn...but I was wrong. The tool I wanted to learn was masking, and at first I couldn't get it to work at all. It was a key step in the process. I got half way done and just had to mask and apply filters, but the process was many hours from done. I had budgeted 1-2 hours to do this assignment, but in the end I sat at my computer for 8+ hours with lots of spots on the desk from banging my head. I can happily say now though that I understand the mask tool and use it often. The struggle was worth it, and even though it took forever, it was a fun project.
3) Developing Meaning:
To look at how I worked to develop meaning I will examine my midterm project and quiz #4. In quiz 4 we were challenged to make mix the movie posters from a chick flick and a guy pick as described for the final project above. The real focus was "bending" the gender of one of the movies to submit to the gender of the other. I made "Breakfast at the Godfathers" with "The Godfather" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's" I studied the posters and came to the realization that for the chick flick the colors were bright, text curvy, and the mood happy. For the guy flick a dark mysterious theme was used to show illegal deeds and death. I worked to morph the elements from B@T to conform the darkness of the godfather. If Tiffany we're to meet with the Godfather you can be sure the mood would not be happy! Voiding the color and adding shadows did the trick quite nicely!
For the Midterm project I took a complete different approach to convey my meaning. Our class "Big Idea" was pleasure, and my piece was entitled "The Struggle for Pleasure." I looked deeper into pleasure than pretty girls, football, and sunny days on the beach. I considered the pleasure we get from hard work and dedication to our passions. For me that's the OSU Buckeye Bullet race car. My collage showed all of the students slaving away for 5 years to build the worlds fastest hydrogen vehicle (www.buckeyebullet.com). I began in the top right corner and spiraled the pictures around in chronological order to tell the story of the design, build, and racing of the car. The story ends in the center with a large picture of the car as is say just after going 302 MPH and breaking the international record.
To look at how I worked to develop meaning I will examine my midterm project and quiz #4. In quiz 4 we were challenged to make mix the movie posters from a chick flick and a guy pick as described for the final project above. The real focus was "bending" the gender of one of the movies to submit to the gender of the other. I made "Breakfast at the Godfathers" with "The Godfather" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's" I studied the posters and came to the realization that for the chick flick the colors were bright, text curvy, and the mood happy. For the guy flick a dark mysterious theme was used to show illegal deeds and death. I worked to morph the elements from B@T to conform the darkness of the godfather. If Tiffany we're to meet with the Godfather you can be sure the mood would not be happy! Voiding the color and adding shadows did the trick quite nicely!
For the Midterm project I took a complete different approach to convey my meaning. Our class "Big Idea" was pleasure, and my piece was entitled "The Struggle for Pleasure." I looked deeper into pleasure than pretty girls, football, and sunny days on the beach. I considered the pleasure we get from hard work and dedication to our passions. For me that's the OSU Buckeye Bullet race car. My collage showed all of the students slaving away for 5 years to build the worlds fastest hydrogen vehicle (www.buckeyebullet.com). I began in the top right corner and spiraled the pictures around in chronological order to tell the story of the design, build, and racing of the car. The story ends in the center with a large picture of the car as is say just after going 302 MPH and breaking the international record.
