DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND IMAGING - PROJECT

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND IMAGING - PROJECT

24/09/19 - 15/10/19 (Week 5 - Week 8)
Chan Jing Wen (0340480)
Digital Photography and Imaging
Project

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Project 2A&B
24/09/19 (Week 5)

We were given our topic for our project. For our project, we should create a surreal image. Our homework for this week was to draft out our ideas for the project.

After going back, I went online to look for inspiration because I wasn't really sure what to do.

<figure> Inspiration

In the end, I came up with two ideas. The first one is having actual food such as donuts and hotdogs to replace the floaties in swimming pools and the other is to have cats lying on the sushi rice.

<figure> sketch

01/10/19 (Week 6)

Upon receiving feedback, Mr Martin suggested that I start creating the mock for the swimming pool idea first since it would be harder to find reference photos online for the sushi.

Figure 2.1 Hotdog

Figure 2.2 Girls on floaty

Figure 2.3 Swimming Pool

I assemble the elements into the photo and added shadings for the floaties and girls.

Figure 2.4 Adding all the elements and shadows

After adding everything into the photo, I feel like the composition was a bit weird and that it seem a bit busy but empty at the same time so I decided to add some things into it. I added another hotdog to it and a new donut.

Figure 2.5 Adding additional floaties at the back

At this point, I showed my mock product to Mr Jeffrey. He said that the skill sets are there but the composition is weird. He thought that the problem is at the pool. He said that the photo I chose wasn't so suitable, the angle and cut out points are weird. He suggested that I either crop the image or find another photo of a better swimming pool.

Since I've actually went through a lot of photos before coming across this pool, I really couldn't find a pool that is suitable to the angle of the hotdog, person and entire composition so I decided that I could try cropping it.

Before I did anything, class ended; therefore, I didn't actually crop the image. I wasn't really confident in this piece so I thought maybe I should work on the sushi idea instead.

During the weekends, I went out to order sushi and took photos of the sushi. I removed the sashimi from the sushi rice so I can get a clear base to put my cats.

Figure 2.6 Photo taken of sushi plate

Figure 2.7 Cat 01

Figure 2.8 Cat 02

Below is the outcome :

Figure 2.9 Cat Sushi Screenshot

Figure 2.10 Cat Sushi

I wasn't really sure about this attempt either. It was not very challenging at the slightest, I basically just put the cat there and added the slightest shadows to them and that was the entire composition. However, I decided to keep it and show it to my lecturers anyway.

08/10/19 (Week 7)

During class, I cropped the swimming pool scene for the swimming pool attempt.

To do this, I initially made the floaties and girls into a PNG File and insert it to the cropped swimming pool

Figure 3.1 PNG Version of the Girls on Floaties

Figure 3.2 Screenshot of Attempt

I noticed by doing this, the shadow outcome actually differed from the shadow outcome of the ones with separated layers. Therefore, I redid everything since the size of everything had to be rescaled so the final outcome won't turn out blurry.

Figure 3.3 Screenshot of another attempt

As you can see, the shadow here is more natural than the previous one.

Since Mr Martin was busy checking other classmate's work, I decided to do something else. I tried photoshopping goldfishes into ice cube.

Figure 3.4 Goldfish 01

Figure 3.5 Goldfish 02

Figure 3.6 Ice cube tray

Figure 3.7 Screenshot of attempt

Figure 3.8 Outcome of Attempt

I showed both the sushi and the swimming pool attempts to Mr Martin. I didn't show the goldfish one because I felt that it wasn't really suitable for this project (although it kind of looks cute) and I wouldn't really know what to do for the animation.

Mr Martin said that he preferred the swimming pool one because he thought the cat "couldn't go wrong because they're cats", there wasn't anything really special to it. I told him that the animation for the swimming pool would be having the swimming pool water move a bit and having the floaties float on the water. He agreed with the idea.

Going home, I went online to look for ways to create these effects in After Effect. As I remembered that we could do "ripple effect" in Photoshop, I just went and check if After Effects had that function. Luckily they had. However, for my first attempt, the entire background moved together instead of just the water so I had to create a layer that consist of just the water.

For the floating effect, I referred to this video online :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni_GdNERwJg&pbjreload=10

I managed to make everything float but every layer floated in a different way. I tried a few ways to separate the layers, to merge them and everything but it didn't really work so I kept my question for the next class.

15/08/19 (Week 8)

I asked Mr Martin for help in class and he helped me separate the background from the other layers by grouping them into one. I then applied the effect onto the hotdog layer.

Figure 4.1 Screenshot of Layers in After Effects

Figure 4.2 Close up of the effects and transformation used in After Effects

These are the final file submissions :

Figure 4.3 Hotdog Floaties - Still Image

Figure 4.4 Animated Still