Video Self-Portrait

Title: The End



Artist Statement:

My final project for CyberARTs was to create a video self-portrait that expresses myself. The basic idea of the video is that I am a creative and artistic person, not a scientific or mathematical one. In the beginning I am waking up and looking tiredly at the clock, and then getting out of bed. I included this to tell viewers that it is the beginning of the day, and how I am feeling. I show the extreme opposite of enthusiasm towards my math work when I sit down to do it and almost immediately pass out from frustration. I continue to show this frustration by showing that I am sleeping on my desk in all of my classes throughout the day. For the music, I wrote it so it matched the stressed feeling I had while going through my day. This gives the viewer the overall idea that school is just something that I have to survive everyday. After that I show myself going home so there is a bit of a transition from the setting going from school to home. If I didn’t put this in, it would take the viewers off guard because they wouldn’t be ready for a scene change, which would make them have to adjust quickly to the new setting. When I go inside and am doing artistic activities, the music immediately changes so it is much more pleasant and relaxed, the same mood that I am feeling in the video. A measure before the change in setting I made the music quickly buildup in volume and change from a minor to major key so the audience isn’t taken off guard by the sudden change in music, just like how I added a transition between me being at school and home. For the scene when I am doing artistic things, I do multiple things like reading, writing, and playing instruments. I wanted to include myself doing art, but I couldn’t use an easel because it was broken, and I couldn’t film myself drawing while staying within the same camera shot, so I left that out. After that, I am reading in my bed at night in my pajamas and look at the clock to see it is late at night. This is supposed to tell the audience that I have been reading, writing, drawing, making music, etc., all night. At this part I made the music slow down, and the melodic phrasing in a way so it matched the idea that I was winding down for the night and getting ready to go to bed.  I turned off the light and kept it off for a few seconds to represent the time I spend sleeping, except obviously I didn’t film the darkness for 7 hours while I slept. Instead, I kept the light off for a few seconds and then switched to the exact same shot as in the beginning, which is of me lying in bed. I did this to make the audience realize that the whole video is just my daily routine. At the beginning and end I wrote, “The End,” because waking up in the morning is the end of the day for me, and the beginning is when I get home from school to do art, music, and writing. Also, throughout the film I made the music not only match the video by mood, but I also timed it so it corresponded with shot changes to create more of a connection between the two. Because it is easier to edit the video to match the music than the other way around, I wrote the music so it went with the video as close as I could, and then did the fine-tuning in the video editor. For the technical part of the assignment, I wrote the music using Cubase 7.5 and Komplete 9 Ultimate. For the video editing, I used Corel Video Studio Pro. I used different video and audio software because they are both much easier to use, and also have more features. I exported the audio as a WAV file from Cubase and then converted it to an MP3 because WAV files are too large to use in Corel, and they also increase the file size of the project, making it harder to move across devices. I exported the video file as an HDV 1080i (PC) because the visual and audio quality are the highest they can get, and also because they file is meant to be viewed on the computer, which is the main platform that the video will be viewed on.

Street Photography on Spadina

For the second half of the day I went to OCAD, I also did street photography. I took several hundred pictures that day, but I chose my ten best and then enhanced them in Photoshop CS6.

OCAD Exhibits

On my trip to OCAD, my favourite exhibit was painting and drawing because I enjoyed the bright colours and unique designs. Here are a few works that I liked:

Maqvette Study # 1
by Samantha Robbie-Higgins

     

Hermit Calligraphy II
by M. Rocca

Another Niche
by Jordan Warmington

OCADU Field Trip: 3 Programs I Am Interested in

Today me and my CyberARTs class of Lakeshore Collegiate Institute will be visiting OCAD to explore the different careers available to a budding artist. Because the amount of exhibits that will be on display at their GradEx show, I will be focusing on 3 programs to explore while I am there; Digital Painting & Expanded Animation, Illustration, and Drawing & Painting.

I would like to explore drawing and painting because I enjoy the ability to do many things with the mediums while using classic materials such as paint and pencils. The program at OCAD reinforces painting and drawing skills through technique and medium, but also has some technical aspects to it such as digital imaging, much like the CyberARTs program at Lakeshore that mixes traditional and technological art together.

I want to explore the Illustration program because it covers a broad area of design. The program offers opportunities to design for mostly public and advertisement-related mediums, including books, websites, CDs, packaging, and more. The program also explores both traditional and digital art to expand students' palettes of creativity when working on a project.

The final program that I am interested in is animation because it is my favourite art medium. The program teaches all of the essentials needed to do advanced animation such as 3D modelling, texturing and rendering, and digital painting and compositing. The program prepares students for career built around animation like making animations for commercials, video games, or music videos. This program intrigues me the most, and it is something that might be a future hobby or even career I would enjoy.

Self-Portrait in Art Deco Style

Portal 2 | Cave Johnson Lemons Rant

The audio I used for the typography assignment was a 30 second rant about lemons by a character from the video game “Portal 2.” The character in the game is a bit crazy, and often says strange but humorous things like in the rant I used.

What I like about the final product the most is how I was able to animate the text in many different ways, making it more interesting to watch. Instead of just making the text appear according to the talking, I made it move across the screen, squash and stretch, and change colour in various ways. One of the things I would want improved about my kinetic typography is how smoothly the text moved. For the most part, the text was moving fluently and without choppiness. There were some parts where it seemed awkward, like at 0:21 when the text was changing colour, but did it in a rather sporadic fashion. To fix that, I probably could have finely-tuned the tweening for the colour changes.

In terms of visual design, I wanted to keep it simple because if I had multiple fonts, text colours, and background designs, it would be hard to focus on the text. That is why I kept the background black throughout the whole video so the bright yellow text would stand out easily. I kept the font (avenir heavy) the same as well, and only changed the colour in some parts where the colour change was the main focus of the typographic animation. I also had some moving symbols in my animation. I kept the shapes simple too, because if you watch the whole animation you will find that any design more than simple would be too much for the viewer to process.

The biggest technical challenge in making the kinetic typography was the timing. I can usually make audio match the visuals in a video precisely, but I found it hard to do in Flash. The reason is because in other visual/audio editors I am able to slow down the playback temporarily so I can match the sound and images. In Flash I could only play back the animation at full speed, which meant I had to rewind it many times in order to get the timing right.

The only thing I could use to help me with the timing of the audio and visuals was moving the marker over the audio and listening to snippets of it and looking at the sound waves of the recording and matching the words with them.

My New Passion!

I have discovered my new favourite medium.... cartoons!

Eye Sketch

I felt inspired to draw, and this was the result:

Kinetic Typography: Identifying the Elements of Animation

0:14 | squash and stretch

0:18 | ease-in and ease-out

0:27 | timing

0:49 | arcs

1:07 | appeal

1:11 solid drawing

1:29 | anticipation

1:31 | staging

Illustrator Pen Tool Assignment

Illustration

Original Image

Above is the design I did in Adobe Illustrator of a trumpet. To achieve the most accuracy of the shape, I took an actual photo of a trumpet and then traced over it. To create this image as an accurate representation of the original image, I first opened the image in Illustrator. I used the Pen tool to trace the lines of the trumpet, and used the Convert Anchor Point tool to create smoother curves and to reduce the amount of anchor points. After creating all the outlines, I added a gradient fill to the whole shape to give it more depth. To create the illusion of shine, I added ellipses with gradient fills as well to make it seem as if the instrument is reflecting light. To make the image more realistic, I made the outline  a similar shade to the fill of the instrument instead of a bold black line, which would make it look more like a cartoon. This made it more realistic because when you look at the original image, the outline is defined by a darker shade as it curves away from your view. Just by adding some discreet gradience to the image, it becomes so much more realistic.

For uploading the image to my blog, I wanted to maximize the image quality. I examined several image formats that seemed best for online sharing- JPG, GIF, and PNG-, and narrowed down my decision from there. I looked at GIF as a possible format to use, however, it reduces the richness of colour when compressed. I did not want this because the colour of my illustration is one of the most important aspects because of how heavily the realism depends on it. I then looked at JPG, which also seemed promising because of its ability to support colourful images. One large problem with this format though is that it does not cover sharp edges (vectors) well, so my image, a vector drawing, would turn out blurry. The final format I looked at was PNG, which was what I went with in the end. I chose this format because it supports colour and sharp edges well, meaning that the uploaded image in this case would be the same quality as it is in Adobe Illustrator.

While making this image, I did come across some small problems that I was able to fix. One problem was creating the curves with the Convert Anchor Point tool. When I went to add a curve to a line, I would curve the other line attached to the one I was trying to manipulate as well, but I did not want to. I figured out soon after that I just had to manipulate the line I was originally working on and then fix the other with the handle attached to it. Another minor issue I had was trying to add colour to a gradient fill. After researching it I learned that I needed to double-click on the pointers that adjusted the gradience under the Gradience panel to select colours from the window that would pop up. Besides those, there was nothing else that I had trouble with.

Overall I am very happy with my final result. There were a couple points throughout the project when I doubted that the final result would be this good, but I kept going and was rewarded with this. The things I am most pleased about are the accuracy of the lines compared to a real trumpet, the illusion of shine that I was able to create with the gradient tool, and the 3D illusion of the whole in the bell of the trumpet. The reason I am pleased with these aspects of the drawing the most is because they were the hardest to accomplish, and being able to do so left me fulfilled afterwards. The only thing I think I could have improved was the curvature of the shape, because at certain points the curves are a bit pointed, wobbly, and awkward. I am not too unhappy about them though because this was my first time using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator.

More info on file formats

Pixel Portrait

GIF

PNG

Here I did a pixel portrait of myself. I uploaded two different file formats of the image, GIF and PNG. Although I've been asked to identify the visual difference between the two file formats, I don't see any difference in colour, value, or line. If there are differences, I cannot see them at all.

For this self-portrait I intentionally made it have noticeable pixels, like in 8-bit gaming. Because the quality of the photo is so low, making a portrait that accurately represented myself was a challenge. To do this, I made sure to accentuate my hair and eyes because they are my most unique features. I made my eyes black in the portrait even though they are actually dark brown in real life. However, unless you are up close to my face, my eyes look black. I also made sure that the shape and colour of my hair matched reality. I made my hair slightly darker than it actually is as well to get the idea across that it is dark. I also did it because most people think my hair is black, so I made it almost black to represent how other people see me. For my colour palette, I tried to limit it to a few colours to keep the cartoon effect of the picture. Although my face actually has small gradient hues and values, I made it one solid colour in the portrait that I felt was the average/overall skin tone. I did the same thing with my hair as well to reduce the amount of colours used.
 For my shirt, I made it a red blouse because I often wear blouses, and my favourite colour is dark red. Although I have only one shirt like this, I think it represents me the best.

To achieve this picture, I took a quick photo of myself using Photobooth on the computer to work off of for a more accurate result. I opened a new file in Photoshop at the size of 100x150 pixels and 72 pixels/inch. I then dragged the image into Photoshop and re-scaled it so it filled the frame.
After that, I created a new layer on top of the photo and drew on that with the pen tool.
During the actual drawing process of the image, the only part I traced off of the background photo was the hair and the eyebrows. Besides that, I drew the image by eye because I found it easier to capture my overall appearance by drawing myself how I see myself instead of tracing the actual photo.

Rene Magritte