Film Critique

1. The film takes place in either the present or the near future in an unnamed forest in an English speaking part of the world.  A girl is visiting to father in order to make amends after some kind of split happened in the family.  Her father is apparently obsessing over a society of tiny people who live in the forest.  She thinks he's crazy, runs away, and comes into the middle of a ceremony of the tiny people and apparently by accident is shrunk.  From their she joins up with some of the "Leaf Men" as apparently some of them are called, and goes on a quest to save the forest.

2. The main themes of the play are Life versus Death, and Good versus Evil.

3. The movie is very cool.  The screenplay was very good although in some parts it was kind of corny.  The problem about the movie is how well off the bad guys were, but instead of accomplishing their goals in the long term, they stupidly went for hard to accomplish short term goals that were bad for basically every reason.  It had lots of symbolism, unfortunately, this movie would have been much better had the bad guys won, which they should have.

4. THE BAD GUYS WERE WEAK! They were very predictible and stupid.  This film had even more potential had it been made PG13 and had a sequel.

The Spoooooky Hooouuuse...

Ok, this may sound sad, but it was the Haunted Mansion that inspired me to make my house the way I did.  I used to be so entirely freaked out by everything about that ride that I could barely go on it without crying and having nightmares when I was little.  Oh, the memories. If it wasn't supposed  to be realistic I would have added the gravestones with puns on them like the ones outside the haunted mansion,  but I thought that would be corny, so I opted to omit them. I actually got the idea for the foreground from a picture I saw on the internet. Credit to the guys with really unkempt lawns and Disney World!

Custom Vehicle

This is the Imperial Death Ship, Bringer of DOOM.  I used several different space ships in my design, with the Imperial Star Destroyer as the base for it.  The X-Wing turrets had to be re-masked so many times it isn't even funny.

My five original images are not retrievable, unfortunately they were lost when I transferred computers.  However, I used something like these.  The actual turret on top was on a tank but I could not find the same tank again.

For the New Background I touched up the masking and color and took time to find a background that had the correct lighting.

For my screen, the response time could definitely be better.  If I were to move my cursor across the screen I would see a faint "ghost" of where it was.

Magazine Cover

Alright it's late, I know, but at least it looks good.  I didn't go crazy on things from the article, but I did make sure to use some things.  I think the one that had the biggest impact was typography.  I downloaded a specific font to make sure that it actually looked right, and I had had one in mind since the beginning.  I also had a plan beforehand.

If you're wondering what the magazine cover is about, it's about a trading card game called Magic: the Gathering.

Branding your team

          For regular credit, (1) I wanted to combine a few different things in order to make this logo.  I used the coins in order to show that we were lucky.  I wish I had the ability to make more natural curves because I would have made my own clover for the card, which I transformed from an Ace of Spades to a thirteen card with a clover on it.

          For Senior Designer, (2) all I really did was delete the color layers and all my shapes and symbols became outlines. 

          For Creative Director (3) I just wanted to make something simple. I wanted to make it so that it would be easy to tell what it was even shrunk for a web browser icon.

          You can only use the ideas of others legally if you change them in some way and add in your own new material.  You can't reuse totally the same thing if you don't change it.  If I took the Pepsi logo and popped it onto my project that would be illegal because I wouldn't have changed anything.

          My design went through a few changes before it came out as it did, and I like how it turned out.

Comic Strip

Whew, that was a tough project.  The hardest part, I think, is making all the color. First you have to make the things see through them make them so that they're filled with just the right color.  My least favorite part about this project was getting to remove water marks.  From the start I knew what my character (and the tiger) would look like, however,  the only explorers I could find had gigantic water marks, which were the biggest pain in the universe, ever.  I think I like the scene where the tiger is jumping out of the box, it looks pretty neat.  I don't like that I didn't have time to color the background or do shadows, so that makes it look significantly worse... All in all though I learned a lot and it looks ok, so overall success!

Eddie the Donkey

9/16/2013: Eddie the Donkey was a very informative project. I learned how to make things disappear, reinforced how to drag them from one image to another.  I like how we learned how to change the colors of the grass.  I think that will be useful at some point for other things as well.  I thought it was cool how we made the grass along the bottom of the barn.  I don't know how often I'll be using the magnetic lasso though, it seemed to mess up more than the quick selection even.  Time shall tell which is more useful!

Thor: Dark World Movie Poster

9-12-13: Thor: the Dark World. I just hope that it uses better special effects than I can use. I'm finally done, sorry it took so long Mr. P. When I found my background, I immediately figured out that my entire picture couldn't fit if it was vertical. I turned it around horizontally and that removed a lot of pixilation. I had to use lots of things to make sure that everything looked ok, but mostly i just used the eraser and the quick selection. I found it very annoying that the spaceship had so many small parts. My larges problem by far though was with Jane Foster's head. It was really weird looking so I photoshopped the head of Padame Amadala on top of it, which required a lot of Hue/Saturation stuff.

Color Theory Self Portrait.

8/30/13 - Well, I really need to do a little work on my cropping skills, and choose easier to crop photos, because Jin Gitaxias, the creepy dude on the bottom of my page was really tough to do. I like the blue. It only fades into black because when it was plain blue it made Jin look really weird in terms of lighting. The blue represents my constant seeking of knowledge, my intelect, and therefore my weird nerdiness... The symbols that look like the Greek letter "Phi" are the symbol of the Phyrexians, the bad guys Magic: the Gathering, some cards of which are also to the top of the page. The running shoe represents my love of running, as I am a member of cross country. The blue represents my constant seeking of knowledge, my intelect, and therefore my weird nerdiness...

Animals, Initials, Masking, & Textures

8/28/13 - Alright! Assignment 1 complete! I really don't know how I came up with what I did. It really didn't take anything other than me playing around, dragging the letters into weird combinations. I just kept the "K" as it was and dragged the "M" around and messed with it until I turned it approximately 90 degrees sideways, and matched up its two "legs" with the two "legs" of the "K." I had to use a few tools. I used the brush tool to create sparkle affects, and bubbles from the fish. I also moved things around with the default mouse tool. I can't wait to be able to make things like forum avatars and banners with Photoshop!