Workshop Activity: Week 9

During this week’s tutorial, a two part activity was undertaken under the topic of physical graffiti. The first part of the activity consisted of stylising and adjusting an image in the hopes of giving it a much darker and more sinister tone. My original image was of a bald man growling with a quite menacing face. Within Adobe Photoshop, I used colour saturation and curve effects to alter the image into a more ‘Sin City’-like appearance (majorly made up of black and white tones). To set some sort of scene within the image I also added a pistol (held up against the man’s face) and a speech bubble proclaiming “KILL ME!”. I believe I made a decent effort to give the image a dark and sinister tone, but there is one problem, which seems to take some of the wanted effect from the image. It was suggested that the amount of grey within the image be decreased as much as possible as to give the image a complete ‘Sin City’ feel. My image still consists of some grey areas which do slightly throw it off balance. When I attempted to completely rid the image of these grey areas, there didn’t seem to be enough communication between different areas of the image, particularly on the man’s face. By this I mean that many areas of his face blended straight into the blacks and whites of the background and surrounding areas of the face. This made it hard to make out what was in the picture and so I was forced to keep some of the greys in the image to allow the image to be more distinguishable. With more exploration of this area of image editing, I hope that I will be able to find ways of fixing these types of problems in the future.


















The second part of the activity involved creating a temporal composition showing three pieces of graffiti being revealed by animating masks. My composition involved just this with a concrete wall in the background in which the three pieces of graffiti appear. The three pieces of graffiti I used consisted of a cartoonish character, a detailed tag and a stencil depicting Donald Duck as Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’. I chose these images of graffiti because I believe them to be some pretty distinguishable styles of graffiti, all known to be found around the place on buildings, etc. These images, one following the other, all appear through masks and with opacity and, the third image, dissolve effects. My plan was to use these effects to create the illusion of the images being sprayed onto the wall (but much more quickly than in reality). This plan didn’t exactly succeed as I didn’t really achieve this illusion too well. As I hadn’t used masks in Adobe After Effects before, I wasn’t exactly sure how to used them, but got the basic idea of it after a little while. With the help of some tutorial videos and some more practice and experimentation, I should be able to improve my skills in making these effects.



References:
All of these sources were gathered from www.creativecommons.org under Google settings.

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David Wooding. 2008. The Sun. Knife And Gun Crime Worsening. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1316975.ece cited 25th September, 2008.

kirstypargeter. 2008. iStockphoto. Stock Vector: Blood Splatter Background. http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/health_and_beauty/medical_concepts/blood/1316538_blood_splatter_background.php?id=1316538 cited 25th September, 2008.

sascha Herfort. Unknown Date. Harefort. Worn Concrete Wall. www.harefort.com/portfolio.htm cited 25th September, 2008.

Fun Fever. 2008. Fun Fever. Modern Graffiti Art. http://funfever.blogspot.com/2008/02/modern-graffiti-art.html cited 25th September, 2008.

Anarchosyn. 2008. Flickr. Dusty Duster LosAngeles Graffiti Art. flickr.com/photos/24293932@N00/2311477224/ cited 25th September, 2008.

Cristian Kit Paul. 2007. Kit - Blog. Romania / Cultural Statements. kitblog.com/2007/07/cultural_statements.html cited 25th September, 2008.