First Week Carousel Evaluation

Day 1 of the Carousel.

On our first day, we were with Alan Figg who works with the graphic design students so I'm sure you can work out what we were working on. For those of you who aren't quite sure, I'll tell you. We spent our time working on the different graphics applications which I , personally, have never used before so this was all new to me. Now baring in mind we only had 3 hours , we had learnt a lot as a class on these different software's which has helped develop a new skills for us all ! 

Our first lesson was consisted on learning the basic fundamentals of learning how to Photoshop , using Adobe Photoshop ( surprisingly ). Before we cracked on with working on Photoshop , Alan gave us a brief description of the application. He said that Photoshop's man purpose or use in the graphic industry was to generally create effects for editing films. We were shown how to Photoshop a face , any face , onto something natural so something like a tree or some moss. The idea was to find these 2 images on the internet and then work on them in Photoshop. So , for the face , Johnny Depp is by far my favourite person in history so I just had to choose his face ! And for the natural , I went with a photo that would have more than likely been edited beforehand. 

The picture used for Johnny Depp and the ' natural ' photo

With these photos , we used Photoshop to merge them into one photo. Alan showed us a way of doing this through a non-destructive method , which involved first us placing both images into one page, like the picture below. From there we created a mask layer onto the face image This allowed us to crop the photo without corrupting any of the data in the picture. So using the mask layer tool , I was able to produce my final piece which is my image below on the right. Johnny Depp's face on the moon. What an outstanding combination ! 

We the moved onto , in the second lesson , how to use Adobe Illustrator and Maya ( a 3D animation program ). On Adobe Illustrator, Alan taught us how to create a cartoon animation of someone. We started off with first finding an image of someone. Again , due to the Depp obsession , I used a picture of him again. 

With this picture , we used the zoom shortcut ( command + or - ) to focus onto a certain aspect of the person. Mainly, a lot of us went with their eye. From there , used the pencil tool to draw over the eye thus creating the first cartoon layer of the eye. 

And so on we went over different layers of the eye to create a cartoon looking eye. 

Moving onto Maya. This application creates 3D shapes that allow us to animate certain shapes. King Kong was created using this marvellous application ! Now, onto the lesson. The general idea was to create a 3D shape and alter its properties to try and make the shape move as time went on. For some reason , I'm not able to change the size of the below picture but this is the shape that I was able to create during the lesson.

These lessons were beneficial to a lot of us as it has taught us a whole new understanding of how us media students could be able to use these graphic applications for any of our work , and how we could use these applications in the future if we follow into the media industry. For me, personally, it has taught me several new skills. Not only has it helped me with my ability to use the MACs but it has helped me understand a lot more about these applications and how they are used. Also it has provided more useful skills to help within the future for any of my future work.

- Owen Bowra