During the narrative 2 Unit in Digital media, we expanded on our knowledge in both photoshop and After Effects.
Funny Images
As our first Digital media project for this unit, we were tasked with creating a funny composition using photoshop. While the overall goal of this project was to output a comedic composition, this project did teach us a lot about how to blend and cut images to create a piece of art.
Behind the scenes
Lots of layers, huh?
Overall, This was a fun little project. I’m happy I got to learn more photoshop skills and produce these images!
Motion Graphics
Prior to this project, Adobe After Effects was mostly, to me, basically Premiere Pro with a few extra settings. This project taught me that After Effects is in fact, for the most part, different from Premiere Pro. Its the animation version of Premiere Pro.
The main focus of this project was to get us familiar with Premier Pro by creating motion graphics.
For my motion graphics project, I chose to do a Audio/Music sync visualization to a random song that I found. Both my favorite and least favorite part of this project was creating the graphics themselves. As much as I loved making the fireworks, they were a technical pain for me to make. All in all, a fun project none the less. I also added a little reference to a cool game that I play sometimes called Just Shapes And Beats. Its a bit of an obscure reference, but if you spot it, cool.
3D Art (LightBox)
Our 3ed and final project for Digital media was to create a piece of 3D artwork, capturing a scene from our English Worldbuilding project. We were given the choice of: Stacked wood art, A light Box, or a Wooden ring. Initially, I chose to create a Stacked Wood Art piece because I had gotten inspiration from a previous students work. This, however, crashed and burned and quickly turned into an issue. I spent WAY too much time on the design and left little to no time to actually assemble the thing.
After realizing that I had dug myself into a hole, I decided to attempt, and successfully, get out of said hole. I pivoted to creating a LightBox design instead, which was the best decision I made.
This is ultimately what I ended up creating. While this doesn’t show an actual scene from my group’s Worldbuilding project, It still visualizes the Act I wrote; Act II. The scene shows my character, Mori, falling down into his home, the slums.
Other view of the piece & Behind the Scenes
This piece does actually have other layers. They’re just difficult to see in the dark.
This was my first iteration of my lightbox. I was going to make it look like my character was looking at himself falling. Key word: WAS.
That was until I decided to remove the eye layer to get a better look at how things were fleshing out and to see if I should resize anything. Once I removed the eye layer, I realized that this looked way cooler than what I was initially doing; so I pivoted.
Artist statement
For my multi-layered art project, I choose to make a 3D light box instead of stacked wood art and rings. Because our WorldBuilding Story is supposed to be set in the future where society moved from the ground to entire societies built on towers(with the exception of old cities), I chose to create a scene where one of our main characters, Mori, is falling back down to the base of the tower.
The main goal of my piece was to bring Sol Oscuro, the city where Mori is from, to life. So the city that Mori is falling into is his home. He got to the top and is now coming back home. I created this piece to 1: illustrate the lowest class level & 2: to look cool. This specific piece doesn’t actually depict something that happens in the story; it was mostly just made so I could show what the lower level would look like. And don’t worry! Mori will survive the fall. He’s extremely durable and there are also just a lot of things that will slow his fall far before he hits the ground. Now, a quick rundown on the place depicted. Sol Oscuro is one of the few inhabited cities at the base of THE CITY OF STARS. You can think of the city as the slums of the tower.The big circle behind Mori is actually a drainage pipe created to be one of the main drainage pipes for the whole city. The pipe connects to a ton of other pipes and also serves as extra support for the city. Because of the general rundownness of the city and generally low Quality Of Life, the city is always covered in a layer of fog mixed with smoke and other contaminants. The fog is illuminated by all of the neon lights down on the surface. That’s why the fog in my light box is colored instead of just being translucent. As for the significance of the name of my piece, the definition of “Memento Mori” is “Remember you will die”. In the world of our WorldBuilding project, death is a common occurrence. Mori was named after that fact.
Looking back on my creative process and what I’ve created, I found the process, for the most part, really fun! The only exception to that would be trying to come up with what I wanted to make. That part took a while to come up with. I was actually planning to do stacked wood art instead of a light box. The reason I switched was because I was getting too ambitious with the design and tried to make all the machinery too technical. As for the creation of the 3D digital render, it was quite time consuming, but still fun. As for my experience with this project, I expanded my knowledge in thinking in 3D through planning where each layer of my art would be and how it would look with the lighting I was planning on adding. As for the more technical part, I expanded my knowledge in Adobe After Effects.