Week 6 Exercise

Task 1: Turn a photograph into Graffiti Art

For this exercise, I had to turn a photograph of a person into a peice of graffiti art. For that task, I used a photo of actor Jared Padalecki attending a conference (within Creative Commons on Flikr.com).
I found that turning th photograph into a 'Sin City' type of style was relatively easy. I first turned him black and white, and then adjusted the saturation using the Curves effect. I think I found this more easy than other tasks, possibly because it was based more on how I thought it should look, rather than what a client might want.
I was pretty happy with how the picture turned out (which can be viewed in the video below as the man in the bottom left hand corner), although I wasnt very pleased with how rough the edges seemed to get. I will look further into this and see if there is a way (other than using the feather tool) to get a softer appearence so that it seems that the picture has been 'sprayed' onto the wall.

Task 2: Create a Temporal Composition that Reveals 3 Peices of Graffiti

This task I found very interesting. The class had to use 3 peices of graffiti (2 were supplied and the other was one that I created in the previous task) to create a composition. In this composition, we were to exploit the graffiti and make it seem as if it were sprayed on a wall.
We had to first mask the graffiti and then adjust the colour saturation so it would stand out on our picture of the wall. We then had to give it a softer look so it seemed that it was sprayed onto the wall. I used a lot of the Curves tool throughout this exercise, which helped to saturate the colours I wanted to stand out the most.
In this class I learned how to use the Camera tool. I found the camera fairly difficult to understand to begin with, but as I used it more and more, it soon became a little easier to understand.
In this task, I used the Camera tool to zoom in on certain features of 'the wall' that I created as well as track the wall. These features are known as XY Tracking, Orbiting and Z Tracking. In this exercise, I didn't use a lot of the Orbiting Tool because it didn't fit with how I wanted to convey as though I was moving all over the wall.
Overall I was quite happy with how my video turned out.