Most people have pets. Some have dogs, some have cats, and some even have chickens or bunnies or whatever other animal they find adorable. What do we have? FISH! A LOT of fish! And what does that mean? Plenty of (free) actors and actresses, plenty of footage (collected over the years), and plenty to work with.
With around 100 images and videos collected over years, documenting the births, deaths, and everyday lives of these free-floaters, there's been plenty to go off of. There's been so much, I've attempted to organize them by images and videos, then by timeframe, and then I eventually partically gave up and settled for establishing folders by whenever I just ended up downloading it onto my computer.
One of the scenes I wanted to add was where various bits of footage would be cut very short and then pieced together, in a kind of flash-flash-flash sequence where it all kind of "flys" by. Honestly, there probably was a much easier way to assemble this than what I chose to do, which was to essentially brute force my way through by cutting all the clips short and then manually putting them together on a single video timeline, realizing that they were either too long or too short, then separating them again so I could change the speed without them all overlaping and destroying each other, then putting them back together again, and rinse and repeat. My main saving grace afterwards was that I learned how to make and use sequences inside of other sequences, which meant that I could isolate that one scene instead of having to put it together on my main timeline, where it could potentially mess up some of the other editing, and also that I could reuse this same flash-flash-flash clip without it being so painful! Yay. Small mercies.
Flash back to three years ago, 2021, in the middle of the COVID pandemic. Stuck at home with nothing more than a lot of boredom, a camera, and a ton of fish, I started a YouTube channel, where I planned to make videos about...well, the fish. I never really got beyond making a "trailer" video to put on my channel screen before I got very busy and completely forgot this existed...until now. And with this personal project and even more fish videos, now seems as good a time than ever to see just how much my virtual art skills have improved (although it was a pretty low bar before) and in a way, finish the project I once started.
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Ah, the Birthday 500, a parody of the Daytona 500 Nascar races -- but with kids and plastic bikes. Just like the past two assignments, we were given the same video clips, as well as the same background audio, and assembled them together ourselves.
For this project, I ended up going a bit beyond what I've usually done with other projects, namely using more text and sound effects. In the countdown scene from right before the "race" begins, I used the text and video effects tools to create the countdown numbers and animations, along with some copyright-free stock sound effects to signal the countdown. I also found and used another copyright-free audio clip of a crowd cheering, which was used a total of three times during the entire video (once when the announcer was talking and twice during the actual race), adding a bit more auditory effect and stimulation as well as visual movement.
Ah, knock-knock jokes, both the bane and height of my existence. For this project, we had multiple clips of two fellows (or maybe the same guy? Clones? Twins?) telling one of the most classic and cringe-worthy forms of humor. Similarly to the last assignment, we were all given the same clips, but assembled them differently. But, since I chose such a dramatic style that leaned heavily on using simple straight cuts, it was hard for me to find a good place to put video transitions besides in the beginning and end. So, I ended up putting some transitions onto the text near the end.
Cinematic Epic Emotional | EGLAIR by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/ Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC BY 3.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_U
Alliterations? Check. Unnecessarily over-dramatic video? Check. Horrible naming skills? Check.
Our assignment this time was slightly different than usual: instead of looking for copy-right free images/videos online ourselves, all of us were given the same clips to create our own video (we still had to find our own audio though). So, essentially all of us chefs were given the same ingredients to whip up different dishes, all with varying flavors and textures. And as you can see in my video, I opted for an almost comically overdramatic style. This time, we also were to focus on two things: adding transitions and conserving fluid momentum. Transitions are fairly straightforward; they're ways to smoothly move from one scene or camera cut to another. Fluid momentum, however, is more abstract. Momentum in physics is defined as the mass of an object multiplied by its velocity, but in this case, fluid momentum is the "motion" or "movement" in a scene. For example, there's a clip in the video of the man opening the doorknob, which then cuts directly to the door closing. The motion of the hand opening the door and reaching back towards the camera has momentum that is transferred when the scene cuts to that same hand closing the door and leaving, ending the momentum.
Continuing with our video production unit, this next project was fairly similar to the last, except with a few differences. First, instead of using still and static images, we used moving videos for a specific theme, which you can tell I chose here as "food" or "fooding". Also, this video was slightly longer than the last -- going from 15 seconds to 20 -- and included music as well.
With my toes already dipped a bit into the deep, deep pool that is editing with Premiere Pro, this second project was significantly easier and way less troublesome than the first. Although I already have some experience with video editing using WeVideo, Premiere Pro is a completely different beast, with so many features and windows and functions and editing abilities that is very easy to get lost in. Epic Battle by FSCM Productions | https://fscmproductions.bandcamp.com Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Now as our final quarter begins, we start an entirely new and challenging unit: video production. For our first project, we simply chose a color as a theme and assembled multiple copyright still images. As part of the honors class extension, I also added (copyright free also) music, with my song choice being Strauss's famous Blue Danube, performed and provided on Youtube by Lud and Schlatts Music Emporium, linked here. I also (tried) synching the images to the music, which was much easier said than done -- and even now you can still see that the images lag a bit behind the beat by a few miliseconds.
One of the hardest parts of this project was mainly just using Adobe Premeire Pro's interface and figuring out how to actually use, close, open, and move around all the different windows and functions. As a complete and utter beginner, there was no shortage of amateur and careless mistakes I made. One of which was forgetting to save my progress, and having to redo a good chunk of the video...more than once. Another was forgetting to actually set the video's frame size in the start, so it set itself as the frame size of the first image I loaded onto the video, which had an unique dimension size that was vertical rather than the usual horizontal and was really big, causing the rest of the images to all be painfully out of place. Ah, pixel art. My old love. One of the things that first drew me to Minecraft and its iconic art style that warms my heart in a way few things can. And now, I get to both actually create pixel art of my own AND submit it for a grade, so from my point of view, that's a total win for me.
I created a rough outline according to the paper sketch I made earlier, with the general shape and pose already planned out, then slowly colored each section in with a few base colors. After the basic coloring, I edited some of the proportions and parts of the Dude, then added some more shading and texturing in.
To shade, I simply got a darker shade of the base color then applied it to anywhere shadows or less light might be, like the bottomside of the tail or the neck or the lowered leg with a shadow being cast on by the other, raised leg. Texturing was a bit less strategic. All I really did was get a variant of the base color and splatter patches around that section, usually for larger areas like on the shirt, pants, and the skin of the arms and legs. Finally, I added some smaller details, like the badge and walkie-talkie on his chest and the smaller blue badges on his arms. I also ended up redrawing the skull and its horns and cleaning up the rest of the art before applying a dark-gray background to make the whites and light-grays of the boney skull and tail stand out a bit more. The wolf. One of the most beloved animals in Minecraft since the baby beta version of the game, capable of being tamed by being fed bones and will hunt anything that either harms or is attacked by the player (except creepers, and for good reason: they blow up). And now with more soon to be added, including customizable wolf armor and new wolf variants!
As part of the new Wolf Update, either new wolf variant designs are being added to Minecraft! And so, if you look closely enough, you can spot the names of each wolf type in the text, alongside some other classics like "I like bones", "Doggo", and my personal favorite: "Woof".
And by layering multiple pieces of texts on top of each other with different shades of color and darkness, I was also able to add a bit more depth and emphasis for some parts, like on the lil' booper-sniffer nose and the eyes. And as yet another quarter ends, I can't help but think that this has actually been one of my favorite ones -- or at least somewhere in my top three quarters this year so far. This quarter has two main parts: combining the first and second quarters together to create textures using Adobe Photoshop for 3D models in 3Ds Max, and using Adobe Illustrator to create clean and smooth vector icons that range from being cartoonish to near-realistic.
Though some parts of this quarter have been quite time-consuming and frustrating (looking at you, Bezier Game =-=), like having to unwrap the 3D tank model into a 2D texture map or trying to get the shading and shapes of a soda cup just right -- just to cut it out anyway, it has also been oh so fun. I think that my digital art skills -- not just for Adobe Illustrator, which what we've spent practically the entire unit on, but in general my spatial awareness and mental planning skills. Following the Bezier line assignment, our next goal was to trace and color in multiple logos and symbols from the Star Wars franchise and then color them in. Many of the shapes and icons had very complex shapes, often with many curves that are very sharp and/or curve in different directions.
For example, the flags on the orange, bottom-left logo were hard to trace since they both curved very smoothly in opposite directions but also tapered off into a sharp end. The "wing"-like structures on the last one in the bottom-right corner were also hard to trace for a similar reason: because of their size that sharply turned into a point. |
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The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Chapel Hill High School and Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Archives
May 2024
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