Photo manipulation practises

To help prepare for our final film, we made 2 different types of visually manipulated images to explore the main techniques behind the art form.

 

The first one technique we used was manipulating photographs we had taken our selves and editing them in photoshop.

 

We got the photos by going around college and photographing anything we could with the potential of them being manipulated. Here are all the photos I took:

 

In the end I decided to with a photo I took of Chloe taking a photo and have her camera pan down to reveal her face.



This, however, did not translate well on photoshop. It was easy enough to use the mask tool to separate the hands and camera from the rest of the background and put them onto a new layer, however using the clone tool to edit the background into an full background didn't go well. It went well with the brick wall and hoodie, but the right side of the shot warped and it doesn't look very successful as an effect, although this wasn't the worst part of my image. Because of the animation I had planned I had to find an image to replace Chloes face so that it would look believable, but I didn't take a second picture of her face from straight on so as a joke I took a face from a different image where she's at a slight angle. I also had issues editing her hair so it ended up looking like she has a wonky face and really long sideburns, but she winks so the charm makes up for it. 

The final image

 

In hindsight it was an incredibly bad decision to choose such a complex image, but it was also hilarious so it at least serves a comical purpose. However I also don't think I will be using this method in my final piece because its very labour intensive, and I won't have the time available to make a full film with this. But it was really interesting to see this method as it is used a lot in films so it's definitely fun knowing what goes into this type of animation, but its also plain to see its limitations as well.

 

The second method we used was drawing individual animation frames and shooting them on a real background.

 

To begin, I drew out objects from the video game 'Portal'. I did originally plan to animate the main character, Chell, but as it took so long to draw one frame, I instead chose to animate the inanimate objects instead.

 

After they were all drawn and cut out, I positioned a DSLR camera on a tripod and animated the paper objects (in this case a box falling off a ledge and into a portal and back onto the ledge).

 

Editing this was incredibly easy, it only required importing the frames into photoshop, setting each picture to be an frame in an animation, and saving the results as a looping gif.

 

The Final gif

I really like this method of animating a film, its very organic and it can still have a lot of style and variation. It's also easy to shoot, as long as blutac and tape is around, you're pretty much sorted. Its also easier to achieve depth of field and more interesting shots. However drawing each object is very labour intensive and difficult to reproduce for each frame, which means a lot of planning has to go in to keep the frames looking similar and animating well. I think I would like to use this method (or maybe a variation to speed up the process) because its really sweet and a lot of fun.