Spike's Digital Media Blog

    This post shall entail the process behind the 3 collage edits that I made in Photoshop spanning from 20/10/2022 to 21/10/2022. The first outcome is from a collaging  tutorial, which showed me the use of masking and smart objects, I also had to redo the shadow technique, but I feel I had a lot more tools at my disposal this time in order to make it a success such as gaussian blur filter instead of just the blur brush. The addition of the bats in the background was also interesting as I never really used the 'Black and White' tool, nor considered using it to have an easier time cutting out images.    These 2 pieces are based on Hanna Hoch's photo collages which were made in response to the current political situation of the UK. By making a collage with faces that need to overlap in a certain way, flattening erasing and cropping too much could have made the process irreversible so I needed to continuously save and back-up the process and assets t...

    After editing through 15 minutes of footage I had come to a 90 second sequence, which in all honesty is probably more bearable to watch considering the camera lingered in many shots after the action takes place. The cupboard/ fridge takes which I thought were inventive at the time became the bane of my existence while editing into the 90 second timeframe as they consumed up to 10 seconds yet communicated very little more than any other shots leading me to cut corners such as with the teabag flick sequence, where I needed to cut multiple close-ups. While my final cut was far from perfect, hampered by some shakier shots, especially the arial ones and a shot from within the fridge which lingered for far too long, I believe I had some success in visually communicating the narrative of 'the tea ritual'. Improving the piece shall begin with reshoots, such as with a significantly shorter 'Fridge sequence' and then perhaps the addition of a few shots which I ha...

    In the beginning, like many others I had planned to simply film my hands doing each step of making Tea separately from a POV perspective. Upon hearing feedback from others who had the same idea I realised that it mostly defeated the purpose of the task in the first place. This meant that much of my initial storyboard was null and void for the most part, meaning I had to recreate many shots with a 3rd person perspective in mind. After that I needed equipment to make the sequence, namely a tripod, which my dad had 2 compatible with my Phone.  

   I decided to use my dad as the subject of the sequence while I film, using a 'Made for Phone' Tripod (Though it may not be apparent by the shakiness of some footage).   I chose to film at night as to not risk the light level change for consistency's sake. On the topic of consistency,  I also had to keep moving items from inside the cupboard  that I used were on the worktop as they kept managing to sneak in-to-frame such as on the fridge interior shot. The main issue which I encountered, in my opinion, was needing to craft the composition of many shots from around the lights in the room, this was most apparent in the cupboard shots where the lighting would obscure what you could see in the frame if not covered and used as a backlight, which if I might say so looks rather nice.  In total I have over 15 minutes of footage from 2 hours of recording so it will definitely not be easy to decide what goes on the cutting room floor.   

  Being the first time I used Photoshop on this course and indeed in a long time, removing the man was a little difficult. Initially I went with the approach of using the Clone-Stamp approach, starting with the brick wall as it was a predictable pattern that the wall followed, I used a selection box as to not brush over the wall's edge so but that was too straight considering the Brick so I had to later revisit the wall's edge with the smudge tool. After the considerable length of time this process took, I decided to start using assets from other images provided such as the window/curtains to remove the reflection from the window and the kerb. When tackling the text on the sign and the fern I used the magic wand I appear to have gotten extremely luck with the selection of the plant which allowed to past it on to a separate layer above the text, thus the seamlessness on the edit. I found it interesting throughout the process, whenever I zoomed in to an element I believe that I c...

  While being taught more basics of illustrator, I familiarised myself with using the pathfinder to group/ cut/ segment assets along with guides for more precise cuts as opposed to using the pen. The 'NIKE' logo is also made up of similar geometry on each letter which reminded me of the importance of re-using aspects of an illustration to create others for consistency and time-saving's sake. After attempting logos I moved on to Album cover designs. Considering that i have been working in simplistic shapes thus far on Illustrator I wanted to incorporate that into the fictional Band: Bread Bag. This is also why I incorporated arrows as they aren't on the list of placeable geometry so I created one by grouping together a square and a rectangle with the pathfinder tool, arrows were also my first association with the word 'Alignment'. I chose red, white and black as there was a strong contrast to go with sharp corners and straight lines utilised. On the topic of the ...

  Today I tried using adobe illustrator for the first time, I thought that I would have had an edge because of my prior knowledge with Photoshop however it is entirely different aside from aspects such as filters. I struggled using the pen at first as I had managed to completely avoid using it for my whole time using Photoshop after that it was simple but I still feel as if I have a lot to learn but as for basics I feel I am at grips with them. It was also difficult having to use the pen to cut out an object for example instead of using a background eraser or soemthing similar.

Hi my name is Spike. This post shall be the first of many about my media design course at Hertfordshire University, look forward to future posts. I am interested in Digital Media Design as it expands the capabilities of what I can create using digital tools such as the adobe suite amongst other softwares and I shall learn how to do so in a professional environment over the next 3 years.