Photoshop animation & Encore exercise 9;

Photoshop animation:

Today we learned how to do some basic animation in photoshop. We did this by first opening an image (mine of an apple) and then using the magic eraser tool to erase the background of the image. I then opened a new canvas before dragging my apple onto it. I then went to the windows tab and selected animation before duplicating the apple and choosing where I wanted the animation to end. After I did this I tweened the apple so that the action filled the space between start and finish before pressing play.

Encore exercise 9:

Opening the test project I did previously on Encore I then imported the zombie movie file on timeline before
dragging the file onto the timeline and marking chapters on the file.



I then dragged the different chapters into the picture holders on the sub menu. I then imported another movie file 'How is Santa' before dragging the movie file next to the zombie timeline.

Preproduction DVD Menu research;

For the preproduction research for the DVD menu I looked at similar and existing products. I gathered examples of DVD menus of the horror genre and other horror films that I then annotated on power point.

 Annotations;

* Includes a lot of close ups, focusing on the actors faces to show all expressions closely.

* Low angles camera shot, making the supposed killer seem bigger than the victim, this also shows how the killer has the upperhand over the victim and also the victims inferiority in stance to the killer.

*Film tagline 'Get ready to get wasted' has a double meaning. It can mean to get wasted as in getting high/drunk or it can be seen as a suttle hint at being killed.

* The film poster sticks to using dark colours; black, dark browns, white, this helps to show the genre of the film to be horror. It also uses images from the film that grab the audiences attention, making them think about what could be happening to the characters in the film at the time.

Annotations;

* Paranormal activity is filmed in a cctv/self recording style (similar to The Blair Witch Project). The scenes are often in darkness, shadows on the walls etc, this adds to the tense and psychological build up of the film as it goes on. The not knowing whats out there.

* All of the camera shots are either from a handheld camera or a stationary camera. Making to it to be like a home movie which helps to build the tense atmosphere as it makes the movie seem more real to life than it is.

* Most of the camera shots are of a long distance where you can see the full profile of the character or a close uup of the character when the camera is being held by hand.

Annotations;

* Uses a lot of dark colours, set at night so everything is darkened, things become harder to see, more places to hide/emerge from.

*The strangers uses a lot over the shoulder shots, where the 'killer' is often seen behind the victim, but the victim does not know this yet. By doing this the audience becomes agitated and tense as they know whats coming yet the victim doesn't.

* Based on a true story, although this could mean only the names of the characters or the location is real, this still builds up to the suspense of the film as the audience are always thinking that this already happened to someone.

Friday the 13th: The menu for Friday the 13th, like the grudge, uses the colour of red, white/silver and black, with the silver relating to the silver blade of a knife. It uses layered images with the background of the menu showing a scenery of woods with a moon emerging from behind the trees whilst a figure is placed on top of the scenery with a silver glow like shadow, making the figure stand out. The text used on the menu is again like the grudge in white and kept simple with the highlighter being a red line appears underneath the sub menu selections when selecting a choice.

The Grudge 3: The Grudge 3 DVD menu is kept simple. It uses one main image from the film and then is accompanied by the movie title and sub menus. It sticks to the colours of black, white and red, using the red to make the title and the eye of the girl, in which a screaming face is reflected, stand out. These are also the first two things you notice when seeing the menu. The text used is simple and kept plain in white while the highlighter of the menu (The small eyes that appears beside the sub menu) is yellow, making your selection clear.



Research & Sketches for my DVD Menu;

Today I contiued my research for my DVD menu. I looked at different films in the horror genre and compared their differences and similarities, their colour choices, texts and effects. I then considered these when sketching my own ideas for my DVD menu and annotated them in detail.

I decided to stick the colours of black, white and grey, the only colour being the title and the highlight of the different menu selections. I'm doing this as I want the menu to appear older then it is, almost like a sepia or film grain effect, to add age to it.

Encore test exercise;

After opening Adobe Encore CS3 I created a new file and folder. I created the new project with a DVD authoring mode and PAL format before importing a film clip from the media archives folder on the hard drive I'm using. I imported the clip as a timeline file as it is a film clip that I'm using. I then double clicked on the blue notes menu option in the libary section of encore.

After I double clicked blue notes menu a menu screen appeared. I selected the first button on the menu before dragging the pickwhip over to the movie file in the project menu. I then reset my menu to 'set as first play' before viewing a preview of what I'd done.

I then created an end action to the menu by dragging the pickwhip from the properties menu to my menu in the project menu so that the menu would return to the introduction after the film clip played.



I then right clicked my mouse inside the project menu and created two new folders; Menus & Timelines, and placed each file into one of the folders; PAL_Blue Notes Menu into the menus folder and both 'army of zombies' into the Timelines folder.





Digital graphics for IMedia; Investigation

'Everything a beginner needs to know about digital images of photoshop...'

For my article about digital graphics of photoshop I researched different image formats such as Jpg, PSD,Tiff and more, I'm also looking at how images are captured, differences between formats and resolution. I copied and pasted the information I found from useful sites before highlighting what I thought was important and annotating the infomation.

JPG;  Works well on photographs, naturalistic artwork, 'real-world' scenes etc however they're not so good when it comes to lettering, cartoons and black and white lines. Jpg becomes 'lossy' this means that when the image is decompressed it won't be identical to the original image put in. JPG supports CMYK, RGB and grayscale colour spaces. It's supported in HTML and other web applications and when saved directly in jpg format compression, contrast, sharpness etc are applied.

PSD;  Photoshop files are written and read by Photoshop  but there are some other appplications that read this format. Most page layout applications won't allow images in PSD to be placed. PSD files keep all of the file attributes although to use PSD they must first be converted to a TIFF file.

TIFF; Raster-based file that is widely used in desktop publishing. It supports RGB, CMYK, grayscale, lab and indexed colour. The format uses compression but doesn't necessarily loose information while compressing  like Jpg does.

BMP; Mostly used on DOS and window based machines. It is a raster file that only RGB colour space and also bit depths of 1, 4, 8 and 24 bits per channel, this makes BMP unsuitable to use in high-end print production.

GIF; Used mainly for cartoon like graphics. It has an 8 bit format which means that the maxium number of colours supported by GIF is 256. There are two types of GIF formats, 87a and 89a with 89a having additional features like imporved interlacing, transparency and also the ability to store mutiple images in one file to create animation however only netscape supports animated GIF files.



Week 4; Film poster.

I finished editing my film poster and changed the document from a psd. file to a jpg. so that I could print it and put it into my folder of work. I changed the resolution to 150 and made sure the document was of A4 size before printing it in colour.

After printing my poster I then saved it onto the student harddrive by opening the folder for my class and then creating a new folder under my name before dragging and dropping my poster into the folder.

My film poster.