Final Project Rationale

I chose Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare 2 to do my final project on because it is one of the passions that I have that I thought I could really do a good job on. I was going to do reading because I am an avid reader but I didn't see my passion for reading coming across well through technology. My image slides for the final presentation were just plain old fun to make, and I'd find myself itching to play the game when I got out of class after working on my project. I decided to focus mainly on the campaign mode of the game (story mode), as opposed to the multiplayer aspect because I felt that the campaign is more of a personal experience than playing multiplayer with millions of other players online.
Unfortunately I botched my voice recording as it wasn't on my flashdrive when I went to finish. I had planned on having the natural gun noises (in that cool percussion beat) open my project, then have my voice come in and then end with the quote on the last slide. As it turns off I still think it is pretty cool, though admittedly I could have had an easier transition from the gun noise to the quote.

Bind-in Blow-in Rationale

I used Adobe Illustrator and Quark express to do my bind-in blow-in cards. Of the two I prefered Adobe Illustrator because I found it easier to use. I had little to no difficulty finding the tools I needed in Illustrator to get the effects I wanted. One of the biggest challenges I had was finding the exact ESPN font that the original cards used. Once I stopped trying to make a cheap immitation of the font I googled "Espn font" and found a website where I could download it. With that crisis averted my other main challenge was some of the touchy work around the outside of the cards, as well as putting all the lines that are used for scanning. Not that the last part was all that hard with the pen tool but it was time consuming and tedious.
I havn't had a good opinion of Quark since we used it to make our band poster. In that assignment I tried and tried to find a way to manipulate the fire image that I had brought in to enhance the top of the poster. I was incredibly frustrated to find that when I put the poster in photoshop I was able to create the desired effect with little to no hassle. That being said using Quark for the bind-in blow-in cards wasn't all that bad. I still preffered using Illustrator but after having just done a card in Illustrator I found Quark to be a little less of a hassle.

Flickr project

Patriot Place Broshure

Online Broshure

Concert Poster

Design Rational Power Point

I have made multiple power points in my academic career, but this one is by far the one I am most proud of. I was excited to learn how to put music into a power point because previously I had only been able to put sound bytes from certain websites into my presentations. I wanted to do my presentation on an artist I liked and that I felt I could do justice to in a power point. I chose Lupe because I really enjoy his music but he isn't quite as mainstream as some other rappers. Really I was trying to do his music justice while hopefully introducing him to the class in a good light as inspire others to listen to him.
I based my color scheme off of one of the first pictures I found when begining to plan out my presentation. The green and black theme seemed to really fit, and I'm proud of the effect I gave both the sources slide and the track list slide. I found adjusting the opacity to keep the text from being obscured to be a pain.
One thing that I am very proud of was how i was able to mesh the two songs I chose. I had never used a music editing program before, but I found audacity to be easy to use and I'm proud of how it turned out. If I had had more time I would have worked through the timings of the dimming and fading animations, which irked me till the end.

Lupe Fiasco2

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Design Rationale Animation

I was excited to make the collage for my font poem because I really like my quote and how the still frame turned out. I was looking forward to adding a collage to it and even more excited to animate it all together. I decided that in making my collage I would have one or two pictures to represent each of the major words in my quote. The biggest problem I faced was cutting and downsizing the pictures I found to go with my quote. I had to bring them into Photoshop on a separate tab, then cut out the main image from the background in the original picture. After I brought the cropped image into my collage I had to place it appropriately, then I used the blur tool to give the edges a smoother feel. I’m most proud of my placement of the images and how the placement in the collage correlates directly to the placement of the words. If I had more time on the assignment I would have worked to cover all the open background space with pictures that relate to my quote, using the blur tool to make sure the edges blended well. The uploading part of the project was incredibly frustrating and I really don’t know why FileZilla exists when photobucket does the uploading job infinitely easier. That being said once we decided to use photobucket the uploading process ceased to be a hassle and instead was a quick and efficient procedure.

Animation

Hands + Corpse

Contact Sheet

The first row of my contact sheet consists of the same picture but at different resolutions. The resolutions range from 1200 dots per inch to a lowly 72 dots per inch. I changed the resolution by going to “Image Size” under the Image drop box and entering a new number resolution in the resolution field.

For the second row I chose a picture of fireworks in Disney to change the color scheme and settings on. First I enhanced the colors and second I changed the tone to duotone meaning you can set two underlying tones on a black and white image.

The orientation row was all about cropping the picture and setting the dimensions to determine if the picture would be landscape, square, or portrait.

In the framing row the goal was to crop a picture zooming in for all intensive purposes but keeping the picture size itself at 1 inch by 1.333 inches. The tricky part was to make sure that your picture didn’t loose resolution, as you cropped deeper into it.

The content row had me using the crop tool again this time to take a picture of something commonplace and by cropping and enhancing one part of the picture turn it into a picture of something unrecognizable.

For the purpose row I got to test out all kinds of effects tools and see how they changed the original picture. I chose to use the Darkstroke, Neon Glow, and Palette knife effects because I thought they changed the picture in a cool way, and because I was the most surprised by how they changed the picture.

My quote is from George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire". As a longtime fan of this series this particular quote popped into my head immediately when I found out that I would need to bring a quote to life. My only real concern going in was whether or not I could do the quote justice. The most challenging part of the project was having the words convey imagery, such as the word mountain being in a triangle. Another challenge was once I had the words I wanted in positions as to convey imagery I wanted to make sure that I was using all the space without leaving gaping holes. I actually had to use two different layers to make the mountain image a possibility. I am really proud that I was able to use a variety of effects on the text itself as well as figuring out how to use the space I had with the images I wanted to convey. If I had more time I would probably have found a background that really pertained to the quote, as it stands now I spent most of my time working on the placement of text and the text effects. I honestly surprised myself in that I was able to learn how to use the photoshop program with relative ease. I'm not bragging, I'm just proud that i could do what I wanted to in the program and that I know I could do it again.

Font Poem Draft