Digital Photography and Imaging / Final Project - Cinemagraph (Surrealistic Parallax)

26.10.2020 - 29.11.2020 (Week 10 - Week 14)
Jocelin Agustia (0345436)
Digital Photography and Imaging / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media

Final Project - Cinemagraph (Surrealistic Parallax) 

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Week 10 

Tutorial on Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere. 

figure 1.1 Inspirations on Pinterest 

figure 1.2 Photograph of Myself 

figure 1.3 Photos for Composition

For this project I want to use Adventure as my theme, the idea came when I brought my dog on a walk, I saw how happy he is. So I also included him in this project.

figure 1.4 50% Progress (29/10/2020)

Week 11 - Week 13

After 50% Progress, I decided to change the color of the balloons and the placement of my dog. Below here, I will explain how I created the composition from the early stage until the final.

figure 1.5 Process (1)

First added the background color, a photograph of myself, and a window with the scenery above the clouds taken inside the plane by me. I masked out some parts of myself so that later on when adding the clouds they won't have sharp edges, which I don't want.

figure 1.6 Process (2)

Then I started adding the hot air balloons, clouds, and balloons, I changed the color of the balloon from all blue (see figure 1.2) to some with red color because I think if it's all blue it won't look colorful and the original image of the balloon was in red but then I made some adjustments by using hue/saturation and the balloon becomes blue in color. 

figure 1.7 Process (3)

After that, I added the moon and applied a glow to it by duplicating the layer and changed both the layer below and above into linear dodge (add) and I blur the layer below so it could make the glowing effect. My original hair color is black but I always want to dye my hair so when I accidentally added an image and changed the blending mode into Hue, I find that my hair color changed into blue and it blends pretty well too. 

figure 1.8 Process (4)

Lastly, I added the ladder and the picture of my dog into the composition. The placement for my dog on the ladder was discarded because I don't think he fits there, I want to animate the ladder to swing left and right, and if put my dog there realistically he will fall, so I changed the placement.

figure 1.9 Final Composition

Animating

figure 2.1 After Effect Process 

I first started to animate in Adobe After Effect. I have watched s lot of videos of how to animate using after effect before animating. First, I animated the balloons and hot air balloons by using the slant effect and twirl. At first, I thought of using an effect called 'bend it' but then it couldn't be applied so I changed it into another effect which is 'slant' that has a quite similar outcome.

Next, since the clouds were grouped in the first place I need to duplicate and masked a part of the cloud to make them seem moving by playing around with their position. The ladder was animated by using the CC Bender effect. 

The most confusing part is when I animate the hair, I added a video of a shooting star to my hair and I need to use the linear color key and masked the video. The hard part was when I need to mask it because every time I try to mask it, the video will still show outside my hair so I try and try until it worked. 

Lastly, I added some hide and seek movement to my dog as sir Fauzi suggested, to make it look playful. I animate it by creating a new layer shape and apply the shape layer as a mask to my dog layer. With that, I could animate the effect.

figure 2.2 Adobe Premiere Process

The process in Adobe premiere was very fast, I just inserted the music and made adjustments to the audio mixer because the actual music was very loud so I lower the sound to make it more suitable.

figure 2.3 Final Surrealistic Parallax Animation

Youtube Link: Surrealistic Parallax

The quality of the animation when posted here was quite bad, so it will be better to directly open it in Google Drive or Youtube.

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FEEDBACK

Week 11

Sir Fauzi said that it is a good composition and asked what I would animate. He also said that he likes how smooth the ladder effect was.

Week 12

Sir asked me what do I want to animate next and suggest me to add shooting stars to my hair, he also provided me a tutorial on how to animate it.

Week 13

This time I was suggested to make the effect of hide-and-seek to my dog to show a playful animation. Sir also said that it's okay if I can't animate the shooting star video because it is quite extent.

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REFLECTION

Experience

When making the composition, I had a lot of fun because I did a lot of experiments on the placement of my dog and it was quite funny during the process. Because of my dog, I added a lot of fun and adventurous vibes elements. 

Observation

I noticed that the color shouldn't be all blue because it doesn't make the composition pop out, and in this final project I wanted to keep it simple. Unlike my exercises, I tend to keep a lot of things. I like it better in simple. 

Findings

Animating is hard. But because I watched a lot of tutorials, I managed to finish the animation. It took me days to finish just a simple animation. Although it is hard, it is very fun and exciting.