Digital Imaging & Visualisation ; Project II : Recreating Surrealistic Painting

 
30th of October 2017 - 13th of November 2017 (Week 9-Week 11)

Ashila Putri Sandi (0332938)

Digital Imaging and Visualisation

Project 2: Recreating Surrealism Painting

Lecture/Tutorial 9: Puppet Pin Tool

On the 9th week, Mr Jeffrey gave us a brief us about Adobe After effects and the basic tools in it. He also taught us about the puppet pin tool in Adobe After Effects and how to use it. The function of this tool itself is to animate a picture to make it have a subtle movement. For the tutorial, Mr Jeffrey took a picture of an ink from the internet and used it as an example. I decided to search for a similar picture of an ink inside the water where I used the puppet pin tool to animate. The steps are to select the puppet pin tool then pin it on the parts of the picture that you wanted to animate then just move the pin tool.

Fig 1.1 Image that I used for the exercise

Vid 1.1 The animated video from the image that I choose 

Moreover, we were also taught about how to make a pattern of clouds in Photoshop and how to animate and loop it in After Effects. Initially, the steps are:

1. Duplicate a couple of layers of the clouds and place it in different positions with multiply as the blending mode. 

2. Then we move the positions of each layer so that there is an animation of the cloud. 3. Try to loop it by precomposing the composition into a loop and splitting the loop into two. The second part of the loop should be moved in front of the composition and the first part of the loop should be moved to the end but leaving a few seconds underneath the layer of the second part of the loop. 

4. Changed the transparency of the second part by having it at 100% just above the starting point of the first part and then changing the opacity to 0% at the end. 

5. Then you'll have a perfect loop.

Fig 1.2 The picture of cloud I created in Photoshop

Vid 1.2 Moving clouds (Loop)

Afterwards, Mr. Hafiz explained about our first project where we were required to recreate a surrealism painting by taking our own pictures instead of searching it on the internet. Even if we wanted to use pictures from the internet, we have to completely change the picture itself so it will look like our own picture instead of the original picture due to cases of copyrights and plagiarism. 

Lecture/Tutorial 10: After Effects

We were asked to start working on our projects where we should already have our own pictures taken.  Moreover, we were also asked to keep on working on our exercises and see if we have any questions that we wanted to ask. At that time I already have a picture of lemons and rods, so I decided to try to edit those photos. But, I found it a little bit hard to find the background of the artwork. Thus, I determined to chose another painting to recreate.

Fig 2.1 The first painting I wanted to recreate

Fig 2.2 First try recreating

Fig 2.3 Pictures that I took 

Lecture/Tutorial 11: 

I decided to recreate another painting for this project. I did it because I found another surrealistic painting that I thought it was very interesting and the objects are easy to be found.

Fig 3.1 The painting that I chose for my reference

Before I started to work, I first took some pictures. A photo of rocks from my apartment building,  a tree near lakeside campus, an old photo of a beach in Bali that I took a long ago, and a photo of the sky day with clouds when I was in Brunssum, Netherland.

Fig 3.2 A picture of rocks

Fig 3.3 A picture of a tree

Fig 3.4 A picture of a beach

Fig 3.5 A picture of a sky and clouds

First thing first, I made a new project with 1920x1080 size. Then I started with the background. I did some changes for the brightness, gave a posturized filter and I cropped the picture as well.

Fig 3.6 Attempt making the background

Fig 3.7 A layer of masked and coloured rocks

Then, I tried to mask the rocks and colour it up. Also, I gave it some kind of shadow on the right side of the rocks.

Fig 3.8 Adding a tree and shadow

Fig 3.9 The final look after editing

After edited the photos in Photoshop, I transferred the photos with psd format per layer to Adobe After effects and I made the clouds move. After editing the animation in After Effects, I rendered the the project and save it to a movie. Then, I opened the photoshop again to turn the video into GIF.

Fig 4.1 The GIF