Cowboy Blob's Saloon and Shootin Gallery

I'm not a real Cowboy, but I play one in the movies.

Thursday, December 09, 2010

Finals Week

Besides napping, eating, sleeping, FaceBooking, snoozing, and avoiding doing housework, I've been finishing all the projects that are due at the end of the semester... mostly using fine Apple and Adobe products.

The final out-of-class PhotoShop project was to take an old, damaged 8X10 black & white (or sepia) photo and restore it to pristine B&W, then produce two different colorized versions. I'm glad I put this off for a week or two because the professor taught us the ideal work flow for the job only a few days before it was due. I didn't waste any effort reinventing the wheel and only spent two whole days on it, mostly because I had to select a photo that was so complicated. My Grandmother is the little girl on the far left, I think.














The Multimedia Design I (Flash) final project is an interactive "kiosk" flash featuring video, music, and sound effects. I didn't have any trouble coming up with video, as y'all can probably guess. I picked a subject near and dear to my heart.









Film Animation put me back in touch with the Bolex 16-mm film camera, only this time, it was shoot two frames, move the subject a tad, shoot two frames, move it again, lather, rinse, repeat. I'm still struggling with this beast and I'll probably be elbow-deep in Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack Pro (and maybe a little Flash) all weekend to meet the Monday deadline.

As you can see, it's a South Park parody. The characters were originally drawn in Flash, printed, and cut out into paper dolls. It would have been easier to just animate the whole thing in Flash, but doh! it's a FILM animation class. I'm probably going to replace some fuzzy or missing footage (forgot to bring the backgrounds) with short Flash segments if the professor lets me get away with it. I'll post the final product some time next week and hope Parker and Stone and their lawyers have a good sense of humor.

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4 Comments:

  • At 10:02 AM, Blogger Serr8d said…

    Photo restoration looks pretty good. You might consider running the final B&W product through OptikVerve Labs' Virtual Photographer plug-in (one of my favorites, works in GIMP too). As usual, duplicate the layers and apply screen - overlay at percentages that look the best; mapping the areas that might need enhancements to 'bring out' a subject.

    And, blue sky! to the color pics.

     
  • At 10:43 AM, Blogger Cowboy Blob said…

    Thanks! I balked at the blue sky... it was hard enough doing the trees!

     
  • At 12:50 AM, Blogger Serr8d said…

    There's an app for that, for GIMP, but you can probably figure out the trick and apply it to CS3. It's just a masking map to which you apply a color gradient. Does well with the leaves at the example there; but yours are pretty diffuse. You could select for them then decrease the selection by a pixel and maybe get an adequate look. Or not; the dreaded 'halo' effect might get your grade dinged.

    Come to think of it, it looks pretty good!

     
  • At 3:17 AM, Blogger Cowboy Blob said…

    It got the max grade anyway, but thanks!

     

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