Stop Motion - Progress

Today I have imported these photos onto the computer and opened into Adobe Photoshop.
Although I had a white background, it wasn't a clean/pure white that I wanted. As the colours of the flower were strong compared to the background I was able to use the magic wand tool to select all parts of the flower in each image and layer via cut. This meant the the flower was then on a separate layer to the background. I then deleted the background layer and made the background of the flower white. This made it look a lot more professional and made the flower stand out even more. As I took the pictures as landscape i had to rotate them so the flower was the right way. I cropped it down a bit to ensure there wasn't any excess area at the top. I repeated all of these steps on each photo.

Once I was happy with each photo I imported them into Final Cut Express and put them where we wanted them to go, we used markers to ensure that the images was in time with the music. The only problem was that as the images were portrait there was blocks of black either side of the image. I thought this looked very unprofessional so I put a colour matte of white behind all of the images so the flower was in the centre of a white background.

I was very pleased with the overall result.

Stop Motion

We have nearly completed our music video, we have got a 5 second gap that we still need to fill in. Looking through all of our footage we could not find anything that we wanted to use, so we had to come up with a new idea. Ella came up with the idea to have a stop motion flower to fill up this gap. We got straight to work and started cutting out the flower and petals from different card.

During the lessons today I was on my own. I finished cutting out all parts of the flower and placed the stem on a piece of white background as I wanted the background to be plain and not draw the attention away from the flower. 

I took one photo of just the stem. Then another of the stem with the centre of the flower. The next photo I added the first petal. I then added one petal at a time and taking photo's as I went. 

I took more than one photo each time to ensure it was in focus and just incase anything happened I had copies. 

Progress

Although I have been helping with the creation of the digipack, Ella and Gearogia are the most creative therefore a lot of it are their ideas. However I have spent a lot of time recently on photoshop doing editing to still images that we needed to use for our digipack.
As there is still a bit of editing that needs to be done, I am going to concentrate on that from now on to ensure that it is completed for the deadline, because due to problems we have had with the digipack and the template, that has taken a lot longer than we had enitially planned.

Stop Motion

We still needed to take the pictures for another section of stop motion. I printed the pictures at home and brought them into school. During our lesson we took the photos. Although I will import this onto the computer later on today, at first glance I think they have come out very well and will look good when it is completed.

Cloning

Today we had to use the cloning tool on photoshop to remove a date in the corner of a photograph. This was difficult as the background was very detailed, because the date covered trees, leaves & fencing. Below are some screen grabs of our progress.

To use the clone tool we needed to zoom into the picture to get a smaller sample to clone. We then used the alt button to grab a piece of the photo that we wanted to clone. By clicking over the area we wanted to remove, it replaced the date with the selected clone.

Here is the finished photo with the date removed.

Progress

Today, myself & Ella put the finishing touches to the back cover & completed the magazine advert. We are hoping to finish the disk with a background next lesson which means we would have completed three panes of the Digipak. Considering the difficulties that recently occurred, we are happy at how quickly we managed to fix the problem & complete these things. Our ideas for the final three panes are using photographs which were taken when getting our photographs for the front & back cover. These will be the focus for the nex few lessons & then we will focus on our music video again.

Finished Back Cover

This is our completed back cover for our album. We added the spine to make it look realistic. We also added a barcode & small print which again, makes it look professional & fits the conventions of a real album back cover. Once this had all been completed, we converted the file to a JPEG & uploaded it to www.piknik.com. This is where we made adjustments to the image such as airbrushing, blemish control & lip & eye colour enhancements. 

Magazine Advert Progress

As you can see from our last draft, we have now added a image of the finished album. We did this to make possible consumers aware of what to look for if they wanted to buy the album. We also added the logos of the companies currently stocking the album.

Here, we have conformed to typical magazine adverts as we have added quotes from music magazines & newspapers. We have also added a four star rating, these are typically seen on adverts. We decided to have different colours for the quote & magazine name as it made the quote stand out more & would be more eye catching to viewers.

This is our final magazine advert. We made small finishing touches such as Lenka's website & Sony's logo, which are often typical characteristics on magazine adverts. We moved the positioning of 'includes hit single - everything's okay' as we thought it made it stand out more & was quite an important piece of information. The final thing we added was 'OUT NOW!', this is important as viewers need to know when the album is available for purchase.