Digital Photography and Imaging

2.6.2022 - 10.7.2022 (Week 10 - Week 15)
Tan Yi-Tyng (0353327)
Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Digital Photography and Imaging
Final Project: Cinemagraphs Self-tilted (still & animation)

QUICK LINKS

Exercises: Weekly lecture note & class exercise

Project 1: Physical & Digital Collages

Project 2: Conceptual Product Photoshoot

Final Project: Cinemagraphs Self-tilted (still & animation)

INSTRUCTIONS

FINAL PROJECT

We were assigned to create a cinemagraph self-titled project about showcasing ourselves and animating a video. This project aims to express our individuality and reflect our personality into digital art self-expression. Below are the things that we need to take note of for this project:

Duration: 15 seconds

Output: MOV or .MP4 less than 20MB

Size: 1080 x 1920 px (I.G reel/ story size)

Idea Development: 5 marks (WEEK 10)

Design Direction: 5 marks (WEEK 11)

Execution and Post Production: 10 marks (WEEK 12)

Animation & Finishing: 10 marks (WEEK 13)

1. Biography about me

Tell us about yourself

My name is Tan Yi-Tyng, and I was born and raised in Penang, Malaysia. A 20-year-old girl who feels like walking in a dark tunnel with no light at the end, she keeps moving forward to finding herself. I’ve had my highs and lows throughout these years. Feeling anxious and lost about what I want to do and where I want to be. But in this current stage, I’m trying my best to fight hard times and overcome all challenges to find out what I truly want.

What is your passion?

What’s motivate you to achieve your dream?

As an introvert, I value alone time and freedom where I can spend time alone to do things that can give me inner peace. My passion for self-care was always having deep conversations with myself to listen to my inner self. Besides, I’m an art enthusiast as I like many things related to art, including drawing, painting, music, filming etc. Mainly, I find many things to enjoy in art which I have the freedom to express my inner feelings and thoughts that convey my emotion in a passionate manner. My passion for art and creativity makes me feel whole by giving me a chance to think wide to create something to share and enjoy.

How do you want to visualize your dream into an artwork?

The primary motivation is my father. He was so supportive of me no matter what. His support always pushes me to try and work to the best of my abilities. I want to make my parents proud and show them that I’m capable. Also, I like the feeling of achieving something from my hard work. Being able to finish a work that I am satisfied with and liked by others is the motivating force for me to strive for progress and innovation.

How do you want to visualize your dream into an artwork?

I’m planning to make something surreal and vintage style of poster. I want my work to have a meaningful message that comes from my thoughts and reflects how I feel in my current stage of life. With all of that, I want to include some visual elements that can symbolize something abstractly. And I want the visual outcome to be both a self-reflective art piece and a meaningful message for the viewer.

2. Statement about my work

Tell us about your work

I would like to create a poster with vintage and surreal kind of style to express my inner self of thought and the difficulty that I’m currently undergoing. As I prefer to convey the message in an abstract way, there have metaphors hidden behind the artwork that are waiting for viewers to find out.

What is the concept behind it?

The concept of this artwork is to show the dark side of me, which I’m currently struggling with myself. I constantly compare myself with other people who cause to puts lots of pressure on me and make me get anxious. The emerge of self-comparison lead to feelings of insecurity, fears and self-doubts. And I realize this is a way of tearing myself apart and consequently losing myself, my drive and my passion. The creation of this artwork is also a way to encourage myself to fight with this difficulty. It shows how the end, I finally open my mind and accept my inner truth. I have the freedom and enjoy being myself to do what I want to do.

What is the message you want people to understand it?

The intended message I would like the audience to understand is that comparison is the thief of joy. You are who you are. Your circumstances and abilities are unique and cannot be compared with others. The only real competition you have is who you were yesterday, last month, or a year ago. Use your past self as a benchmark of comparison. You’ll be able to see real growth through retrospection and be proud of your growth. This will get rid of unnecessary pressure and actually will make you a better person.

What is your motto/ quote?

“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.” – Allen Ginsberg

3. Visual Research

Fig 3.1 - Inspiration Board

4. Sketches

After writing down my biography and idea for the poster, I started off by roughly sketching out what was in my mind. I wanted to make a poster with a vintage and surreal kind of style and then I came up with two sketches.

Fig 4.1 - Sketches

For both of the sketches, I have been thinking of some story revolving around my topic, "free your mind". My initial idea for the first sketches is about when the upper part of my head is close tightly, the door that placed on my body is also closed. But when I accept my true self, the controller starts spinning and opening my mind. With that, I finally open up myself and being true to myself. For the second sketch, the story is something similar to the first sketch, the difference is that I used other visual elements to convey the message. We can see a seesaw inside the head, symbolising how my struggle with self-comparison caused feelings of unhappiness and depression. So, I made up a choice to choose the 2nd sketch for my digital poster as I felt it was more related to my topic and reflected the current state of my own.

5. Create digital poster

To create the poster, I first took photos of myself with my camera and tripod. Next, I went online to search for some visual elements that helped my artwork to look more complete and vivid. I’m glad that I have found some of the photos with a transparent background which save me a lot of time, for some other images, I need to move to Photoshop to clear them from the background. Below are all sources of photos I collected online that were used for this poster.

Fig 5.1 - Visual elements from online

Fig 5.2 - Visual elements from online

Next, I proceed with designing my poster. Below are the progress of my editing the work in Photoshop.

Fig 5.3 - Import and edit my self portrait in Photoshop

Fig 5.4 - add layer mask

Fig 5.5 - Adjust the portrait into B&W

Fig 5.6 - Edit the background of the "happy version"
by blending two photos together

Fig 5.7 - Outcome of the "happy version" background

Fig 5.7 - Edit the background of the "saddest version"
by blending two photos together

Fig 5.8 - Outcome of the "saddest version" background

Fig 5.5 - Edit the upper part of the head

Fig 5.6 - insert the visual element and design the "saddest version"

Fig 5.7 - detail of editing the visual element

Fig 5.8 - insert the visual element and design the "happy version"

Fig 5.9 - Adjust the colour and adding texture for the poster

Fig 5.9 - Outcome of the "saddest version"

Fig 5.10 - Outcome of the "happy version"

Fig 5.11 - Final Submission of Poster " Free Your Mind"

6. Animate Poster

After making the poster, I arranged all the layers in Photoshop more systematically to ease me when animating the poster. I decided to use Adobe After Effects to animate my video. It looks me quite a while to become familiar with the workspace and animating this one as this is my first experience exploring this software.

Fig 6.1 - Arrange the layers in Photoshop

Fig 6.2 - Import the PSD file into After Effects

As I was new to this software, I faced some difficulty in animating the movement of the seesaw smoothly. Thanks that I found a YouTube tutorial to demo how to animate it and I am satisfied with the outcome.

Fig 6.3 - Add keyframe

Fig 6.4 - Apply ease ease on the keyframe to make it look more smoothly

Fig 6.5 - Adjust the ease graph

Fig 6.6 - Keyframes of the seesaw

Fig 6.7 - Using the tool of null and parent link

Fig 6.8 - Apply layer mask for the upper head part

Fig 6.9 - Create sticker peel effect for the mouth

Fig 6.10 - Process of adding motion effect for all visual elements

Fig 6.11 - Layers in After Effects

Fig 6.12 - Render the video in Adobe Media Encoder

I decided to export two versions of the animated poster. One is applied with noise texture which is the same as the Final still poster. Although I like the texture that makes the poster look more vintage style, but at the same time, I think it decreases the quality of the video which makes the video look more complicated. I was worried that viewers are hard to understand the story behind it. So, I created another version of this animated poster without texture that will look slightly more clear and more comfortable.

Fig 6.13 - Final Animated Poster (without texture)

Fig 6.14 - Final Animated Poster (with texture)

Watch the video in YouTube Shorts: https://youtube.com/shorts/0GKDNQQCm5U?feature=share

Watch the video (without texture) in YouTube Full Screen: https://youtu.be/99sH7Oe_LUM

Watch the video (with texture) in YouTube Full Screen: https://youtu.be/zFE_9JO629w

FINAL SUBMISSION

Title: Free your mind , Free your soul.

1.Poster

Artist Statement:

With this Self-Titled project, I want to showcase the dark side of me by expressing my inner self of thoughts and the difficulty that I’m currently struggling with. Constantly having self-comparison is the main blockade for me to moving forward in a dark tunnel, the emergence of feeling fear, insecurity and self-doubt making me gradually lose my true self. However, after realized the problem and being able to cope with the hurdle, I can free my mind by accepting my inner truth, I have the freedom and enjoy being myself to do what I want to do.

There are multiple visual elements used for this poster and each of them represents something about me. I have designed the poster by adding noise texture and applying a reddish-brown of colour filter to make the whole artwork look vintage surrealism style.

The main message of this project is to encourage myself and also for the audience to understand that we should accept who we are, embrace our authentic selves, free our mind and soul, do what you can with all of that and let it be enough. Remember, don’t compare your life with others. There’s no comparison between the sun and the moon. They shine when it’s their time.

Fig 7.1 - Final Poster "Free your mind , Free your soul." (JPG)

Fig 7.2 - Final Poster "Free your mind , Free your soul." (PDF)

2. Video

Artist Statement:

There is a story behind this video. At the beginning of the video, the upper part of the head is slowly opening upward. With that, we can notice something like a seesaw moving inside my head, which symbolizes how I constantly compare myself with others. And they are continually stuck inside my head, which shows that I can’t escape these barriers. This led to how my facial expression looked upset, and the visual elements on my face represented the situation of I felt loss, fear, insecurity and self-doubt. The background showing a desert symbolizes my current situation of loneliness, getting lost and difficult to traverse. But when I start to free my mind and accept my inner truth, we can see the upper part of the head has opened more space, the element for the seesaw fall out of my mind, and everything starts to turn different. The background change from a dark tone of the desert to a brighter tone of outer space. All of the elements representing freedom flow out from my head, such as a butterfly car, astronaut ballerina, key, hot balloon, etc. Also, the facial expression that looks happier now as the “sad smile” looks like a sticker peeled off and shows my happy smile. There is also a bunch of dead and dried flowers at the bottom, turning into beautiful flowers at the end.

Fig 7.3 - Final Animated Poster "Free your mind , Free your soul."

REFLECTION

This was a very interesting project, and I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process. At first, I struggled with writing my biography as some questions were a bit too hard for me to answer. But soon, I started sketching out and brainstorming my idea. I enjoyed the process of discovering myself and thinking about how I could portray myself with the kind of visual elements I would include. I found out that using Adobe After Effects is a complex thing to do, but once I became familiar with the workspaces and the tools, everything became simpler. There are too many functions and special effects to be discovered. Also, I observed that watching many Youtube tutorial videos really helped me a lot and gave me new tricks. All in all, this is a great attempt and exploration, not only exploring my own inner but also learning how to use more applications to make my artworks more complete and vivid.

TAN YI-TYNG (0353327)