Whew, it’s been a long five weeks of putting together my four compositions and improving on them based on feedback during consultation. So here’s a breakdown of it all.

(The featured image is a picture of the scan for composition 1 in progress, by the way.)

 

Composition 1 (Filmmaker – Writing)

Using a reference image, I created two floating islands. I’m not really sure why, but the two islands took a loooong time to draw out. So for the rest of the islands, I duplicated one of the original two I created and flipped them to give it more variety. Drawing one tower was really time consuming too, so I duplicated it and filled in whatever was necessary for the tower to fit into my letter ‘E’.

Once that was done, I used the clipping tool to mask everything outside of my name.

I then rearranged the islands to my liking and added in the phoenix and the dragon.

To create more depth, I added a few layers of blue between the different islands and played around with the opacity levels.

I found an old essay/reflection/piece I wrote about the sky, the ocean and blue, so I wrote that out on the bottom-most layer to symbolise that this is world created out of words.

I wanted to show that writing involved a lot of hard work and frustration, so following Joy’s suggestion, I checked out scanography and decided to try it. I really liked the contrast that resulted from the scanning without closing the top. (I made the mistake of closing the top the first time I scanned and it looked really boring.)

In the next consult, she suggested that I sketch out drafts of the island and I did. I came up with a really rough back story about the island and scribbled it down as part of the planning process that brought the fictional world to life. And that’s how I came to my final piece!

Composition 2 (Filmmaker – Filming)

This was actually the last piece I created and I had a lot of trouble coming up with an idea for it. But once I did have an idea, the process was simple enough.

Since I liked scanography so much, I decided to make use of it for this piece as well. I held my camera to the scanner and scanned it. I experimented with moving the camera around, but I didn’t really like the effects. (I’ll upload the photos of my experimentation once I reduce the file size. ^^”) I then found a recording image and overlayed that over my scan. And finally, I typed my name in.

As I told Joy during consult, I wanted this composition to have some form of movement, so I used the motion blur effect on photoshop to make the letters of my name move. I wanted to start off with a lot of motion at the ‘C’ and end off with barely any motion for the ‘E’ to show that I’m tiring out.

I realised it was a bit too difficult to make out my name, though. So I added a few more laters to make it more obvious.

While adding more layers, I wondered whether I could motion blur the already ‘motion blur’-ed layer that I copied, so I tried that out. It made the motion blur more prominent and I liked it. And that’s how this piece was created.

Composition 3 (Filmmaker – Editing)

Ahhh, this piece took up a lot of time and energy like the first piece. I wanted to create a cool block letter effect (like I saw on Pinterest), but I didn’t have the time or the money to buy physical block letters, so I had to figure out how to recreate the effect I wanted digitally.

These are my drafts for this piece. I’ll talk more about the process for the actual piece.

First, I created the block letters on Google SketchUp and used a rotate tool thing to shift the letters around until I was satisfied. (It was really annoying at first because I just couldn’t get the hang of SketchUp.)

Using the Sketchup image as a reference, I created a cleaner version of my name on photoshop.

I added a shadow below my name so that the cracks would look realistic when I started creating them.

The cracking took quite a lot of time because it was difficult to decide where I wanted to create a crack and how I wanted it to pull away from the letter. But once the cracking was done, arranging the fragments floating away from my name was a lot easier.

To show that I was getting tired of looking at the screen while editing, I blurred the last few letters.

But then I realised that it was more accurate to describe what my eyes saw onscreen when they’re tired as ‘double vision’ and I decided to recreate it. So I duplicated the last few letters a few times and played around with the opacity of each duplicate.

Composition 4 (Filmmaker – Summary)

This piece started off as one thing and ended up really different at the last minute.

This was my initial plan for composition 4. I wanted to show the filming process by starting with the writing in the ‘C’, the filming in the ‘ELIN’ and the editing in the ‘E’. And finally, a girl sleeping once the entire process is done. For the draft, I used random Google images of the locations I normally film at.

For the second draft, I went out to shoot and tried to make sure that the change in timing throughout the day was reflected in the pictures. I don’t think this went super well because ‘morning’ and ‘afternoon’ pretty much looked the same. I didn’t have time to shoot at night, so I had to reuse the Google image as a placeholder. Joy suggested that I make my font/handwriting look like I was getting tired, so I made the ‘C’ nice and gradually made the other letters messier.

Joy also suggested that I add lined paper at the back so that I could make the letters fall off the lines or something, so I tried that.

The lined paper by itself looked lacking, so I added a coffee stain. I was prepared to go home and crumple half of the paper to further improve the effect. Classmates suggested that I could make the filming segment look more like filming by using pictures of camera equipment/setting up instead. As I was shooting my camera equipment, I just got this feeling that it wouldn’t look nice -that no matter what I did, I wouldn’t like this composition as much as I liked the rest. So I thought really long and really hard. And I finally decided to make use of the clapboard that’s been sitting around in my cupboard for a long time.

Following the initial idea, I wrote the ‘C’ neatly and gradually messed up the other letters. I placed the three above components of filmmaking into the shot by representing writing with the pen and paper, filming with the camera and editing with the keyboard.