DAY 1: EXPERIMENTING

I love textures and compositing and want to boost my Photoshop skills so this class was a great resource of both inspiration and techniques. I am particularly interested in creating the distressed textures that I could either apply to images or animate for using as background in motion design projects.

The original image appealed to me by it's melancholic mood. I like that he is facing away from us, towards the seascape.

The Quiet Frontier - image 1 - student project

I thought about how the elements would be moving: the waves, the air, and also maybe his mood shifting.

What would the shot look like with the textures recreating the landscape?  

Tweaking the Toner Stripes a little, I got the texture that could look like the dark and the light in the waves.

The Quiet Frontier - image 2 - student project

More intense Toner Stripes could give a sense of movement from the sky, like drizzle.

The Quiet Frontier - image 3 - student project

I combined the two textures with the Contrasty Image of the guy and masked out the stripes of the sky area from most of the middle part (water).

The Quiet Frontier - image 4 - student project

This is when I noticed that the two details of the guy – the ponytail and the white threads on the denim of his jacket – looked kind of strange like this.

To add some mystery, I added the second contrasty photo to the scene.

The Quiet Frontier - image 5 - student project

I flipped it upside down (borrowed the idea from Domenic! :-):

The Quiet Frontier - image 6 - student project

I might prefer it without the gradient map applied but this is the board I ended up with (I also rotated my "waves" a bit to add some diagonal movement and connect the sky and the ground in a visually more interesting way).

There was a lot of going back and forth and before I knew it, I went down the rabbit hole and when I surfaced, I disliked everything I've done.

At some point I ended up with two of them :-) but here the ponytail looked really weird and the eimage as a whole strated looking more creepy than mysterious.

The Quiet Frontier - image 7 - student project

My gradient maps kept ending up blury and uneven because I had masked out some of the areas and they would not look good at all with a gradient map on top.

I had to go back and paint the areas in again. Yet I wanted his head to be compositing into the scene above a little.

This is where I ended up.

The Quiet Frontier - image 8 - student project

 In the next step I want to animate the textures and see how they can work together.

Irina Almgren

Getting animated

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