Assignment 8: Two Channel Video Installation

Here is peek at my two channel video installation project. Its theme is how often people can't communicate with each other.

When I initially showed it in class, I was very disappointed because the background noise overpowered the dialogue, which was pretty much the whole raison d'être for this project. Anyway, I have included links to compressed vimeo videos of it with two different remixed soundtracks. Hopefully they will prove easier to hear. (I tested the original on my laptop and could hear the dialogue, but soon learned that obviously isn't a good test.)


http://vimeo.com/66374620

http://vimeo.com/66374619


***Special thanks to my very patient friends who allowed me to film them many hours! I appreciate your willingness to help and subject yourself to experimental filmmaking!

Assignment 7: Slide Show

The concept of my slide show turned out to be a little different than the concept of the sound piece on its own. With the slide show, my idea was that someone is stuck in their apartment on a dreary winter day daydreaming about a sunny spring day at the park. As the sounds from their actual life (the sounds of their apartment and the street noise) build, they interfere with the person's ability to construct this pleasant day in their head and, subsequently, they start to think of just another dreary winter day in the park until they start to come back to reality and we see that they were inside the apartment the whole time. This is a pretty elaborate concept and one which I'm not sure the slide show really fully portrays, but here is what I ended up with:

Assignment 6: Sound Project

For this assignment, I made a sound piece called Rhythm of a Day. I used 39 different sounds that I recorded a few weeks ago to compile a piece representing the sounds someone might hear in the course of a day. My goal was to explore how the various random sounds we hear can be interpreted rhythmically or musically.

Here it is: https://soundcloud.com/karen-wheeler-4/rhythm-of-a-day.

Assignment 5: Photo Manipulation

Of the assignments we have had so far, this one was definitely the most up my alley. I've loved messing around with Photoshop since I was a kid, so I was excited to take this assignment on using some of the pictures I took for previous assignments.

For the first image, I decided to really challenge myself. When this picture was critiqued during the genre photos assignment, I received feedback that it would be much stronger if the photo presented the building straight on and it the tree wasn't there. So, I decided to make this happen. I used a lot of different tools to make the manipulated image. First, I transformed the whole image using skew, distort, and perspective. Then, I used a combination of the stamp and patch tools to add extra windows and remove the tree completely. I thought about something one of the guys said in the video we watched in class last time - that you need to leave in enough of the original that the

Original Manipulated

viewer can still relate to the image. So, I left in a few of the shadows and dirt spots and window curtains from the original to give it more of an authentic feeling. This image took way longer than all of the other ones I did combined, but I am really happy with how it turned out!

Manipulated

Original

After spending so much time making the other building image as realistic looking as possible, I decided to go the opposite way with this one. I took this photo of a church for the narrative assignment and I really like the quality of the light and even the lens flare in it. Something about it kind of reminds me of a painting, more specifically, an impressionist paining because of the color and the "capturing of light." I've always liked pointillism, so I decided to give it a little bit of a Seurat look. First, I tweaked the color and saturation to make everything more vivid. Then, I used the Pointillize filter. This process was rather simple, but I like the outcome.

Original Manipulated

For the third image, I decided to fully break with reality and take one of my nature pictures and make it completely unnatural. For this image, I cut out the bird from the rest of the picture and inverted it. Then, I used the Glowing Edges filter on each layer. In order for the bird to stand out as much as possible, I tweaked its color, hue, and saturation. I think this would make a really cool poster or t-shirt design.

For the fourth image, I used another nature genre photo. This time, I wanted to augment the sense of foreboding found in the original image. First, I increased the contrast. Then, I used a combination of the Dry Brush and Smudge Stick filters to enhance the image. I wanted it to seem like it is caught somewhere between a photo and a painting. It's not that dissimilar from the original in color or even texture, but it's just unrealistic enough that you know it's not a "true to life" image. Something about the final result reminds me a little of looking at coral underwater.

Original Manipulated

Original Manipulated

For the final image, I decided to take a picture and just enhance the image slightly so it retains a sense of realism. First, I cropped the image so that the random guy walking by was no longer in the shot and so the main subjects were more off-center. Then, I tweaked the color of the letters on the sign so they were brighter and had more red in correspondence with the other red elements in the image. I used the stamp tool to eliminate the washed out parts of the letters on the top of the sign and to remove some of the elements I found distracting like the bright spot of light in the background, the snap on the girl's bag, and the shiny zipper toggle on the guy's pants. I also darkened and slightly desaturated the girl walking in the background (seen just below the lower right

corner of the sign) and used the burn tool to darken the orange lights that are visible through the branches of the central tree. I think the overall effect is very natural looking but allows the viewer to see the main action of the photo more easily.

Assignment 4: Narrative Photo Essay

Walking Home

 I decided to do a photo essay on my walk home from school yesterday. I've been thinking a lot about routines and patterns recently, so I thought I would show mine. The premise of this narrative was that each picture would relate to the last through an element in it such as a building or a fence post. This was definitely more successful in some cases than others. Hopefully it reads somewhat linearly in relation to time.

It was a beautiful sunny day, which actually challenged me more than I expected as I struggled with the fact that I was walking into the afternoon sun and it was hard not to have the images blown out by the bright light. In some cases, I was unable to adjust the camera properly with my novice skills which resulted in some lens flares. I kind of liked this in some pictures, so I chose to display those anyway. I also decided not to fight the high contrast I was getting and decided to emphasize this as a way to show the difference between the bright sun and the shadows created by the buildings.

Assignment 3: Photography

Though I would have preferred some sunny (and warm) weather to shoot in, I actually got some dreary winter days for these photos, so I decided to embrace it. Here's what I got.

Street

Landscape and Nature

Abstract