My COM210 blog at WSU Vancouver
When thinking about my logo, I wanted to go for a mock video production company, so I settled on Final Cut Studio. I want to do a pair of scissors cutting through film strips with the “final” and “cut” portions on the strips, perhaps in a photo negative color scheme. Though I could not find a clever place to put the “studio” part of the logo, I think having it at the bottom will look good!
Here are my Illustrator tutorial images!
Here is the final draft!
From the beginning, I had to decide what I wanted to make. At first, I thought, “what says ‘movies’?”. Immediately, I thought of attempting to make a movie poster, but after mulling over the idea for a bit, I just could figure out how I could make that work, back to the drawing board.
I knew that I wanted to make something that I could use to improve the look of my blog, and that’s when I saw the idea for the banner in the assignment handout. I thought that it would work perfectly. I would get to fulfill the assignment and add a nice piece of artwork to my blog. With this new idea in mind, I once again thought about what relates to movies and film. Well, the answer is filmstrips, so that’s what I decided. Now that I knew what I wanted my banner to look like, it was just a matter of finding a few images. Using Google Image search, I looked for weathered effects and film strips that were explicitly free to use and remix. I was fortunate to find a filmstrip with an already keyed out background. I did the same for the camera too, but that took some more thought, as I wasn’t sure what would work well in the center of the strips. I figured that filmstrips in and of themselves would need a little more substance. Otherwise, I would have a very dull banner.
I opted to give a weathered effect. Additionally, when people think of movies shot on film, they tend to think of older movies from the 50s or older, so having that weathered effect was a natural choice. The cameras in the film strips were, while not a camera that was used for filming movies is a nice-looking classic camera that worked with the black of the film strips. My initial design process was to see how everything fit. I drew up some lines with the ruler tool so that I could easily snap everything together. After trimming the cameras, I applied the weathered effect. Last, I worked on the text, given that my background consisted of dark images. I went with a white text to help contrast better. I also applied the glowing effect to not only help with readability but to give a projection effect too.
After posting the draft, the feedback I received helped tweak the design. Initially, I had the weathered effect on top of everything, including the text. But, as pointed out in the feedback, that led to some unevenness in the text and effected the readability. Instead of the overlay being on top of the text, I changed it so it was on the layer just below it. Looking at it now, it works much better as the text is supposed to look projected. Speaking of the text, another piece of feedback was the unevenness of the brightness on them. A quick fix, but it makes a big difference.
Additionally, to improve the look of the filmstrips, I adjusted the opacity of many of the layers. I reduced the opacity of the filmstrips while adding some to the images in the strips to help blend them better. I also brightened up the grey background and made the font slightly transparent to give it the effect that it was being projected onto a screen. Overall, these changes helped to strengthen the look of the banner.
Here is my draft!
Idea and Inspiration
I wanted to do a banner for my blog. I thought it would look good to have a welcome banner on the site. When thinking about what to make in Photoshop, I first thought about what relates to movies and film. Well, the answer is filmstrips, so that’s what I decided. I figured that filmstrips in and of themselves would need a little more substance. Otherwise, I would have a very dull banner. Looking at the filmstrips that I have, the ones that I didn’t take care of were scratched and weathered.
Design Process
So, I opted to give that weathered effect. Additionally, when people think of movies shot on film, they tend to think of older movies from the 50s or older, so having that weathered effect was a natural choice. The cameras in the film strips were, while not a camera that was used for filming movies is a nice-looking classic camera that worked with the black of the film strips. My initial design process was to see how everything fit. I drew up some lines with the ruler tool so that I could easily snap everything together. After trimming the cameras, I applied the weathered effect. Last, I worked on the text, given that my background consisted of dark images. I went with a white text to help contrast better. I also applied the glowing effect to not only help with readability but to give a projection effect too.
Technical Detail
I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted my banner to look like, so it was just a matter of finding a few images. Using Google Image search, I looked for weathered effects and film strips that were explicitly free to use and remix. I was fortunate to find a filmstrip with an already keyed out background. I did the same for the camera too, but that took some more thought, as I wasn’t sure what would work well in the center of the strips.
I didn’t encounter any issues when building this, mostly human errors. I placed in the camera images without cropping them first, which made the film when I turned it slightly transparent to show the edges of the pictures. Which required me to go back and trim and recopy each one. Moral of the story measure things before you start using them in Photoshop.
Sources and Materials
I wanted to do a banner for my Photoshop project. I felt that whenever you think of movies, the first thing you think of are film strips, and that is going to be the basis for my banner. I will take the film strip image, and layer the distressed texture to give it a weathered look, and add an image (or several) into the spaces. Then I will overlay text across it!
Here are my 5 Photoshop projects!
Hello, everyone I’m Mitchell. My blog will focus on the film making and storytelling process. Those processes include the technical stuff along with the how to tell stories in film.
I have always found storytelling interesting, but for a period of time I never had a method to tell those stories. I’ve never been interested in writing books, and never good enough at art to illustrate those stories, but I very much enjoy visual medias and all the artistic choices that came from it. I began my storytelling, and film making journey by doing stop motion animation when I was 8. I did that for some years before I got a camera for my 12th birthday. After that switched over to a live action filming and never looked back on stop motion. Not cause I didn’t enjoy it, but because, and I cannot stress this, it was incredibly time consuming.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI9DUIgtRGHNH_HmSTcfUbA
The first influencer is the YouTuber known as The Closer Look. I’ve been a fan of his content for a few years now. He currently sits at 534K subscribers, and he provides great video essays on how to successfully tell stories in film. He may only have half a million subscribers, but he still reaches a fairly sizable audience, with some of his videos getting upwards of 2 million views. (His most popular sitting at 2.5 million.) These “How to” videos zero in on a specific aspect of a story and how to achieve it, for instance his How to Write a Great Ending video. Overall, The Closer Look is an excellent YouTube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/user/samandniko/videos
The next influencer is another YouTube channel called Corridor Crew. Corridor Crew’s focus is on the post-production side of film making specifically, visual effects. They have a sizable following of 3.32 million subscribers, and their videos vary in type. Some videos they give VFX break-downs, and in others they react to good and bad CGI. Their most popular videos tend to be the react videos, some of them getting upwards of 4 million views, but their videos that breakdown effects, or give other post-production tips are also popular, some getting close to a million views.
https://twitter.com/ActionMovieKid?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvmil-2FYPtN3NGRZAubQ0w
The last influencer is ActionMovieDad. ActionMovieDad is a commercial director, and VFX artist, he has both a YouTube channel, and a very active Twitter account. While his Twitter varies in content, ranging from funny VFX videos he’s done, to him just posting about his kids, his YouTube channel contains Adobe After Effects, and Premiere tutorials. It sits at 41K subscribers, and his main channel is at 1 million. Additionally, he has 17.4K Twitter followers, and his content is fairly popular.
It will be a lot of fun to further grow this blog as the semester progresses. I look forward to it!
Mitchell's Blog