Digital Publishing (Week 2)

Six Portrait Principles:

• To use a longer lens (70mm+)
• To have a shallow depth of field, to do this I will set the aperture to low 'F' number.
• When taking the portrait, to focus on the eyes to create depth and so the audience will automatically be drawn to the person's eyes.
• To place the person in the best light, creating the necessary shadows to enhance key features.
• Balance the image by using the rule of thirds which adapts the layout of the portrait.
• Cropping is important as you need to think about how and where you need to crop to emphasize specific things in the portrait.

Three-Point Lighting:

With three-point lighting, there are three lights which creates the three lighting technique.
The first one is the Key Lighting, this is the brightest light and so creates a base point for the light, when this is the only one on, it creates large dark shadows, to prevent this, we then introduce the Fill Light.
The Fill Light allows us to create controlled shadows, enhancing different features such as if you were doing a portrait, t would enhance the cheekbones, jawline, and nose.
The final light is the Background Light. This means that with it, the person/object, will not disappear into the background.

Editing on Photoshop:

Later in the lesson, I started to play around with the different kinds of edits and effects there was available on photoshop.

I chose a random portrait online and then started to experiment with different effects such as below. I found this interesting to look at and also quite eye-catching as the face looks like melting candle wax down the page, this then gave me ideas on what I could do with my portrait pictures. To do this, I tried out the Polar Coordinates.

Next I went onto exploring the camera raw filter, this allowed me to adjust the colour of the porrtrait which i found quite interesting, here I could adjust the colour to percieve a mood within the portrait.

Below, I also tried out the lighting effects, this is deffinately something I'm considering to use for my portrait magazine coover as then I can play around with the lighting to create mystery and depth in my portrait.

Digital Publishing (Week 1)

Portrait Magazine

Physical Features:

Dark Brown hair, but perceived as black to some

Asian

Eyebrows

Hobbies:

Sports such as Netball, Hockey, Basketball

Watching Musicals and Films

Building/Creating things

Characteristics:

Bubbly

Control Freak

Competitive

On my mood board, it shows my different hobbies, characteristics, and physical features. After thinking of the different things which symbolizes me, I then created a mood board of the different things I had written in the above. I decided to put more images of my hobbies (sports) because I feel that that is a large part of my life, and same goes to my competitive characteristic, these are my most dominant categories which make up me.

Portrait Magazine Inspiration:

Last week I produced a mood board of different portrait magazines, with these, I started to gather inspiration for my own portrait magazine. In many of these portrait magazines, you can spot similarities in them such as the font, in others, the pictures are a little obscure in a way to make it a little more dramatic and dynamic, thus making the portrait of the person stand out from the rest of the other magazines.

One of my favourite portrait covers from the selection below is the one where Lady Gaga is shown to have three heads, with a large 'V' in the centre of the cover. This is one of my favourite portrait covers as it shows in a way, three sides of her as the heads are different in some way from one and other, I also like how the 'V' centres the picture too, it compacts the heads together with the singular body, making it unique and eye-catching in the fashion industry.

Another portrait cover which stands out to me is the one where the girl is being splashed with water, and also the one where the man has paint dripping down his face. This is because, with the man that has dripping paint, in my opinion, it symbolizes his face as a white plain canvas, and to show the artist's creativeness, the paint is to show his devotion to his job. The one where the girl is being splashed with water also caught my eye as her face is set so neutrally as the water splashes her in such an elongated way, making it pop out in a dynamic way.

After creating my mood boards, I then went on to thinking of a name for my magazine, this was the part I fond most difficult as I wanted to choose a word, which somewhat described me and was also unique to the point that it is not a frequently used word. I first search up word of the days, there is couldn't really find a word which sounded right, and so then I searched 'Exotic Words' (https://www.proofessor.co.uk/rare-but-nice-words/), I found this website quite helpful but unfortunately, I was unable to found a word or phrase which sounded right to me. I then went to watch a couple of television series, such as Bates Motel and Teen Wolf, usually in series such as these, they have peculiar words which link into what the series is about. A word which caught my attention was palinopsia, this is a Greek word which means seeing again, for example like a persistant reoccurance of a visual image after the stimulus has been removed. I am going to use this word as i want my portrait cover to be that memorble for viewers. Next, I chose the font for my title, and so I went onto Dafont (http://www.dafont.com) as this was suggested to me. On here I found a selection of fonts to download which are simular to the fonts on my portrait magazine inspiration mood board, which is Sans Serif, after searching for a while, I found the perfect one, which is Tondu, I chose this one as it was bold and made the page soft with the softened edges on the letters.

I next came up with different ideas on what to do with my portrait magazine. After much thinking, I have come up with three different ideas to try out.

First Idea:

The Lady Gaga magazine cover has inspired me as I said earlier in my blog. My first idea is to have my three traits, personality, hobbies and facial features, portrayed on three different faces. In the middle, I will have my facial features enhanced to make my Asian features are bold. The face to the right of that will show my competitiveness, I chose to put this to my right as my right hand is my dominant hand, making this my dominant trait of me, to show my competitiveness, I will be focusing into the distance with a trophy faded into the distance. And finally to the left, my face will represent my hobby for sport, the portrait will be taken as a freeze action shot to show the intensity and dedication I have to my hobby, in it I will have my hockey stick to represent my sports.
Second Idea:

My second idea, I was inspired by the newspaper portraits and so I have an idea where I am looking down, in it there will be newspaper articles woven into my face, these articles will refer to my hobbies, physical features and characteristics. The portrait itself will be black and white to create mystery in my portrait.
Third Idea:

With this portrait, I was inspired by the portrait with the artist has dripping paint on his face and the girl that has water splashing into her face, my idea has combined the two to create an exciting image. In this portrait, I will have wet paint thrown at me, but the picture is caught in a freeze frame, my face will be white to represent a white canvas as without my characteristics, physical features and hobbies, I'm not myself. Each of the colours thrown at me will represent my three traits, firstly to represent my hobby of sports, I will use a royal blue, this is because during my times competing, I have almost always represented a blue team. Secondly, to represent my competitiveness, I will have red paint with golden stars in, I chose the colour red because it represents dominance and the stars are there to represent victories and success I have had. Lastly, to represent my physical features, I will have orange, this is because it is the traditional robe colours for Buddhist monks in Lao, being where I am originated from.

Final Thought on Ideas:

The idea that I feel strongly represents me well in a portrait magazine cover is my first idea. I believe this because the idea is the most simple and also the most visual for viewers to understand what I am trying to portray on my magazine cover.

The Style of Silent Films

What started as a mere novelty with the invention of motion-picture cameras in the 1890s has since become a marker of different cultures worldwide. The art of filmmaking massively grown and innovated in the last 127 years since the first minute-long silent snippets of clips which back then involved little technique, no camera movement, and a big, wooden contraption that resembled a camera obscura. Silent films were captured in black and white due to how expensive it was to produce the variety of colour we see nowadays. But as technology has progressed through the years, creators of film challenged themselves, starting with films which only merely silently captured the movement of people moving for three seconds, to slowly introducing sound and then colour, to which gives us our multimillion blockbuster movies we all know and love.

What put together the silent films were un-synchronized recorded sound, especially as there was no spoken dialogue. The silent film era lasted from around 1895 to 1936. In silent films for entertainment purposes, the dialogue was transmitted through muted gestures, mime and title cards with a written indication of the plot or key dialogue so that in some way the audience would understand what was happening in the sketch.

The reason as to why there was little camera movement during the silent film era, was due to the fact of the equipment being too heavy to freely move, which meant that films also took longer to create, even if the films were much shorter.

Films nowadays, play on enormous screens in a variety of colour, cameras will also dramatically capture over expansive cityscapes that appear to have been decimated, and sound will captivate the room from all sides, thus making viewers question whether they’re merely watching a film or are right in the middle of it. Considering the incredible features of the cinema industry that we enjoy now, we must redirect our attention and give credit to the silent films which began this global sensation, without which the contemporary film industry is a perfect example of the technological and creative success that we see today.

My Review of Arrival

Plot: 

The aliens land on Earth, which speculates a lot of fear into the people as it is something they have never seen before. The plot of the film is to help Dr. Louise Banks, realise her potential to see her own future, and that with that kind of power, she controls humanity's fate and her own.

Meaning/Message:

The film held many messages, the one which stood out most to me was about communication. To me, the main message that the film was trying to bring across was that it is communication which brings everyone together, whether we are of different nationalities, race, gender or even social class. In the film, Agent Halpern says "...If only we had a leader to lead all of us, things would run smoothly." But as communication is so powerful it can be used as a weapon quoted by Dr. Louise Banks, "Language is the foundation of civilisation. It is the glue that holds a people together. It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict."

Another message I got from the film was that time is precious. The character, Dr. Louise Banks, in the film gets continuous flashes of memories of her daughter, as at the beginning of the film we see that her daughter died from cancer at such a young age, we see memories in which builds up to the moment she realises that she is able to see her own future, at the end of the film, she asks her close colleague, Ian Donnelly, that if he was able to see his own future, would he change any of it. And so to conclude this message about time, it shows that we must use what little time we have on this earth meaningfully.

Method:

In this film, they use many things to convey a story which is more dynamic and interesting by using different things to symbolise different messages within the film. For example, they mainly used dull and dark colours, unless Dr. Louise Banks had memory flashes of her daughter, this meaning that in those memories she sees, she is much happier, whereas in the present, she is in a way emotionless without her daughter there.

Another method I have noticed is, when they first went into the spaceship, they are lifted into this dark somewhat, alleyway, to me I feel that the darkness represents mystery and unexpectedness such as the future.