The Magical Lizard Walk!

Last week we went out into the city of Leicester and started taking photographs of where we were walking around and talking for two-ish hours. We took the photographs with a mobile phone of one of the group members, uploaded them to facebook and then we mapped out the route on google maps and added annotations to the points on the map. 


View The Magic Lizard Crawl in a larger map

Psychogeography!

This week in our Digital Media Workshop, we started a small section of work on Psychogeography to carry us to the end of the Autum term on the 18th of december.

We started off by going over some of the stuff from the last Digital Media lecture we had last tuesday.

Then we broke off into groups and started to plan our very own piece of Psychogeography from around Leicester. First off, one of the group members suggested we walk around leicester and got random passers by to hold up lyrics from a bob marley song. While going around a route that resembled a Smiley Face.

After a little while of looking, we realised that there wasnt anywhere near the university campus to get this done, so we went back to the drawing board. While sticking with the BOB theme, we went back to google maps and we decided that this was far easier for us to plan out, after planning out a route, we decided that we were going to just take pictures of the route while walking along the BOB path in the city centre.  This looks like it could be fun, I enjoyed planning it and working with some of my friends from University.

I look forwad to next week when we have to go out and get the pictures taken. It should prove to be something very new for me, as I have never really taken part in a photography project on this level before.

fun times ahead. I also look forwad to setting it up for publishing on the web, I do not know how it will be done, but i'm sure we'll figure something out when it comes down to it.

Week Three! Photoshop introductions and Banners!

This week, we, as a class were being shown how to use Adobe Photoshop CS3.  To be frank, I was bored. Simply because I've done this three years ago, so I just sat at my Mac trying to recreate what I did at home a few days before. Although, on that note. I really like the header I made at home and so do other people that i've shown it to.

This is going to turn into a little bit of tutorial for how i made my banner, but I believe that it's important to show what I've done, because things don't always show how they were made in the finished result.

1. First of all, I started off with a grey background  "#303030"  on a canvas of 602 px wide & 328 px high  and the text, 'Charles Farquharson; Media Assignment Blog'  and then I started playing around with ideas while looking through my past work.

This is the one I took inspiration from;



So I began to try to recreate the above mentioned, because I liked the effect that the blur on it gave...moving on....

This is the first step I took into creating the new header (Click on the thumbnail below to see a full screenshot of the header in progress);



Just a simple white line made with a standard round brush at 30 pixels.

2. For this step, I just added some more, smaller white lines going in a vertical direction this time, varying in thickness too and ofcourse a couple more lines going in a diagonal direction.



Once again, nothing complicated or interesting, just another step towards the greater good. Afterall, in reality, this header took me seven and a half minuets to make in total (or there about) and about...20 clicks, at a guess, but that's not really relavent.

3. For this step, I added the blur!! OoooOOOoo Scary stuff eh?




This tool shown in the screenshot is the 'Raidial Blur' using it at 100 percent intensity, Zooming it (I'm not sure if that's the way to say it...but it shows it in the screenshot...) and at the best quality. After getting this set up, I repeated the blur 10-20 times using the Ctrl + F shortcut, which repeats the blur as many times as you press the buttons.

Here is the finished result (of the blur phase atleast);


 
4. Now to give it have some FLARE!...if that's a way to put it?



These effects were made by combining two or three Layer effects from the 'FX' button at the bottom of the layer panel. Namely, the Drop Shadow and the Outer Glow, which made it look much better than it was without them.

Just to finish things off, I added some "Marquee's" around the text, which is just a rectangle that has had the opatcity of the layer turned down so it is see-through ( Which was turned down to 17% so it's almost invisible, but it's still barely visible) . Then just to finish this finishing off...off, I erased the parts of the marquees that were not covered with text.

aaaand here is the finished result!




I really enjoyed this little thing to get us introduced to the program again, I hope there's more like this instore for us in the future!

Introductions Introductions...

Well, where to begin hmm?

My name is Charles Farquharson and I am a first year Media Studies student. I have a BTEC National Diploma in E-Media/I-Media with MMP Grades.

I am 19 Years old and I come from a small town called Northampton.

I have been doing the 'Media' subject since Year 10 of my GCSE years and I absolutely loved it and will continue to love it for the foreseeable future.

I have alot of faith in my abilities as a media artist, because I always try my best when it comes to my work, sometimes that will make me seem arrogant or maybe cocky is a better way to describe it. When someone asks me for advice on a piece of work, I will give constructive critisism to help you out, not to put you down or belittle...

My area of expertise (atleast I think so) is Photoshop, as it's the program I spent ALOT of time working in at college before I came to University and that it's the one I enjoy using the most, but that doesnt mean that I am not very good with the other programs we will be using in this area of the Media course.

Hmm what else is there? I think sometimes I come across as a little grumpy, but that doesnt mean i'm misrable or anything, I'm just quiet and like to keep to myself some of the time.

Well, seeing as this isnt really a personal blog and that i'm just writing this to practice my stuff, I'll be finishing up now and will head into photoshop to try and design a good template for the blog, starting with the header.


Thanks for reading!