Textification

The assignment was to make something entirely out of text. Mr. Sands let me keep the oval in the middle (which is supposed to be an inter-dimensional portal or whatever else you decide) because it looked cool and there's no way to turn it into text without detracting from the effect. Basically for this, I took a photo of a classmate and used Type Mask to cover him with his name, then inverted the selection and pressed delete. Then I used Copy and Paste and Flip Horizontal and Invert to get the picture on the left. Everything worked as I wanted it to (except a small hitch when I accidentally set the horizontal stretch on the Type Mask to 0% and it took me a while to realize why the etxt wasn't showing up), and, thanks to a cool font I found last year on an old diskette, I think it turned out quite well. The only thing I could really have done better is use a smaller font size to show more detail.

Once again, the answers to Mr. Sands's 6 questions. 4 of them were addressed in the paragraph above:

The hardest part was finding someone who wanted to be turned into text. To make this, I learned how to use Type Mask, and I fooled around with Outer Glow on the oval.

More Text

This will be the last text tutorial. This effect was created by combining about 6 other effects; whoever wrote the tutorial must spend a lot of time on Photoshop. I will post a picture made entirely of text in a few days (but it probably won't have any bubbles or clouds in it).

Another Text Tutorial

Another text tutorial. The tutorial would have had me making about 90 layers, but I got the same effect with about 15.

Text Tutorial

Another tutorial that Mr. Sands had us do.

Fairies

After Doodle for Google, we were assigned to take a picture (or 2) and turn someone in it into a fairy. To do this, I took the photo outside (the girls are in my class), then found a tutorial on the Internet for creating sparkles. The sparkles needed 3 layers, and I found that one of them (which added a blueish glow effect) was great for drawing the outline of the wings. The insides of the wings are simply a white paintbrush on new layers set to 33% Opacity. I originally planned to have them make the bushes behind them flower, but I found that the resolution was too low to do that, so I improvised and added the peace sign using the same layer I used to draw the outlines of the wings.

As anyone following this blog has surely figured out by now, Mr. Sands has us answer 6 questions for every major project (and a few of the smaller ones this this one). Here are the answers to the ones not addressed in the paragraph above:

I thought this was fairly successful. The wings turned out great and although I couldn't do what I originally planned, the girls in the photo like the peace sign. If I did this again, I would take a higher-resolution picture so I could do what I planned. The hardest part was drawing the wings. And to make this I learned how to create a brush and about Gaussian Blur.

Doodle for Google

Google has a competition every year for schoolkids (Kindergarten to Grade 12, split up into different age groups) to draw a Google logo. After they judge the entries, the winner's Doodle is displayed on the Google homepage (probably the most visited page on the Internet) for a whole day, May 20 this year, and the finalists are given a trip to New York and sent home with awesome prizes. Mr. Sands entered us into the competition, which means this Doodle (and the ones from all my classmates) will be entered. For more information, just Google (or use Yahoo or Bing if you want to be ironic) "Doodle for Google".

In case you're wondering, the thing that makes the l is supposed to be that part of the Mars Rovers that sticks up and has a bunch of cameras on it. The 2nd o is the Hubble Space Telescope. The e is formed by a planet with rings (the black part is experiencing night-time; i.e. it's not facing the sun). The G is made from the sun with a few sunspots and an asteroid blocking part of it, the 1st o is the Earth, and the g is a comet and 2 asteroids.

Eddie and Liz Animation

Eddie and Liz from Daniel Ghan on Vimeo.

This is why I haven't posted anything for the past week or so. I've been spending my time taking the characters I created then and named Eddie and Liz (Eddie has already appeared in my previous post) and making them have a conversation. First I had to find a girl who had enough time to be the voice of Liz. That was surprisingly hard, so when I got a recording I went ahead and used it. This is why the quality of the sound is not great: there was way too much background noise, and when being Eddie's voice, I made his first question sound like a statement. I would have gotten better sound if I'd had time. Anyway, after that it was a matter of importing everything into Flash and making 12 mouths for different emotions and sounds. For anyone who knows how to use Flash, almost everything I did after importing involved Symbol Swap.

Overall, I thought it turned out fairly well. I wrote a script beforehand, and the girl who helped me did a great job reading her part.

Once again, Mr. Sands has given us 6 questions to answer, so here are the answers to those that I haven't addressed above: if I did this again, I might add more sets of mouths to show more complicated emotions (I only had 2 sets in this animation). Animating the mouths was easily the hardest part, simply because it's so time-consuming. And to complete the project I had to learn the basics of Flash, since this is the 1st time I've ever used the program.