Fall 2013 Blog Entry #14

This is a photo from last February

For this Thanksgiving weekend, I want to give an update on my final project for Ms. Sowa's Computer Graphics II class. As of this Tuesday, I have finished recording the video clips for me to use Adobe After Effects to put them together in a 2-minute long video. Depending on the amount of data storage each footage (either from a handheld Sony camcorder or from my iPhone) contains.
Three weeks ago, I made a proposal that I would like to make a video featuring my eight Transformers movie Autobot figures presented as the "Chicago heroes," which is based on my vision of the Chicago Battle aftermath. I was disappointed with the abrupt ending of 2011's Transformers: Dark of the Moon, in which I feel like making a message to remind Michael Bay and the moviemakers of how I would have expected the third TF movie to end when a huge Avengers-style battle in a populated city was over. The heroic background music playing is from last summer's Battleship movie, provided by fellow music composer from the Transformers movie franchise Steve Jablonsky. My video would later end with my Optimus Prime and Bumblebee action figures holding a paper to announce the anticipated fourth movie Transformers: Age of Extinction, expected to be in theaters next summer.

Speaking of "abrupt ending," I also made a video (last recorded on 11/21/2011) of my Optimus Prime toy with an ending speech that includes an EXTRA line to really make the TF movie threequel "go out with a bang" (though, not literally). His "voice" is my impersonated voice for Optimus, actually. While this is not for my final art project, I just want to conclude this post by making a joking suggestion of what would've made the Transformers: Dark of the Moon ending more "fresh-like" and really going back to the roots of his previous ending speeches of the first two (his first ending speech is my favorite).

"In any war, there are calms between storms. There will be days when we lose faith, days when our allies turn against us. But the day will never come that we forsake this planet and its people. I am Optimus Prime, and I send this message to the universe: We are here, we are home."

Fall 2013 Blog Entry #13

This is one of my final projects for Computer Graphics II. It is a redesigned version of my own popcorn product of "Norville Bluendocker's Popcorn," parodying the particular popcorn-related food item Orville Redenbocher's. This is done by Adobe Illustrator. Norville resembles to that of Blu from the 2011 animated movie Rio. I modeled this after my old hand-drawn, box-shaped Norville Bluendocker's popcorn product at drawing class during my final year of IFTA.

Fall 2013 Blog Entry #12

Last week on Sunday, my mom and I went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. for my art history museum project of Dr. Barbara Lash's Art 102 class. The certain types of artwork (painting or sculpture) that we were supposed to find are Italian Renaissance, Northern Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Romantic, Neoclassic, Impressionistic, Post-Impressionistic, Surrealistic, Cubic, Dada, Pop, and an artwork from the last 20 years.
It wasn't a bit easy to find a work of art from a specific period even with a map or guide. But with the help of my mom's iPad, I was able to research the art style that matches with the gallery section somewhere in the building. We have already found the paintings of Impressionism, Neoclassic, Baroque, and Renaissance. Around 4 PM, dad came along searching for me and mom. Later, we started having difficulty looking for the last remaining artworks in the East Building. However, my parents and I finally found the paintings of the Dadatic, Expressionistic, and Cubic periods. We were unfortunately not able to find another specific example of Surrealism except finding one in Spain of our recent summer vacation from last year. It was decided that I would use the Salvadore Dali painting of last year as an example for my museum project paper, with permission from my art history teacher.

These are the works of art that I found in the National Gallery of Sunday the 10th:

          

                                The Japanese Footbridge (1899),                             The Feast of the Gods (1514-1529), 

                                             Claude Monet                                                         Giovanni Bellini & Titian

          

                                     Organization (1933-1936),                                  Painting with Statue of Liberty (1983), 

                                             Arshile Gorky                                                                 Roy Lichenstein

Fall 2013 Blog Entry #11

Inspired by the clever concept of the recent Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, I began my sixth project on my own loosely-designed "foodimal." This particular food-like animal will resemble a ground-digging mole with a lemon as its head. I used various objects (including the fake lemon, the Belt plush toy from the Blu-ray 3D pack of The Croods, the Bionicle claws, and a pink eraser) to assemble my own imaginative animal. I scan them with the Epson scanner at my house and the other scanner at Ms. Sowa's classroom to convert them into graphic images for me to edit them on Adobe Photoshop. I dub it, a "Lemole" -- a mole with a lemon head.
After opening these object images on the Photoshop program in separate layers, I used the wand and eraser tools to delete the extra backgrounds while I change their sizes with the transformation tool. The closed eye and a mouth were drawn in by a pencil tool, with many different types of strokes. I even drawn in some furry details at the tip of a pink eraser to make up a small tail. Once I have finished putting them together to form the shape of a mole, I started to make up an underground setting with the paint bucket tool (ex., a completely brown background) and a paintbrush tool (ex., thin lines or big dots). Though I felt that creating a colorful background works better on Illustrator, something that I did not propose. Especially when I could have put the details in individual layers to make it less difficult when using Photoshop. But the best thing I did to make the finishing touch is by using the burn tool to put some shadows all over the tunnel created by a Lemole to make up a three-dimensional texture. If one could move away and see this picture above by focusing his/her eyes carefully, he/she could probably tell that the digging tunnel looked like it was round-shaped.
I think my parents will love this project that I had made. I give my special thanks to the makers of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 for reminding me that I could come up with my own ideas when inspired by something, which I have stated before in my sixth blog of this year's fall semester of NOVA.