Film Critique: Epic

   For the move 'Epic', it covered several subjects. However, the most obvious ones were biology (pretty much any sort of science) and history. History, because of the fact that they had all of the ancient scrolls that told every event of the past. The setting was mostly in the forest, and there were a few scenes at the girl's house with her dad. The forest had two kingdoms, the Leafmen kingdom and the evil guy's kingdom who wanted the whole forest to be dead.
   In the beginning of the movie, the girl was given the pod of life and she needs to make sure that it blooms in  the moonlight in order for the whole forest to be saved. It raises the issue of loyalty and trust. The major themes of this movie were love and loyalty and being trustworthy.
   I liked the movie a lot, and I loved everything about it. The only thing I would change is that in the end, I would have had both the dad and the girl shrink and stay like that instead. It would have made for a better love story and also the dad would have been really happy. I think people of all ages would like this film.
   The only weakness in this film was the ending, but other than that I actually thought all of it was great. I would watch this in my spare time.

    For my scary house, I based it off of a house that I would always see on my way home from school when I lived in Michigan. It was in a normal neighborhood, but it was sort of set away from the rest of the houses. It was really old and creaky looking, with a few trees around it. I can't tell you what exactly made it so eerie looking, but it was. I loved that house, though. I wanted to live in it when I got older. It wasn't huge and it had lots of pointed roofs on it. This house kind of reminded me of that, so I just tried to make it look as much like my memory of that house as I could. Of course, there were no gravestones, but honestly the rest of what is in my picture resembles that house perfectly. I wish I had a little more time to work on this because I might have added some things, but even though this is kind of basic, it looks how I wanted it to.

The Story of the House in the Cornfield:
     One hundred years ago, in the middle of a cornfield, a large house was built. The house was built by an old lady, and it was said that she did it all by herself. No one knew how, but no one ever saw anybody helping her or even anyone near her house. She lived in the house for twenty years when finally her neighbors from far down the road saw two little children wandering down the road to her house. They thought to themselves, "these must be the old witch's grandchildren!". Sure enough, when the neighbors went over to welcome the children, the woman said they were indeed her grandchildren. However, they were nowhere to be seen. A week later, the police showed up in the town asking if two little children had been seen wandering around anywhere. The townspeople said that the witch's grandchildren had shown up and went to her house. When the police went to her house, there were no children, but they found the clothes of the kids that had been there and their bodies buried underneath an old tree in the backyard. As it turns out, the witch had put the children under her spell and lured them to her house to eat for dinner. The remains of the children still rest in the old, abandoned cornfield to this day.

Original 

With background and name

  Something in this project that I made sure of was that I had good RESOLUTION. It's important to do so because it affects whether or not your picture is blurry, if things go together well and overall if your creation looks good. The better the resolution, the less pixels you will be able to see. A problem I had was with the satellite from the Millenium Falcon was that it was very pixely, but I fixed it by finding a larger image of it.

     In order to create my magazine cover, I looked at a lot of covers of other magazines and I also saved a lot of possible options for pictures on my own cover. I made sure I had one main image (and a couple of smaller ones), a masthead, bar code, etc. I also made sure that everything coordinated with each other and nothing looked like it didn't belong. I revolved all of it around the same topic and put all of the required things on it.

This helped me because I realized I wanted Arwen on the front

This sort of helped me with how to lay out my cover

This helped me with the placing of text

This inspired me to put Rivendell behind Arwen

This inspired me to have a landscape in the background

This gave me the idea to have a caption about Legolas and Gimli

This helped me in finding the right picture of Arwen

This also helped with Arwen

Gave me the idea to have a bag end floor plan

Also helped with Legolas and Gimli

Inspired the evenstar necklace idea

Morgul blade idea

Idea for Smaug story

Bar code

     In order to create my logo, I first looked at the requirements. Having done this, I decided that my logo should be rather simple and clean looking. I choose a turquoise color, light grey and dark blue (it pretty much looks like black). The first thing I did was find the diamond I that I wanted to be the central focus of the logo. I used the quick selection tool and removed the outside of it. Then, I used the magic wand tool to select all of the sections of it (I used shift when adding more sections). I then clicked on the paint tool, changed the RGB to the grey color I wanted, and painted the diamond. After that, I fond my sort of diamond shaped picture. I did the same things with the quick selection tool, magic wand tool, RGB and brush except I used the turquoise color and then placed it behind the diamond. I also changed the border of the diamond and the star to the dark blue. Finally, for the text, I used a fancy cursive text (in the grey color) for the "Pro" and then a normal text for "to" and combined them on the top left side of the logo. Then, at the bottom right, I wrote "shop" in the (grey) normal text. I did this all legally because there wasn't a watermark or copyright on any of the pictures I used, and I created the logo and text myself.

  It is important to save some selections so that your work does not get lost and you do not get confused. You could use that tool for brochures or something that requires a lot of organization. I used this brush differently than in other projects because for some of the panels I had to use the brush on a different color layer because I could not paint directly on the picture. I also learned how to use the magic wand tool a lot better. The tips I used from "Creating Your Own Comic Strip with 3 Panels" were to not make every single panel have text and that you don't need a character in every single box for people to understand the comic. This helped me because I had originally planned to have text and characters in every single box, but when I ran out of time it was easy for me to skip some text and the coloring of people, which helped a lot.

   On the Eddie the Donkey project, I learned a lot. It was very helpful how detailed the videos were to help us with this. I think that the things I learned the most about were masking, combining images and the brush tool. There are a lot of cool techniques that you can use to make your project look 100x better that I've never even thought about before. This has been one of my favorite assignments so far because I feel like I'm learning a lot already.

 
  For my movie poster for 'Thor: The Dark World', I did not make Thor the first thing you see. I felt like Odin should be the biggest and in the background, since he's the oldest and the father. Then, Heimdall was off to the side, but also bigger than most of the other characters. I made the rest of the characters about the same size, and I put Thor and Jane close together since they're in a relationship. In the background, it's nothing exciting but I felt like it would fit the picture. I wanted people to be more focused on the characters than what's happening behind them.

   
    The color that represents me the most is blue. Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven. I only chose a few basic things for my collage, but they are all very important to me. I chose Buddha with the background because I'm a Buddhist and I also love the sky. I chose the text "Nirvana" not only because it's one of my favorite bands, but because all Buddhists wish to one day achieve it. I chose the painting in the top right corner because it was painted by Marilyn Manson, my favorite artist/musical artist. Finally, in the bottom right, I put a rose. Rose is my middle name, so this is self explanatory. 

Animals, Initials, Masking, & Textures

     The animal I chose to create out of my initials (VB) is a snake. I came up with this idea because I pictured the 'V' as the body and the 'B' much smaller, as the head. As for the tools that I used on Photoshop, I used the texture brush (36) a lot. I used this in order to make the snake look more rounded and as though it has a tail. I also used to to try to make the body of the snake more serpent-like. I had to use the eraser a lot to fix my mistakes. I'd like to learn how to better use the texture tools and how to better shape the letters to my liking.