Project 1, Week 4: Figure as Landscape

I finished my project! Overall, I think it turned out well, but I definitely discovered a lot of things I could have done differently, so it was a good learning experience.

One of the biggest struggles I had was dealing with the inability to control my lighting. Since it was a partly cloudy day outside, there were some shots that I had perfect lighting on, but other times where the light was too harsh and I had to use a shade, which flattened out some of the images. This required a lot of editing in photoshop afterwards to try and match up the lighting for all of the frames. Fortunately it wasn't too many frames so it wasn't that bad. Each picture needed something different so I couldn't batch edit them. Figuring out how to regulate the lighting would be something I'd want to try next time.

Another issue I had was getting the model to appear in the frame in the exact same spot every time. It was windy and my reflector/shade blew into my camera and knocked it slightly. I didn't know how to weight it down so it affected some of the shots. That's something I would want to figure out next time. Also, I want to try an onion skin program next time I do something like this to align the shots better, but because of my limited amount of time, I wasn't able to try that this time.

Even though that was frustrating, I learned a really great tool because of it. In Photoshop, there's a script you can run over a folder of photos to align them all, and then split them out into frames in the animation window. I had tried in vain to put them together in Final Cut Pro, but it looked awful. This script made it look so much smoother, and I was really excited that I found it!