Latest Project in Production Course

I just find myself doing so much cool stuff in my classes and I feel like they are worth sharing here.

I'm enrolled in Single-Camera Production this semester and our first big project was creating a montage sequence with music and graphics.  The professor randomly assigned groups and we set out to shoot for the duration of our Tuesday class period.  None of us in our group had any real idea what to shoot, and so we basically did a spin off of the example the professor had provided.  The example was of a UNF student running late for class and running around campus to goofy music, and so our spin on it was that someone was running late for a lunch date, since we had to include each group member in the video for at least one shot and one of the three was a woman.

From there I had a funny idea of how to start the video and shoot the first scene, although it did end up taking up a lot of time waiting around for a bus to pull up to the stop at the UNF library and then leave 10-15 minutes later.  In the end it worked out, except one cell phone did take a bit of a beating.  Some parts are kinda comedic too.  If you know your way around campus you will probably find a lot of discontinuities, and even if you don't know you might spot some too, but we were more concerned about the overall concept as well as being creative with our shots.

It's a quick watch at just a minute long, so enjoy.  : )

Edit:  Upon watching this when I post this blog I realized that is isn't quite completed yet, as I do not know the last names of my group members.  I will have to find out on Tuesday before class, where I will fix this blog post and update it with the correct version.  Maybe a better video quality too...

Typology Assignment for Digital Photo

So doing required classwork isn't exactly getting the most out of life, but I still wanted to share one of our assignments we have done so far.

The assignment was to create a photographic typology.  I'll give you a textbook definition and then how I interpreted the assignment.

There wasn't any solid definition of this I could find online, but this sums it up nicely:

Typology is the study of types, and a photographic typology is a suite of images or related forms, shot in a consistent, repetitive manner; to be fully understood, the images must be viewed as a complete series.

Kristine McKenna, “Photo Visions”, Los Angeles Times, 29 Dec 1991.

The way I interpreted this assignment, especially from the examples viewed in class, was that it was a grouping of photos on one document that have identical composition and subject matter, with minor differences between each shot.  Some typology work is simply astounding and conceptual, but our professor expressed that this was a technical proficiency assignment rather than an art project.  So literally I could shoot anything.

My first idea fell through due to the circumstances of my setting and what I planned on working with.  As I pondered what I could possibly shoot my eyes scanned over the top of the cabinets at my friend's apartment and I noticed the nice variety of Bacardi bottles, among the rest of the collection, which were largely similar and each one was a different flavor.  So it was settled.

Using the back porch of the same apartment I shot in the only spit of light that seemed to shine through.  I was forced to shoot these bottles with a strange background because of this.  My professor critiqued that the shadows and all the lines and things that are going on in the background were in competition with the subject, and the background would have been even more so had I not put on the creative twist I did.

At first I wanted to blur the background more with a Gaussian blur, but I wasn't content.  Then I thought about darkening the background a bit to make the bottles pop a little more.  Unsatisfied with that approach as well I decided to colorize them using similar colors from the bottles themselves.  After all, there was one of each color, and I couldn't resist the opportunity to arrange them in Nintendo player color order (player 1 is red, player 2 is blue, player 3 is green, and player 4 is yellow).

This work by Kyle Dodd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
For those photoshoppers who are wondering how this is done (it's pretty straight forward), I used the quick selection tool to get as much of the bottle as I could and used the polygonal lasso tool to add or remove the remaining selection.  I refined the edge next, cranking the smoothness between 60-100 and feathered the edge 1.5 pixels (I wanted to conserve the edge of the bottle).  Then I inverted the selection and used that mask to colorize the background, at 40% saturation for each.  As an added detail, I removed the tanish-red-orange cushion which each bottle was sitting on from the reflection within the bottle itself, and tweaked the red in the Bacardi icon until each was about the same red.  Also I applied an unsharp mask to the entire thing to help the bottles and the text on them pop.

Ok, so maybe it isn't so straight forward.

We are beginning our conceptual work in this class now, and our first assignment is dealing with diptychs and panoramas, working with multiple photos and text to illustrate an idea or concept.  I will post them up too if I am proud of how they turn out.  

Going to the Gym

No photos or videos for this one, still waiting on a friend to send me my compact digital camera.

My friend and I, Kris, had been talking about going to the gym for a while now but hadn't actually acted on that notion, a problem I'm sure many people can relate to.  Well for once we set a day to go.  "Tuesday," we agreed on, "We will go on Tuesday, after classes."  I honestly thought the plan would just fall through, like every other time, but we made it happen this time, and last Tuesday we went to the gym.

It was the first time I had stepped into a gym since I was 15  and lived in the Bahamas.  I had always gotten my exercise from being outside all the time, running around, swimming in the ocean, walking or longboarding everywhere I went.  I briefly went to the gym in the Bahamas with a group of friends when I lived there, but before long we all stopped that practice.  Ever since I moving back to the states in 2008 my outdoors activity has hit an all-time low.  My naturally high metabolism has let me remain a stable 148 for the past 6 years and I never really had good reason to go to the gym, or be active, because I just don't put the pounds on.  But since for so long I have done very little strenuous physical activity I fear the endurance I once prided myself in (from soccer and being an outdoorsy kid) has gone from me.  I may be a skinny 148, but I'm in the worst shape I have ever been in, ever.  This worry, coupled with the desire to not have such skinny arms anymore, led me to want to start going to the gym.

I don't prefer gyms.  I would much rather workout without anyone else around to see how weak I am, but part of this whole redefining myself thing is facing minor fears like this.  Just do it.  I had never been inside the UNF Wellness Center (except for a smoothie, once) and I was glad to have been with someone who actually knew where to go and what to do.  We did mostly upper body workouts focusing on the arms, chest, and shoulders.  I was glad to find that I could keep up with my friend in reps and weight and by the end I felt great and like I had accomplished more physical exercise in an hour than I had in an entire month.  And even though some people might have stared and even laughed as I benched the bar with a 2 1/2 pound weight on each end, it didn't bother me as much as I thought it might for some reason.  I didn't know these people, and they didn't know me, even though most of us went to the same college.  Guess it somewhat pays not being a social butterfly the past 2 years.

And now I can't stretch my arms all the way out!  The soreness is intense, but I know it will go away eventually and with more gym trips.  Until then I feel like a fricken T-rex, unable to move my arms one forearms-length away from my body, bending down to pick up what used to be well within normal reach.  Now I just got to avoid letting myself and Kris falling into the old "eh, not quite feeling it today" excuse to not go back to the gym, because the slippery slope to not setting a regular gym schedule starts there.

Best of luck to me!

Live Production in Action in Daytona

Recently I was given the opportunity to visit the Daytona International Speedway for the Rolex 24 race, a 24-hour race consisting of 55 cars.  A good friend of mine, Willie Brown, works for NASCAR and helps produce many of the events NASCAR puts on.  He was able to get me behind the scenes to see what all goes into putting the nearby cars screaming down the speedway onto the television.

This is was such a wonderful a insightful experience, after all it's basically what I am going to school for.  And for as much as I have learned, I've yet to see it really in practice, and this visit provided me with much information into how these sort of broadcasts are handled.

I only grabbed a few clips because I was simply to enamored and full of questions about how all of this shiny technical stuff operated.  So just as I got a glimpse, so shall you.


Yeah just a glimpse.  I remembered to charge it, but forgot to clear the memory card clogged up with videos of/by the ex girlfriend before heading to Daytona.  Even now she's still ruining things.  xD