'Not One With The Crowd'

Surrealism of Social Anxiety

 For my CyberArts tech class, we were supposed to make a surrealist picture based on an issue in the world. I choose how people felt outcasted or social anxiety for my project. Social anxiety is something that effects a lot of people, but isn't really talked about. Originally I had wanted to put my model so she was blended into the wall and instead of a dance - social outing type thing - I had originally wanted to have a classroom but felt that only really effected students - even though that was mainly the point. Also I had wanted to put words over the image making it look like it was blended into the wall, but I felt the picture represented itself well enough without the words.

 I find this idea surreal because the image is blended into the wall, it was supposed to represent that she was at the place but she felt as if she was in that lone brick area.

 For my design process first I took a picture of my model, taking her picture against a white background, lighting only on one side. For the background I went and found an area at the back of the school that was kind of secluded and used natural light to take that picture, the picture of the party was found off of the internet.

 Getting started on putting the picture together, I started with the picture of the brick area as my base, then removing the background from the picture of my model I copy and pasted her onto the layer, removing the halo around with an option I found in the select menu. From there, I resized her to fit the size of the corner before taking the picture of the actual party and masking it into the image, using a soft eraser on the image to make it kinda blend, then I fixed the opacity and used the dissolve mode to help with the feeling of blending.

 I really enjoy how the picture had come out, I feel satisfied with how it looked though, I wish I had picked a better image for the 'social outing' type thing and that I had had time to put in the words as spray paint on the walls. 

Discord - Culminating

Still Image

 For our culminating we were to make a still image and video - that tied into each other - that expressed the meaning of a word. My word was "Discord", it has many meaning that all really tie in to conflict or chaos, I choose to narrow it down and really just focus on it's meaning of lack of harmony or concord, basically chaos. My idea for the video was originally something more focusing on the fire and water, but I decided to add in more concepts that kind of tied in to give it more interest, and for the still I originally wanted to have the fire on the top of water but I opted for in within the water with flames around it instead.

 The elements that tied my still and video together was the fire in water theme, having flames underneath water and also the clashing of elements in this case, the red on the cup clashing with the blue almost trying to cover it. This shows my words by showing conflict between two things, either the red or the blue or the water and the fire.

 The video I feel, expressed the meaning of discord I was going for well, it was multiples clips that were shaky and showing some sort of lack of harmony, along with static. There was no music, because, rather than find music that showed dissonance I went to have the static clashing against the silence as well as the random sounds you can here during the black and white clips, I felt that it showed more of a dissonance that an actual music piece could. The scenes in my video were of fire under water, a chemical reaction that showed fire exploded out of water, earthquakes, static and some shaky black and white clips. There was no real order to the clips, I just went with what felt right to put there and felt clashing with the scene before it, the static how over was like a scene break in a sense, also I always found static so interesting and felt it helped get the feeling of chaos and discord across. I used the soften effect and the earthquake effect on my self shot clips because it helped fit more of the sense and helped emphasize the flame.

 Creating this movie I used iMovie HD and a Nikon 3100, using the nikon I was able to record scenes of my illusion of fire underwater and using iMovie I was able to put the clips together, making my collective video. For the still I used the Nikon and Adobe Photoshop.

 I feel that these two collective works helped show my word, and I enjoyed this project, it was fun and required a lot of deep thinking, but I'm proud of my work. I think my still could've been improved on with the showing of the meaning, but overall I feel pretty good about it.