My aim was to make “Zooma” from “The Easy Crew” look like he was smoking a joint. Getting to grips with the pen tool was a trying experience and I did want to give up quite early on. After looking through some tutorials on the basics of illustrator I needed to work out how I would change “Zooma in some way other than having him smoking, I went on to making a silhouette of him and cutting him out of the picture with the rest of the characters. Once I had done this I copied and pasted him to a new file, then with the original untouched image I once again used the pen tool but this time used to outline all his clothes separately and then I was able move them around like the clothes on a Action man.
After silhouetting Zoom and using the pen tool make his clothes.
The final part of Zooma
Music Video
Artist: Ed Solo and Skool of Thought
Track: Love your life
This is an idea that really interests me as a medium, Once things have been blocked out and you can see some semblance of a piece of media, you want to make it as good as possible. I choose the song as it has the same kind of values as the characters from Rastamouse, treat each other with respect and be relaxed and happy. Also I thought the rhythm would be challenging to edit to as break beat is quite erratic sometimes.
Beginning this was very easy going as it was a case of sit and watch the series and make a paper edit of what would fit where and to which part of the song, the song is over four minutes and as I didn’t want to repeat the footage too much I cut it down to 1 minute 15 seconds. By the time I had watched 8 episodes of the show I really started to get sick of it but had a respectable amount of material to edit to the song. Now came the tough bit, starting out trying parts here and there without creating any form of body to the piece was frustrating and I wanted to just plonk bits anywhere I could. A fresh perspective is a wonderful thing and after taking a break and drinking many a black coffee I felt suitably primed for a all night blocking out session.
Material that worked
Material that didn't work
The next day was fine editing and having to slightly move once clip a millisecond to the right or left and cutting a each shot to a vocal or percussion rhythm was a lot easier to deal with knowing I was at the last hurdle.
I am quite pleased with this piece as it is the first time I have tried to make a music video and It feels like a good mix of the two mediums. I would like to go back at some point and create a original score to the visual part and perhaps add some Rasta mouse lyrics.
Image mosaics
This was a last ditch effort to use the software’s that I don’t have any clue about. After seeing some image mosaics online I planned to create one of my own.
I had to go through numerous tutorial websites to work out how it would be done but eventually got a rough idea and started by cutting a number of Rasta mouse images and resizing them to 1”x1” inch squares and starting in the top left hand corner putting them in a line. Once I was at the other side of the page I would join them all into one layer by “merging down” and then pasting them until the whole page was filled like a checker board.
Once it was filled I then go to edit image size and change the pixels to percentage and change the number to 50%. I then repeat that until the checkerboard is very small. Copying and pasting this on to a new page and repeating until its filled up makes a much larger checkerboard and now is the time to open up a Rastafarian image and merge that and set it to “Overlay” this worked out quite well for the second piece but the first one had a checkerboard with too small pictures.
News paper front cover
The next thing I wanted to try and create was front cover of a newspaper saying how Rastamouse had been caught with possession of drugs/cheese and how it shocks the public as he was though to be a hero vigilante doing the work the police didn’t feel was important.
The stock front cover
Beginning this project was another nice learning curve as I had no idea how cut out a part of one image and place it over a second, after some internet help I had the idea and begun by cutting out Rasta mouse’s face using the magic wand tool and defining the edges to make it look less rough. After this I copied over the image and placed over the face of a hooded man being arrested by police officers.
Using the brush tool I zoomed right in and made the places where it looked fake and tried to paint pixel by pixel in varying shades. I tried just doing one shade of white and it looked very out of place. Once I had the image sorted It was a case of pasting this over a front cover image of a stock newspaper.
I thought it would seem more realistic if I was to write a little story to go with it and This will be printed just below the final piece. I think this was one of my better bits of work as it looks fairly official, I think if I had the skills I would like to of created a Rasta mouse style crest for the news paper and a colour scheme of my own reflecting the target audience of the paper.
Super hero super ego
This idea came to me over night and it seemed quite appropriate as we had just starting learning about super egos. There are no bigger super egos than super heroes and They are normally loved by the people, feared by the villains and mistrusted by the establishment. My main super hero to use was Batman as he is the most wanted super hero going.
Once again back on illustrator and Photoshop trying to get the image in my head on to the screen. I started by going through a couple of episodes of Rasta mouse to find a shot where he has his hands up in the air or is looking up at the sky as it would be not as affective to put a cape on him if he didn’t look dramatic. After going through only two episodes I found the perfect bit.
Next was the bothersome task of using the wand tool and it working correctly the first time, fat chance though, as an hour later I still was copying not just Rasta mouse but all the white back ground I thought I had cut out, this went on for a long time until I remembered Als teachings on clipping masks, presto it was on another page!
Next up, finding the cape I took a standard Superman cape from the internet and cut around it using the pen tool and then turning it into a silhouette. I then dragged and dropped on to Rasta mouse making sure to drop down a layer and fitting around his neck accordingly.
Rather than just using his standard clothes I thought, lets make him a costume and once again batman was my inspiration and started creating some pen tool black boots, trousers, jumper, gloves and the still very Jamaican hat. It came off better than the Zooma edit and I think it was then that I realised, slowly, very slowly I am getting better at using the software’s.
The easiest bit of this was taking the Batman logo out of the background photo I planned on using, the blend tool and the smudge tool made the sign look like the clouds behind it and just dropped the word “RASTA” where it was, placed Rasta mouse on the building and it was done.
I am pleased with this because it shows my progression in the programmes use, If I had more time I would of loved to create the cityscape myself and then would have had more room to play around with the positioning of Rasta mouse. He is a little small in the picture I feel but making him any bigger would of looked out of place.
