design

When I was first told to make a mock up for my Empire of the Sun poster I had no clue at all what I wanted it to look like. The one thing I knew it had to be was somewhat crazy, since the Band Empire of the Sun is quite odd for lack of a better world. I decided to do some research by watching their music videos and looking at their album covers, for inspiration. What helped me the most was just sitting down and playing with Photoshop and eventually quark.

Every image I found I needed to crop in order to mesh them all together. I knew I needed a picture of the lead singer, so what that was the first image I added to the poster. The second was experimenting with background. Based off one of their album covers I realized that I wanted him to immerge out of clouds, so that’s what I looked for in my background.

The free transform tool was my best friend for the entire prodject, being able to customize everything the way I wanted it. The other tool I used was the eraser. Using the eraser I was able to make images appear on in front of others. To make it appear as if the tiger and the leader singer were in or behind the cloud.

I found that quark had much better selection of fonts. So that was the main reason I like to use it. However I felt it was easier to manipulate layers and images better in Photoshop. Combining both programs I felt was necessary in order to achieve the poster that I felt proud of.

Empire of the sun poster

Power Point Design Rationale

When working on my power point the first question I wanted to figure out, was what I wanted my background to for my slides. I did not want it to be distracting but at the same time I wanted it to be original. My answer came to me when I was playing with Adobe illustrator, I decided to digitally draw "Paramore". However once completed I needed to open up the photo in Photoshop to change the opacity, to be less distracting.

After the title slide my goal was to effectively keep the viewer's eyes on the correct information, using fade to gray technique. I wanted to animation to look nice but at the same time always serve the purpose of producing an effective PowerPoint.

My second slide introduced the most recent album of Paramore. The first and most important information was the album title so using animation I had that come in before anything else. After which I had the album cover slide across the screen. During the peer review stage it was decided that the album cover was odd looking with no transparency. This posed a problem because I wanted to the viewer to be able to fully see the album cover which was hard to do when transparent. Using animation I had a non transparent image float across the screen then, I had it fade ontop of a transparent photoshoped image. However I need the timing to be perfect, because I did not want the second image to appear before the other image faded. I decided to save time on this slide by having all the times of songs come in all at once.

The third slide I wanted to use images to convey fun facts. It just so happened that Paramore had done the soundtracks to two very recent movies, Twilight and Jennifer's Body. Online I found the movie posters, using animation I had them both appear simultaneously.

The fourth slide was my most difficult slide, since I did not want to use any of the pre-made tables. I decided that I wanted my table to be made as the information came on the screen, not all at once. So I decided I would use the line tool in the object palette. After each row was completed I had a line appear, using custom animation. I used adobe illustrator to make a design for the header, I used Paramore's colors orange, red, and black.

The fifth slide was the slide I was most proud of. Because of how I was able to combine photoshop and powerpoint's animation effectively. For every photo that I found of Paramore, I would open up in photoshop and add an effect to it. In powerpoint I wanted the pictures to fly in then once still, turn into the photoshoped version of that picture. This was a little tricky to acomplish, because I had to have the photoshop photo shop image appear right before the original dissolved away.

Animation

When making the collage, I wanted it to actually look like I was lying awake. I tried to achieve this by making myself look like i'm lying on and actual bed. I tried to explore with photoshop as much as I could to make my college really realistic. I found that using the magic wand tool allowed me to crop the image so it was just the body parts. Then using the free transform tool I was able to change the size and angle of the body parts to make them fit with all the rest.