Raccoon Postcard

       For this project, I had to follow a tutorial to create a raccoon. It was a very descriptive tutorial, and even told the RGB numbers for each color that you needed for the raccoon. It was easy to follow, except for some functions within Illustrator that we needed to use. The tutorial used an older version of Illustrator, while we had a newer version, where some of the buttons changed places within the program. Other than that, doing the tutorial was really fun, and allowed you to have some creativity while doing it, even while following the instructions.

       When we had to create the postcard, I figured I would do a bachelor's party, because I had put a suit on my raccoon to meet the something you did yourself requirement. I figured I should have a black background, with white text saying, "you're invited, Bachelor's party." I also decided to add circle-like objects, that looked like spotlights in the back. I also added a mustache to the raccoon, to fit more into the bachelor theme.

       The final project had the raccoon I designed using the tutorial. I added a suit to the raccoon, and a mustache. Following the tutorial for designing the berries, I added berries, and made it look like the raccoon was holding them in his hand. I made some handwritten typography, and Mrs. Smith helped me scan it into the computer to add it to the postcard. I made it into white text and added it to the postcard, with the raccoon, and added the spotlights to the front of the postcard. On the back of the postcard, I used the provided template, and put six spotlights in a pattern, with more berries in between them.

      This project was also my first one posted on Behance. I feel like the Behance project turned out really good. I added each design I made with my raccoon to it, and added the finished postcard to it. I added a description to the beginning of the project, and put captions under each piece of the project. I also added my signature to the bottom of the project so it is like an official project made by me.

You can see the images for this project on Behance.

ONW 1 in 2000 Video

       In this video that I have created, I interviewed August Berthold. We had to learn how to conduct an interview, and how to actually ask questions to the interviewee. I ended up having over seven minutes of footage, and ended up using only a minute of it. I also had 1 minute of voice over, but only used 15 seconds of it. But it's always good to have more footage than you need for your video. You can see the video below.

       August was a big part in the making of this video, and brought a lot to the table for the making of it. I learned all about his Summer while filming the interview. He worked construction and demolition with his Grandpa, which he enjoyed doing, and is hoping to go into that field when he is older. I also found out that he wanted to get back into sports, after not doing any for four years, so he has joined a recreational league, and hopes to join a competitive league soon. He also participated in band camp, which he wasn't really happy about, but he did have some friends there to keep him company.
       When I had to write my interview, I made sure to include anything I might want to add to the video, even if it wasn't actually going to be in the video. I did want to have an interesting intro, that would grab the attention of anyone watching the video. The hook is always an important part of your video, because, without it, people will stop watching your video as soon as they started watching it. I also made sure to have a good outro, so the video would have a clear and nice flowing ending, so that you aren't surprised that the video was ending.
      In order to shoot the video, the first thing we did was set up a camera on a tripod, and just filmed us sitting on a bench talking to each other. It wasn't too hard. The next day of filming, we shot each other walking down hallways, or opening doors or staring at things. It wasn't very interesting film, but by putting it on top of the interview, it made the video a lot more interesting.
      I really like how the video turned out. I liked the way the voiceover worked out on top of the footage and the interview. August was very helpful for doing the interview. The footage of August walking in and going through doors flowed very well with the rest of the interview, and the overall video turned out great.

Photoshop Tutorials

      For the first half quarter of sophomore year, I followed many Photoshop tutorials, learning how to use specific tools within the program. This helped me extend my knowledge on the basics of Photoshop, and helped me create the challenge collage for my last Photoshop project. Below you will see each finished result of the projects I made using the tutorials. It was pretty fun to do these, and I was able to learn a lot about Photoshop.

Challenge

       The last tutorial I followed wasn't really a tutorial. It was a challenge to use my imagination to make something that looked pretty cool. I was given a few images of nature, and a guy's portrait. Using all the tutorials I had followed before, I combined all the images to create this collage. I think it looks pretty cool, and I got to use a lot of the things I learned from other tutorials to create this.

Content Aware Fill

       This is one of the three finished products for the tutorials I followed for content aware fill. Before, the picture had lots of marks on the wall and darker spots on it. Now, you can't even tell that they were there. To do this, I selected the spots I wanted to get rid of using either the marquee tool and lasso tool. In order to select multiple spots at once, I held the shift key while selecting them to add to the selection.

The rectangular marquee tool and the lasso tool.

Patch Tool

       This is the result of the tutorial on the patch tool. The father had a big graphic on his shirt that we wanted to get rid of, so I used the patch tool to make it appear like nothing was there. After selected the area I wanted to get rid of, I used the patch tool to get a selection from another part of his shirt to replace the original. Then there was some clean up of the wrinkles using the patch tool again.

The Patch Tool

Clone Stamp Tool

       Using the clone stamp tool, I got rid of a light house in the background that just didn't seem to fit with the original picture. To do that, I selected an area of the picture to sample from, by holding the option key and clicking. Then, I painted over the light house and it took the area I sampled and replaced the original part.

The Clone Stamp Tool

Healing Brush

       In this picture, the jacket still had a tag on it. To get rid of it, I used the healing brush. Holding the option key, I selected an area of the jacket that just had the texture on it, with nothing extra. Then, without holding a key, I painted over the area with the tag. When I was finished with that, I added noise to the image, making it bring back some of the texture that was lost while using the healing brush.

The Healing Brush

Spot Healing Brush

      In the original image, there was lots of dirt on this kid's face. The spot healing brush allowed me to get rid of all the dirt on his face. All I had to do was select the brush, and paint over each spot. This was one of the easiest tools to use.

The Spot Healing Brush

Portrait Collage

       This is the finished collage I made, after following a tutorial on how to do it. There were originally three pictures, the left one, where she leans right, the right image, where she is leaning left, and the middle one, which was a close up shots. I put all the images together, and blended the background together where the left and right images didn't reach each other. The middle image was harder to fix, because the close up didn't include all of her arms, so I had use another images to sample the arm sleeves from. In the end, I added an effect that made the background a little darker, and less saturated, and I used a layer mask to make the middle portrait a little more saturated.

Lotion Bottle Branding

       For this tutorial, I aded a logo to a pre-made bottle graphic, curved the logo, made the bottle, but not the logo, partially transparent. I also masked it out so the ocean was in front of the bottom half of the battle. The shadow was made by putting a mask in front and, using a curves effect, made the ocean in front of the bottle darker. The last thing I did was put a glow behind the bottle, as if the light was being the bottle.

Billboard Branding

       The original image was just a billboard with nothing on it. Then I inserted the advertisement on top of the photo, and transformed it to fit the edges of the billboard. Using the magic wand tool, I selected the part of the billboard where the ad would go, without selecting the lights on the bottom, and then jumped a layer to delete it and then I put the ad on it, to look like the advertisement was originally on the billboard.

ONW Procedures Video

        In this video, we demonstrated what you would do if you had a pass to leave the school. It is made to show the six-shot system, and the 180 degree rule. You can find the video below.

We were also supposed to show a clear beginning, middle, and end. You can see the images of the shots below.

Beginning

       This was the first shot in the video. It is meant to establish that there is a student sitting at their computer working. And, if you notice it, the pass to leave class is sitting right in front of him. I used the cross-dissolve effect in Premiere to make the video fade in from black so that it just does't appear. I also did something I do in every video. I put a second of black before the video started, to make sure the viewer saw the first establishing shot. I also used the constant gain audio effect to fade in the music at the beginning of the video. If you have a video without music, or music without video, it makes it feel like the music doesn't go with the video.

Middle

       This shot is just about halfway into the video. It shows the teacher approving the student's pass. It is mostly to show that the student has to get their pass approved by their teacher before leaving. The shot goes on to show the student walking away to leave school. It starts the main movement of the video, the walking from the classroom to the attendance office.

End

       This was the final shot in the video. It shows the student leaving the office and the school. I use another cross dissolve effect to make the video fade to black at the end. I also edited the music so it would end when the video started fading out, to make a clear ending to the video. I did change some of the saturation of this shot in post, because it looked different from the rest of the shots. This is supposed to be an extra wide shot, to show the student walking towards the doors, and then out of them.

Final Review of my e9 Experience

            Throughout e9, I learned many things. In the video strand, I learned how to get the best shots for my videos. While in the graphic design strand, I learned how to use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. In the animation strand, I learned how to make video frame and gif animations in Photoshop, and I also how to create an animation in Sketchup. And in fourth quarter, I collaborated with my team to create an awesome product and present about it.

         These skills I learned were first introduced to me through teacher guidance, and following the directions for each project. I also went further into learning these skills through tutorials that were online. Ultimately, I learned these skills by actually executing them as I learned them and by practicing it, I got to develop these skills further and further beyond the expectations.

         These basic skills that I learned all throughout e9 are very important for me to get to learn all the advanced skills I’ll need for the rest of high school and my career. Without a base to a structure, there is no way for the structure to be made. These basic, technical skills aren’t the only things I learned. With the multiple group projects throughout the year I learned all about project management and how to collaborate with groups. These group skills will be able to help me work with people all throughout my life, and there aren’t many careers where you do not work with others.

         I figured out, throughout e9, that one of my best strengths is getting work to be very precise. I think that I am very good at knowing when something can be improved and how to improve it, and also how to make something very efficient. I also figured that my main weakness is knowing what is popular and trendy. In order to fix that weakness I try to work with people that are up with the trends, so that as a group, we can make something that is very popular and works efficiently.

         With all the things I’ve learned through e9, I can apply them throughout the summer. I can help with my church’s website, and with the many videos and graphics my church needs, there is always room for my help. This class is really showing me how to work with others to make the best thing that we can.

         There are many things that are awesome with e9. However, there is one thing I would change. Instead of having a whole quarter on animation, I’d rather have a quarter on web design. I feel like e-Comm needs to focus more on web, because websites are where you have to present all of your other projects. And then animation could be combined with graphic design because it uses the same programs as well. Otherwise, there’s really nothing wrong with e-Comm and e9.

         Overall, e9 was really awesome and I believe e-Comm will be a big part of my life for the rest of high school. I came to Olathe Northwest for this program, and I am very satisfied for that decision. This was a very good class all year, and there was no time that I was really stressed about it. I feel the e9 teachers all did a great job and I could go to them for any problems I had, openly.

e9 Fourth Quarter Project

       For my fourth quarter project, I worked with a group of four people to design and product and make graphics, videos, an animation, and a website for this product. The first thing we had to do was make a company name. We decided on calling it BARM; an acronym of our names (Braden, Addison, Randon, and Mackenzie). Then we created a product and came up with a name for it. We had many ideas, but decided on an app that would monitor grocery store lines and tell someone which lines are the quickest. We decided to call this app Quick Line.

Our company's logo

      As a group, we were very collaborative. In the process of coming up with a product, we all had our own ideas and we picked the best one. We all made sure we agreed on that before we moved on to the next step. Then, we tried to come up with a logo, and everyone had their own designs, but we eventually all agreed on one. We all communicated very well, getting feedback on everything we did from our other group members.

     We struggled the most with being in class. Over half of the time, one of our group members wasn't at school. Only having two or three people work on a four person product was hard. And if we did something while someone in our group was gone, we would have to see if they liked it when we got back, even if we had no extra time to change it. Next time I have a group project, I'll try to make sure everyone's really committed to trying to be in class to do the work for our project.

The video I made

       If I had more time, I would definitely change some things about our project. Like the website, which I would change to be a single page, instead of the current multi-page website that it is now, because the current trends are having just one page for your whole site. And many other things I could've improved, but time is always a restriction when working on anything.

      Even if I could've done better with this product, I think it really helped me improve working with a team. I really got to learn how to work with people, and use their strengths to help our product's design be better.

The animation

      Everything you see above, all the pictures and videos, are things I helped out with. I created the logo and the video myself, and I helped create the web banner, the website, and I created the iPhone in our animation.

SketchUp

      
       I created these two 3-D Models Using SketchUp. The first one, I created a table and chair setup. The hardest part in that was creating the chair leg, and getting it to be in the right position on the chair. I created the leg by using the follow me tool, which was very useful in this project. The leg was really hard to line up with the rest of the chair at the beginning, because it kept on being off by less than a mm, and you know, it has to be prefect. After that business was taken cared of, I made components out of the leg and the whole chair, and then it was really easy to complete the model. For the dog house, I made it directly proportional to the dog house model we were given, and made sure all of the little edges were the exact size they needed to be.