Vector Portrait

Pre-Production

     For this project, we had to choose a photo of a family member or ourselves and use vectors to make a portrait. I originally chose a picture of my sister, but I ended up switching to a different picture because the lighting in the photo was weird. After I selected my image, I put it into Adobe Photoshop, and cropped it to be 8x10. Then, I added a posterization layer to make the values in the picture more apparent.

Production

     I put the edited picture into Adobe Illustrator, and started creating my project. When I first started, i was extremely detailed, but it was taking up too much time. I restarted on a new layer, and started with the eyes instead of the skin. I started with the inside of the eye, and worked my way out, and finished with the eyelashes and eyelid, and the eyebrows. Next, I did the mouth. I used the picture as a reference, but I mostly created the teeth and braces by themselves instead of tracing. I then did the lips, and put all of the components together. Next, I did the nose. I struggled with the nose, and could not get it to look how it was in the picture.I moved on to the skin. I colored the skin first, then did the highlights and shadows. I also couldn't get the skin to look how I wanted. Then, I did the hair by starting with the main colors and shapes, and then moving on to the smaller details. I finished the project by doing the neck and the shirt.

Final Product

     Overall, I thought my final product could be better. I struggled with the nose, skin, and highlights/shadows. If I had more time, I would work harder on these aspects, and improve them. I thought that the mouth was the best part of the project. I also would add more detailed eyelashes if I had more time. 

Music Video

     My group chose the song Photograph by Ed Sheeran for our music video. To create our video, we had to come up with a general story line. We took the general idea, and created many different ways to portray it and picked one. Next, we matched the lyrics to the shot descriptions, and time amount for each shot. Then, we created a detailed schedule for filming that included what materials we needed and what shots we needed. Then, we began filming. We filmed for 2 day for around 1.5 hours each day. On the first day, we started at Sar-Ko Park and got all of our shots that we needed. Next, we went to Black Dog Coffeehouse and filmed there. After that, we went to Hy-Vee, and finished filming for day 1. On day 2, we filmed at my house and got all of the bedroom shots. After we were done filming, we started to edit. We started by putting the shots in the rough order, then going to each "memory" and editing them. We put a filter on the memories to show that it was a flashback. Then, we added transitions. Our last step in editing was to add the credits at the beginning.

     During this project, I learned a lot about planning and pre-production. We had a lot of time to prepare, so it helped us a lot during filming because we were so detailed. I also learned that you should always get more shots then you need, because we ended up using some of our extra shots to fill space. If I were to do this project again, I would choose actors that knew each other better to avoid awkward scenes. I would still make a detailed pre-production plan, and I thought we were effective while we were filming. I really enjoyed doing this project because it was a lot of creative freedom, since our group decided to start from scratch instead of recreating one.