Farewell DMA

I started out absolutely dreading this class. I thought it would be entirely too much to handle and I would not know how to do anything. Fortunately, I was wrong. Sure, there were times when I struggled to grasp the technical aspects of exactly we were doing, but I eventually caught on and figured things out. Although help was available, I am proud to say I always was able to figure things out on my own. This class introduced me to a wide variety of new topics and subjects I probably would not have found on my own, but I'm very glad I know more about them now.

While I've learned many interesting things about new media and composing, I've also learned a lot about how to make new media composition something accessible for myself. I now know how to record, download, and edit a video, which will be very useful in my voice career. Now, instead of paying someone tons of money to make a video that shows my strong points, I can just record myself singing and edit it together myself. I've also learned about multi-layer photo composition. While it may not exactly be the career I'm going into, I find the whole photo editing process very relaxing and fun. Its something I will definitely continue to experiment with throughout this summer and on into the future. I've become much more educated on where we are heading as a generation of artists through collaboration with my peers. I've seen first hand what my fellow artists think and are experimenting with in their own art form, which will eventually end up impacting my own. I find that whole process very inspiring. In this class, I learned both the importance of self-reliance in a project and how inspiring collaboration/conversation with other artists can be.

I think, in the future, I would like to learn more in depth about photo composition and editing. Its a subject that I find very interesting and would love to learn about in more detail. I'm also still in the process of figuring out exactly how to build my own website to market myself as a vocalist. I feel like I'm on the path to learning these skills and, once I begin studying them, I now have the ability to grasp the concepts.

Overall, this class has been very enjoyable and I have learned quite a bit! I didn't think my art form would be able to collaborate with new media very well, seeing as the majority of the works I use were written centuries ago, but I have been pleasantly surprised. Finally, here is my final video for DMA. I hope you all enjoy it and have a wonderful, stress free summer.

Framing
     Initially, I came up with the ideas of either using photo editing software to explore making multi-layer images, making a video that combines audio from the video and then a music/speaking track on top, or creating a website to market myself as a performer. While I am most interested in the first two, i feel like the last idea would be the most useful in my career as an artist. I've finally settled on option one, exploring multi-layer photography and seeing what I can create. While it may not be the most useful, I feel like this project will be the most interesting.

Talking
  
1.) Exploring multi-layer photography.
2.) Making another video that combines both audio from the actual video but then layering music tracks on top of it to create something different.
3.) Making a website to market myself as a performer. (I feel like this one would be very useful...but I have no idea where to start).

And here is the one response I've received so far. I'll post any additional comments as I get them.

Hey Lulu, good ideas all, good luck deciding! re: option #3 you may find this short research piece, done by Brenna Caldwell in the spring term, useful (link below). It's about video auditions for singers. If you decide to do a project on self-marketing and/or websites development for singers you might for example interview people in the SOM about these matters (the interviews could end up as text, audio, video, etc.) I tend to think of websites and blogs as "platforms" and things like video audition recordings as "assets." The latter may be more important than the former, but they do often go together, and again folks in the SOM would be able to advise you better on this. Anyway, here is the link to Brenna's research piece: https://sites.google.com/site/dmasummeredition/video-auditions-in-music

 
Gathering 
     I've found some very inspirational images on Google so far that I want to try and emulate with my multi-layer photography project. Here are some of the images that I find inspirational:







I also found an interesting website that does not exactly apply the same definition of "multi-layer photography" as I am going for, but I still found the information useful.
Here it is!

I've also contacted a Facebook friend of mine who is a photographer and she recommended that I start with creating multi-layer images using landscapes or still life photography because then it is much easier to control the outcome of the image. I feel like I'm on the right track to continue my work tomorrow!
    
Creating

     Today I have done a bit of experimenting with creating multi-layer photograph compositions with some older photographs I took over a year ago. While this has worked in creating an interesting image, I feel like I could push myself a bit further and create something a bit more dynamic. Tomorrow I'm going to try working with mixing different images in different layers. For example, I'm working pretty much exclusively with landscape photography so I'm thinking of mixing together multiple landscapes. Such as combining a photo of the field by my house with a photo of Mt. Hood from my last visit to Oregon. I'm not sure how this will turn out, it could be an awful mess, but I feel like its worth a shot! I will let you know how this turns out tomorrow.

     Day two of creating! Today I decided to do a bit more "gathering" since I wanted to delve more into multi-layer photographs that combined multiple images. I found some interesting ideas that inspired me to push myself to be a bit more creative with my experimenting. I worked with making multiple layers of the same image again but I also worked with trying to make more visually interesting compositions by combining layers of multiple images. Here are some of the images I drew inspiration from:







Neat, right? I really love the last one. The combination of the cityscape and the profile of the girl is really beautiful. I'm still tinkering around with exactly what images I'd like to combine, but I'm thinking the final product is going to be very similar to that last inspirational image. I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist so a lot of my time on this project has been spent attempting to combine images to create the ideal composition. More to come tomorrow!


Reflecting

I really had a lot of fun with this project and, even though I don't have any intention of becoming a professional photographer, I feel like the skills I gained in doing this work will be beneficial for any art I may want to do in the future.

I wound up doing a few images that were duplicate layers of the same photo, but then I also have a few that are combinations of different images. Alright! So here are my finished products!

 This is one of my favorites. Its just two layers with a different image on each layer, and I played around with the saturation and contrast of each image quite a bit to come up with something I really liked. (All of these images were also taken by me.)

 I'm not too sure how I feel about this one. While I like the hue of the branches, I feel like the image almost makes you a bit dizzy...but I'm still on the fence. This is one of the first ones that I experimented with just using duplicate layers.

 This composition combines two different images of the same flower, which I really think is neat. I like the contrast of being able to see the similarities and differences in the images at the same time. This one was one of my first experiments into combining different images into one composition. I think it turned out pretty well!

 Again, not too sure how I feel about this one. I messed with the contrast of the image, and then decided to stack layers of the same image while decreasing the opacity of each layer. I think the effect is very neat, but I think I may have gone a bit layer crazy.

 Out of all of the photos using duplicate layers, I think this one is my favorite. It still is obviously a combination of images, but is very simple and clean.

 I really like these last two images a lot. The first is a combination of pictures I took while in Portland, Oregon, and the second is a combo of pictures taken outside my house during different seasons. I edited the two images used in the Portland composition quite a bit to get the saturation I was really looking for, while the second image is not edited at all (besides the layering).

Overall, I really enjoyed this project and feel like I got a lot out of it. It was definitely time consuming to try and get the exact right combinations of images, opacity, saturation, and so on...but, in the end, I feel that the images I produced were worth it! I hope you enjoyed them.