I haven’t blogged hardly anything at all about this final project… The story I’m working on is called Lucidity.  More on the actual story when it comes time to do the official final project reflection — it is set in a dystopian future and it’s a little crazy.  For now, I want to share some of the images I’ve been working on and write-up the process for making these.

Here are two of the animated parts I’ve made from the past couple of days.

And these are a bunch of the still images I’ve done so far:

The process:

These are made from photos and video that I took, as well as some creative commons remix license photography..  I’ve been using Photoshop to make these.  Originally I wanted to illustrate them all in whatever my own style would have ended up looking like, but that quickly proved to eat up an enormous amount of time.  So instead, I’ve been playing with the Cutout Filter.  It’s a fairly simple process: after opening the image, go to Filter –> Filter Gallery.  This window will pop up:

where you can choose whatever filter you want.  For the cutout effect, there are three different sliders which will adjust the look: number of levels, edge simplicity, and edge fidelity.  For most of these I’ve been using between 6 and 8 levels, an edge simplicity between 2 and 5, and the lowest edge fidelity.

Aside from that, there are a few things I’ve adjusted with the clone tool in some of the images.  I also made a few color and contrast adjustments (Image menu –> Adjustments) when the original color wasn’t quite what I wanted.  The process for the animated GIFs was pretty much the same, only I applied the Cutout filter to each layer of the animation rather just once for a still image.  The candle GIF was made from a short video clip and was simple to do.  For that, I imported the file as “video frames to layers,” applied the filter, and exported it.  The hallway was made from a still image, which required making several duplicate layers of the original image and darkening the colors of each one to make it look like the lights were going out.