I’m away for a few days and hurriedly packing, so excuse this repost from January.
If you remember, it was then that Harriet Harman was proposing to exempt MPs’ expenses from the freedom of information act.
Next week, I intend to start on a new video but not to ignore creating the odd still image while producing it.
A bunch of links for those still visiting and enduring the erratic posting of late:
Which is good … and bad.
So, off to the trash bin with the roughs of a TwentyFivePoundLand store in the House of Commons, the Freedom From Information logo, and numerous cliché’d pig snout gags.
NB If your viewing from my blog’s feed, the flash animation may not be visible so you may have to view it on my site – sorry- gremlins.
This is very much a draft and, considering the time taken, I’m a bit unsure whether to continue.
UPDATE – Yup, I’m bottling it, it’s not really worth continuing.
Checking with a couple of people, it’s obvious that some monitors display things the way I see them and others reveal differences in contrast which make the ‘face-swaps’ look too obvious.
The reason I thought I could do this in a reasonable amount of time was the darkness of the video which meant I could hide the shortcuts I was taking but it seems that I was wrong.
Due to the filesize, the sound quality is set to low and I’ve also reduced the number of posts on my front page for the moment.
For those of you interested in creating digital images, I’ll post a fuller explanation of how I created this tomorrow when I post the image on my blog. Sod it, here’s a run-through posted below.
This may sound a tad defensive but what the hell :
After having a conversation with a bloke whose views I respect, I think it best to clarify that, although I used a ‘plugin’ to create the brushstrokes effects, this was far from a one-click operation.
The whole image was created from scratch – clothes, background, everything.
(Believe it or not, in some countries, there is a grey area on copyright about photographic representation of images which are now in the public domain.)
As far as I know there is no plugin that will change stroke size, depth, direction, swirl and adjust colour, hue, add shadows, highlights etc. on different parts of the image.
And the only plugin I have to do some of the work has a myriad of settings which you have to mess around with to get each part looking right.
There was quite a bit of ‘manual’ work involved – honest !
Some of the layers you see above had already been merged – The hat layer, for example, was composed of several different shapes on different layers, with different brush stroke dimensions and directions, then warped and the burn and dodge tool applied.
You may see duplicate layers as well – They are in fact similar but with different sharpness and hue settings – They work with each other to create the overall effect.
The added problem when creating an image like this is keeping an eye on how it will appear at the size required for the web.
The image may look OK at a much larger size but when shrunk, you may lose sharpness and detail. This means frequently copying the merged layers, pasting into a new, flat image and resizing.
However, the benefit of reducing the size is that you can’t see all the errors I made.
If you run a non-commercial site and place an active link to this blog (http://www.bbdo.co.uk/blog - not the individual post) ADJACENT TO THE IMAGE and credit 'Beau Bo D'Or', you are welcome to use the images I create - with the exception of those I do on a commercial basis for Channel 4 News or any 3rd party. Please no bulletin boards that require registration. Definitely no Daily Mail which seems keen to nick my images without credit or payment.
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