Opie

Julian Opie is a visual artist, and one of the New British Sculpture movement. Julian Opie's style was first recognised when creating the compilation album cover for Blur. In his portraits he portrays his images by using black outlines with areas of colour and very little detail. The face is normally a circle area of colour, sometimes without a neck and often black circles for the eyes and pupils. Opie's aim is to show personality through these images with very little amount of detail.

To create my Opie I uploaded a photo of my self onto the computer. I then put it into the Photoshop programme. I used the lasso tool to split my photo into seperate facial parts starting with my hair. I then selected the dropper tool to try and get a perfect match of my original hair colour. I used the fill bucket to creat a flat block colour for my hair. I then went onto my face shape and the features on my face such as eyes etc. Once I had created my basic image I enhanced the natural lines and shadows on my face to emphasis features such as my chin. To do this I used the lasso tool and simply made that section slightly darker than the flat colour used. I felt that this task was a great introduction to Photo shop and has helped me deveolp my skills at using the programme greatly.

Tools

In todays lesson we were introduced to the green screen. We used the Final Cut programme to upload and edit our footage. I captured a shot of an actor performing in a video into Final cut as a practice. Once selecting a shot from the footage I clicked on effects, went into video filters, key and then Chroma Keyer. This allowed me to select the colour range which allowed us to change the background. I used the dropper tool to take a sample of the green background then changed the colour spectrum to create a clear coloured background by using a scale to increase or decrease the effect until we got the perfect mixture. We changed the colour spectrum, saturation and luma key and also experimented with the softness of the edges and effects of the shot, aiming to make it as clear and sharp as possible. Once we were satisfied with our clip we repeated the steps for another clip and shrinked them to fit the two clips on top of each other. This then created the impression that the two clips were in the same shot that was on the screen. We could also apply a different background to the clip by using a wire frame to match the size of the background with the shot.

Final Cut skills

We were given a tutorial in Final Cut that included importing files to the software. We then learnt how to cut scenes and move them to arrange them in an order. We then imported music to the software and arranged that to fit the video footage. After this we learnt how to add transitions, effects and markers into the footage to make it more interesting.

The aim of this lesson was to be introduced to the Final Cut software and learn the basic skills that are needed to create a music video.