Final Video:

Self-evaluation:  In creating this video I had a lot of trouble. First I did not know how to make a video of, so instead of taking video I decided to make a video of a series of pictures instead. I think this was a good decision because editing just the progression of pictures was difficult for me. Deciding how long I wanted each picture to be on the screen for took me a while, wanting to make each picture appear on screen for the same amount of time took me even longer. Initially I was not going to add transitions between the pictures but after trying one out I figured it looked better with transitions than without. Adding the transitions also caused me some trouble, because I could not seem to get the transition to overlap the picture instead of appearing after the picture and going into the following picture, but after working at it for hours I finally figured out how to do. Adding music was probably the easiest part for me, although getting the song to fade in and fade out I would not have known how to do without Professor Sanders's help. However adding text took me a while to figure out. I did know how to get text, however I did not know how to input it into the video, after googling it I figured out that I had to drag the text into the timeline to get it to appear on the screen. Creating a story with the pictures came easily to me, however coming up with a title for my video took some thinking. Overall I think I did a good job with this video, because I worked with timing, effects, transitions, and sound which was the purpose of this assignment. Through this assignment I also learned how to use Final Cut and will be able to use it in the future if need-be.

Storyboard for Final Video:

 

Edit #1 of Final Video:

This is the first edit of my video/movie/film. The sequence of the pictures begins with the sun in the midst of rising, then to a picture of the tree as a whole, and continues with pictures of the tree's branches, as well as pictures of the sun slowly rising and setting. I have added music has been added to the entirety of the movie as well as various transitions between each picture to make it more interesting and eye-catching instead of boring. The idea of the series of pictures is as follows: the sun is rising, the tree is rising with it, and progressively the sun rises as the flowers on the tree bloom until finally the sun sets and the tree goes to bed with the sun closing it's flowers. The song I have chosen "Tomorrow Will Be Kinder" by The Secret Sisters went well with the progression of the pictures, because the song is so slow, but because it talks of tomorrow it relates to the story I am trying to tell.

Final Project Abstract:

For my final project, I am planning on creating a sequence of photos of a beautiful tree that resides in my backyard. When this tree was in bloom in early March, I took several pictures of it because it was so beautiful. This movie/film/clip will include the many components that makes the tree beautiful such as the flowers that bloom on it, as well as the color of the sky, the various locations of the sun, and of course the angle of the camera. I would like to create a sequence beginning with the sun rising, then of the tree as a whole, followed by pictures of the branches of the tree as well as the flowers on the tree from different angles intertwined with pictures of the sun slowly rising up into the sky, making the setting of the sun the final picture. I would also like to include a song with a slow melody, maybe even lyrics to add to the intensity and beauty of the tree and the flowers that bloom on it. The basic idea behind this video would be the coming and going of spring with the rising and setting of the sun.

Edited Video #1:

Before learning to use final cut, Professor Sanders asked us to take some video to gain some experience filming and to have something to work with. The above video is the original video I took of my little cousin Sarine jumping off the stairs while I was babysitting her on my cell phone. As you can see the video was taken sideways and there are parts of it that are unnecessary such as the very end when she walks towards me and then back towards the stairs. The video below is the edited version of the same video, using final cut. Obviously the video has been turned to the right 90 degrees so it is straight, and a small portion of the end of the video has been cut off because I deemed it unnecessary. I also toyed with some of the lighting to give it a cool effect. After editing this video on Final Cut I had a lot of trouble uploading it onto my blog so I uploaded it onto youtube first and then posted on here. 

Midterm:

Abstract: For the midterm I attempted to go with the theme of food, but ended up having three pieces that were completely unrelated to food. Nonetheless, I decided to have three pictures taken with a camera, edited as needed, and three composite pictures for my midterm.  

This is a picture of platter of various cheeses, crackers and pepperoni, as you can see. This platter was prepared for one of the many barbeques my family had over the summer. There hasn't been any kind of color correction, cropping or other editing done to it. This is the picture as it was taken. When I took the picture, I was very close to the platter, zooming in and out and moving around the platter to get it at a precise angle.

This is a picture of a salad bowl with a metal spoon in it, a soda bottle and bags of carrots behind it. This salad was prepared again for one of our family gatherings over the summer. Again, there hasn't been any kind of color correction, cropping or other editing done. This is how the picture of the salad bowl came out when I took it. To take the picture I was a significant distance from it, and had to zoom a significant amount to only get this portion of the salad bowl and not the entire thing. Because I zoomed in from a distance the rim of the salad bowl closest to you is blurry giving the picture a very cool effect. The soda bottle and carrots behind the salad bowl are brightly colored giving the picture a cool appearance.

 This picture was taken from the backyard of my house as the sun was setting for the day. The day hadn't been particularly sun, hence the overwhelming amount of clouds in front of and near the sun. This picture has not been edited, it is as I took it. When I took it I did not think much of it, but after uploading it to my computer I saw that it was indeed very beautiful. The rays of the sun are extended onto the garage as well as the clouds that are encompassing it showing it's brightness. The clouds that are surrounding it are showing us that the sun is setting. The garage and the tree are dark because of the angle of the picture and the brightness of the sun, showing the contrast between the sun, sky and clouds.  

This picture is a composite of various flowers. All of these pictures were found online. Because spring is upon us and it is my favorite season I decided doing something with flowers for my fourth picture would be fitting. The original picture I chose was only of the yellow roses in bloom. I then tried to find pictures of different colored flowers to make it an eye-catching picture. In order to make it a composition I opened each picture of the flowers separately and then selected the part of the flower I wanted to use copying and pasting it into the main photo of the yellow roses. Each flower had it's own layer to make it easy for me to move them around as I pleased. In order to make it look realistic I did have to edit some of the pictures of flowers by using the lasso tool to crop out the parts I did not want.

This is a composite of images from a school in Armenia that I had helped raise money for so it could be rebuilt. The composite consists of images of parts of the school that are broken or are coming apart such as the windows that do not have glass on them, ceilings that are slowly caving in or deteriorating, chairs that do not have backs or comfy cushions and children who attend the school even though it is slowly falling apart. This particular picture is very meaningful to me because they are striving to get an education regardless of the conditions their school is in, while in America I am going to a school that spends millions a year renovating and rebuilding buildings. In order to create this composite I used the picture with the broken backed chair as my main image, and opening up the various images of other broken parts of the school, chose what I wanted to add and again selected, or in some cases lassoed, the part of the picture and copied and pasted it into the main image. Each image has it's own layer to make it easy for me to move them around and reposition them as I pleased. In reference to the windows, I used the same image and pasted it many times to create a sort of wall of broken windows image having to move some over others to make it look more like a wall.

For my final image, I again made a composite. The original picture is a picture of my little cousin Sarine without all the food surrounding her. The idea behind this image to make it seem like she was dreaming about eating all of these yummy foods, but particularly strawberries because she loves strawberries. This picture was more difficult to construct than I anticipated because I was working with an image of a person instead of a picture of an object. The positioning of the strawberries, the cheesecake and the cupcakes took me a while. I wanted them each to be placed perfectly, so I played around with their placement over and over, rearranging them several times. To input the various images of food I selected and lassoed the specific food I wanted and copied and pasted it into the image of my cousin. Each piece of food was it's own layer making it easy for me to move it around and position it however I wanted. This composite has to be my favorite because it's eye-catching what with the strawberries and cupcakes. It makes one think about food or what their favorite food might be and about eating it.

Self-evaluation: I will begin by saying I'm very proud of my work. Not being very handy with a camera, I was able to take some really good pictures that I might be able to use in future projects. I was also able to (with a lot of time and patience) create really cool composite's that not only were original but eye-catching as well. Never having worked with photoshop before taking this class it took me a while to get used to the various tools needed to edit pictures, create composites and compositions. Taking the pictures themselves was not difficult, but trying to figure out the angles to take the pictures in, how much to zoom in and whether or not it looked better edited or as it was originally took a lot of deciding and second-guessing on my part. As for the composite's, I had a lot of difficulty selecting and placing them into the main picture I wanted to use. It took me a while to figure out how to create layers to make it easy for me to move the copied images around and place them as I pleased. Editing the image after pasting it was all very trying on my patience; getting the image to be just right was a pain. Despite the difficulties I had, I did learn a lot about photoshop and the various tools that I can use in the future to make compositions and composites and edit pictures.

3 Color Correction's

Karabagh Mountains Before: This past summer my family and I went to Armenia, and Karabagh. During our two week stay it was very muggy and foggy out, especially as we drove up and down the roads that went up and down various mountains.

Karabagh Mountains After: To correct the color of this image and display the beauty of the mountains I first used the sharpen tool to highlight the mountains, and the grass in the forefront of the picture. I played around a lot with the sharpen tool so as not to sharpen the picture too much. I then used the brightness tool to bring brighten the picture further bringing out the features of the mountains. 

Sassounsi Tavit Before: This is a statue of the warrior Sassounsi Tavit on his horse in Armenia.

Sassounsi Tavit is thought to be a mythological hero in one of many Armenian folk epic poems.

Sassounsi Tavit After: In order to color correct this photo I didn't do much. Most of what I did had to do with adjusting the brightness and sharpening the image to highlight the statue and make it more prominent in the photo. By adjusting the brightness the fogginess of the picture disappears making the sky and the sun shining clearer. By sharpening the image I was able to make the statue appear more majestic and more prominent in the picture.

Sosi Morkoor and I Before: This is a photo of me and my aunt Sosi on New Year's Eve. As you can see this photo is kind of dark and faded.

Sosi Morkoor and I After: As I mentioned above, this photo was very dark and faded so in order to brighten it I used the brighten tool, which brought out the color of our faces as well as our surroundings. I then used the sharpen tool to help correct the color of our faces.

2 Composition's:

The first composition is supposed to be symbolic, showing a soldier going away to war in the dead of winter, fading away if you will, and his wife/girlfriend unable to let him go. This could symbolize the last memory she has of her husband/boyfriend or how much she misses him or even the fact that he has gone (died) and the memories she has of him have faded away into nothingness because without seeing him or hearing from him memories can fade. In order to compose this picture I first chose to use this picture of a park, and then selected the man and woman from a photo I found online. I then copied and pasted it into the picture of the park twice, positioning them to look like they were slowly fading away, making the second copy faded added to this effect. The biggest issue with this composition was the color. I tried to match the color of the park with the color of the couple, but did not do a very good job of making them similar.

The second composition is more simple, it is just of two bear cubs play fighting in the grass in front of a church. I thought this would be appropriate because this church is in such a place that it is the only thing besides grass, rocks and trees. Bear cubs being curious could have wandered upon it and started some kind of quarrel while there over a berry one might have found. In order to input the bears into the photo I selected them from the original image they were in and copied and pasted them into the image of the church, which I took. After pasting it, I had to delete some parts of the bears by selecting them and fading the edged of the bears to make it look more realistic.

3 Composite Picture's:

 This photo was originally only of flowers in a vase on a table with white tablecloth. To make it a composite photo I used the lasso tool and to crop out a flower from another image and part of a strawberry from another image. I copied and pasted these into the image with the flowers in a vase and then played around with them, moving them from place to place in order to make the image abstract. Each image had it's own layer, making it easy to move them around and erase parts of them if I needed to.

 

This image was originally only of the wind chimes with the tiny bird feeders. I used the select tool to select parts of other pictures which I then edited and cropped parts out of in order to input them into the base image. After inputting them into the base image I again moved them around to create the image of a person smelling growing flowers, blueberries growing in the distance with bird feeders happily waiting for the birds to come. This image was pretty simple to create in that I only had to select three parts of three other images in order to make an abstract composite, photo.

This photo was originally a picture of a cheesecake with different flavors. I have added a picture of a cupcake, strawberries and a kiwi to make it a composite picture. I think I did a really good job with this final composite picture because you can't tell where the cheesecake ends and the cupcakes, kiwi or strawberries begin. I intentionally chose these various foods to add onto the cheesecake because they are very bright and help to make the picture very eye catching. Again, I simply used the select tool and the lasso tool to select the part of the cupcakes I wanted from the photo, the part of the strawberries I wanted from that single photo and lastly the one kiwi I wanted from that photo and copied and pasted them into the photo of the cheesecake, playing around to see which space they would look best in. To finish this composite, I played around with the layering, putting the kiwi on top of the strawberries and the cupcakes on top of the kiwi to make it look like they were somehow melded into each other.  

First 3 Abstract Photographs:

 

  This picture was taken at Rockefeller center Christmas day. After uploading it onto the computers in the mac lab I played with the colors on photoshop to make the colors brighter as well as our faces, however I was having some trouble with it, so instead I played with the saturation of the photo on my computer in the photo-viewer and the picture that originally looked dark and grey-ish became this. The buildings look like they're popping out, our faces are illuminated and the tree is the center of attention.

This picture was taken during a sunset on one of the many days of winter break. We were driving into the city to see my aunt and uncle when after crossing the George Washington Bridge I noticed that the sky was a bright orange color, making the rest of the scenery a dark blue/black color. The bright orange illuminated the town of Edgewater and the clouds look like they're fanning up, out and away. To me it seemed like an abstract photo because the sky extended into town and is rarely such a color. I haven't tampered with this photo at all. It is as I took it.

This final photo was taken by my best friend who is very much into taking photos and playing around with them to give them cool effects to make them cooler than they originally were. She took this picture several times, changing the effects of her camera to various settings many times. There are many versions of this picture, however in the one above picture she used an HD (I believe that's what it's called) setting to make the colors fade and instead have the picture come out in black and white, exaggerating the outlines of my hair, face, eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows and shirt as well as the wall in the background.

First 3 Abstract Paintings/Drawings:

 60 Minutes:

This last image that I created on photoshop took me the most amount of time because it was allowed to be whatever I wanted it to be and not being very artistic I didn't really know what to draw. I started by making the entire canvas a light purple because that is my favorite color. Next I began playing with all the different kinds of brushes and textures they make, creating these bubble-like images which could symbolize random thoughts, wishes, desires of people. I wanted these bubbles to pop out of the painting so I chose bold colors that would attract attention.Once I had drawn these bubbles, I decided to fill them in with colors that again would pop out of the picture, giving the largest bubble outlined in a dark purple multiple colors. Before finishing my painting I felt that it was missing some thing so I added some random dots inside the yellow and orange of the largest bubble as well as some random pink squiggles towards the bottom of the painting. Once I had done this, I felt that my painting was finished.

45 Minutes: 

This painting was more difficult than the self portrait to construct because we had to paint a landscape and I wanted to create the image of mountains after mountains, but not in close proximity. The difficulty stemmed from creating the image of "far-away" distance-wise. I could not figure out how to draw the mountains to make them look like they were far away, so I settled for making the mountains look like they were appearing one after another, instead of far apart. I chose the colors before I drew the outline of the mountains themselves, deciding to make the outline of the mountains blue so it would be obvious where they started. I decided to make the mountains in the forefront a dark blue color to show that they were taller than the mountains that I drew behind them. Then I added some white at the peaks of the mountains to further emphasize that they were taller and therefore colder. The green mountains are colored green to show that they aren't as tall and therefore not as cold. Behind these green mountains there are three other colors, a lighter green, light blue and a purple color. The green symbolizes another mountain, the blue is for the sky and the purple is for rocks that might appear in between mountains.

15 Minutes:

This was my first attempt at using photoshop to create anything. Being that we had to draw a self-portrait using the paint tools I didn't really know how to go about drawing my self-portrait. After playing around with photoshop and all of the various tools, I figured out how to create a perfect circle as well as ovals to make my head and eyes. I then used the paintbrush to draw a nose, eyebrows, and a mouth. Then, playing with the different kinds of brushes I found a thicker more feathery brush to draw in my hair. Next, I added various colors to my hair, eyes and mouth to make it look more realistic. The pink on my cheeks was one of my final additions using a round faded brush. Finally, I added the colors red, blue and yellow around my head, emphasizing some of the various emotions that help to characterize me as a person such as yellow for happiness, red for angry, and blue for melancholy.

About Me:

Hi, my name is Tamar Samuelian. I am majoring in Early Childhood Education and English with a minor in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at The College of New Jersey. Upon coming to TCNJ, I was a biology major, however after taking intro to biology I found that it was not for me and decided to take a different path, Education. This being my fourth year here, I have found that the college makes everything ten times more difficult than it has to be, playing ring around the rosie with me for these past three years, not allowing me to take more than four classes or even the classes I need to take in order to graduate. It seems I will never leave. Taking intro to digital media was a very large risk for me because I do not know the slightest thing about digital media. I am enjoying it so far though, and hope to learn a lot of new things which I will be able to use when I become a teacher. Besides my interest in teaching, I love watching funny movies, trying different foods, going to the beach, hanging out with friends, playing basketball and most of all baking yummy treats.