Original photo taken from the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough At Last”. Rod Serling’s head is on the right side of the frame, which was not in the original photo
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Original photo taken from the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough At Last”. Rod Serling’s head is on the right side of the frame, which was not in the original photo
The second assignment that I chose for my final project was drawn from the Wait, Where’d That Guy Come From? web assignment.
I wanted the white rabbit to be travelling and following people in order to find the right Alice. So, to create this part of the story, I went to Google and searched “the white rabbit.” I found a few decent images of the white rabbit (which you can find at the very end of this post) then I began looking for backgrounds to put him in.
This was a bit more challenging because I wasn’t sure the significance of the photos yet. Should they be of Alice’s family? Since he’s trying to find Alice? Should it be more like Where’s Waldo and how he just shows up in random places?
I eventually settled on the Where’s Waldo idea. So I went to Flickr’s Creative Commons page and searched “park.”
I found a bunch of photos that I thought looked “historical” and that would also be easy to include the white rabbit. Easy meaning color, graininess, etc.
Here are the photos with the white rabbit:
I took each of the photos and tried my best to adjust the the color of the rabbit photo to match. It as so much harder than I thought! I almost got desperate at one point and wanted to load them into Instagram…
But, I couldn’t stoop that low. I had to do this with filters on Corel Paintshop Pro. It just had to happen.
Part Three
The assignment was to photoshop someone in an image where they didn’t belong. So I put myself next to Hitler.
As soon as I saw this assignment that asked us to photoshop someone or something that shouldn’t be there into a picture, I knew exactly what I would do: Slender Man.
Now, if you don’t know who Slender Man is, I pulled a few lines from a Wiki article on him:
Slender Man generally appears (in modern times) as a tall man in a black or grey suit, red or black tie, and white shirt, with no eyes, mouth, or clearly defined facial features. It has no hair, and generally has normal-looking bare hands. Slenderman typically is depicted in imagery and literature as between 6 and 15 feet tall, depending on the situation, and in video as around 6-7 feet tall.
You can also learn more about the myth of the Slender Man in popular culture and history here.
I learned about him from playing this random game online called Slender: The Eight Pages. I hate scary games, but I gave it a go and it has continued to fuel my nightmares for a while now.
I also made door decs for my residents this past October. I’m a big fan.
I went to Creative Commons on Flickr and searched for “kids” in the “park.”
Why did I search kids in the park? Well, because Slender Man has a weird connection with kids. He often shows up around kids playing a park if you look online for photos of him. I thought it would be creepy.
I found this photo from the Seattle Municipal Archives
With a little Photoshop magic (layering, making him look grainy, and changing his face to look less pixelated), I created this.
Now he doesn’t fit in completely, but I just couldn’t make the photo even grainier than I already had.
Joe Flacco got lost on his way to Disney World.
For this Assignment, we had to insert someone into a picture where they don’t belong. Since Joe Flacco was Superbowl MVP, he was supposed to go to Disney World for a parade afterwards. Instead I made him get lost in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
This was actually really easy to do, it just took a lot of effort to get a good smart cut. First, I loaded an image of Joe Flacco into Gimp, as well as the image that I wanted to place him in, in this case being the parade scene from Ferris Bueller. I went at Joe first using the Smart Cut Tool (I). I probably used around 200 points to get a good shape off of the smart cut–sometimes it gets a little crazy so the closer you put the points together, the better the cut gets. After I finally got around him, I copied the image (Edit>Copy) and pasted it as a new layer into the parade picture. From here, I had to shrink it to an appropriate size using the Scale Tool (Shift+T).
Once I did that, I tried a bunch of different things so that I could put him into the background. I found that the thing that made the best effect was using the Smart Cut Tool again so I could select some of the flowers instead of just using a solid block (Joe was only half there when I used the solid block). By selecting some of the background to move into the foreground, I made it look more realistic in having Joe there, so he wasn’t just floating around and actually looked like part of the picture. Once I had the flowers selected (using the smart select tool (I)), I used the layering options (control+L) to move the flowers in front of Joe, covering some of him up. Then I used the Move Tool (M) to move everything into place, lining up the flowers in the foreground with the flowers in the background, enveloping Joe into the picture and that was that.
Also, don’t forget to export the photo so you can make it a .jpg or .png because otherwise Gimp will format it in some weird file type.
Another element I am using in my story is that Dorothy figure ut that to return to Oz, she would need to go shopping and find a new pair of ruby slippers, since you cannot expect to just fall out of the sky again and land on another witch.
So she has to go shopping somewhere upscale. For this piece of the story, I used the Wait, Where’d That Guy Come From? assignment (fun because I never dis that one before):
Photoshop someone(s) (or something(s)) into a picture that isn’t supposed to be there.
I did some searching on photos of high end shoe stores, but somehow the thought of Dorothy shopping for shoes in the Villaggio (located in Doha, Qatar) worked for me- using this Travelblog photo.
Here is Dorothy (and Toto too) slyly shopping for magic shoes in Doha:
To mix her in the crowd, I would need an image of Dorothy standing or walking, and isolated (no arms around Scarecrow, sorry). The one that worked was for an ad for a life size cardboard cutout.
In Photoshop, I deleted the bit of ground around her feet, and dropped in the main photo. Her layer is on top of the others, but to make it look more real, I position her to overlap with someone standing closer to the camera, and use that person’s shape as a selection to delete a bit from the Dorothy layer, so it looks like she is behind (it is likely better to extract his shape later first and they drop it in.
Dorothon was very tiny. I went to make a blowup of the area after putting a circle around it- I zoomed in the circle to about 400%, and did a screen shot. I then can paste that back to the normal size, so it looks pixelly like it is a real blow up.
This assignment was super awesome. I’d always wanted to try my hand at something like this, so I felt I had struck gold here. I took a scene from Star Wars with C3PO and company, and decided on added the Anthony Hopkins character “Hannibal Lecter”. I took a picture of his shoulders up to his head with the mouth restraint on that I extracted from Google.
At first, I experimented with placing him behind the shoulder of someone but it did not fit so well. So I moved Dr. Lecter around some more until I decided to bring him down low in the scene. The end result: Hannibal looking directly at you from the bottom of the frame, haunting your nightmares, threatening to EAT YO….!!!
What’s HE doing there??
This assignment is called ‘Wait, where’d that guy come from?‘ And in the current day and age, how could I possibly resist putting poor Obama in front of who knows how many NRA advocates? I couldn’t quite get the layers to work right for this one, so I instead erased the surroundings of Obama’s head and made a separate layer of his own head so I could scale it properly and place it carefully. A bit more difficult than it looked, this was still a whole lot of fun. 
Did you guys know that I was actually the scuba diver in Nemo? Yeah, it’s not really a big deal or anything…
So for the assignment “Wait, where’d that guy come from?” We were suppose to Photoshop something or something into a picture where that object didn’t belong. I went snorkeling in the Caribbean three years ago and I decided to Photoshop myself into the Finding Nemo promotional poster! For this assignment I used Photoshop to delete part of my image that I didn’t want in order for it to blend in with the poster a little better. I had familiarized myself with Photoshop, but I was not sure how to actually delete the parts of the images I didn’t want. I tried cropping it at first but it didn’t look right so after some research I finally learned how to outline the picture I wanted and deleted the rest!
This assignment was worth 3 stars.
This one being a three star gave me a little bit more trouble at first. Once I figured out the scene I wanted it was a matter of finding the right material cropping it for my use then trying to fade it in to look natural. All using Pic Monkey! Do you see it?
