Assignment 4: Rethink

After a substantial amount of work, re-work, I also took the time to read the submission guide for Assignment 4 and have a problem.  It explicitly states:

"The purpose of this assignment is for you to demonstrate this stance, and the means involve completing a project which lies in the middle ground of the real versus fake argument"

I suspect a city being invaded by clone warriors is not quite what the course designer had in mind, which is a pity as I was having fun with this.  Ah well, I will put it down to a useful learning experience and try and think of an alternate theme, perhaps something from Singapore as I travel there in a couple of days.

I did learn a lot:

1. Blue screening is more or less pointless for this work as I pretty much cut out the models by hand from the frame.  I actually desaturated the Blue to B&W to remove artifacts from the images
2. For ground based objects, the camera must be in the same orientation for the background and foreground, otherwise there is a very noticeable perspective shift
3. Lighting is crucial, direction and source are both very important, the shadows of the models must match the direction of light in the background
4. Adding smoke and dust using brush tools in PS is quite possible and adds some drama

So my final image was:

Now preserved for posterity as a poster on my next door neighbours 6 year old sons wall.  He thought it was kind of cool for Star Wars to be beating up his neighbourhood.  The building on the right houses his favorite Pizza restaurant.