On trolling superheroes

ds106 assignment on Triple Trolling.

Image: Superman Returns movie poster.
Quote: Spiderman.
Signature: Iron Man.

Wanted to go a little fancy this time and did a full movie poster troll. The idea came from realising the similarities between Iron Man, and Superman who is sometimes known as "The man of steel" (in fact I think it's gonna be the title of the next Superman flick).

With that the only thing left was to add a famous comic book superhero quote and when searching for good Superman images Spiderman's line on power and responsibility just seemed to fit the pose.

Tackling an entire movie poster this time presented its own unique challenges I think, and the main difficulty was in putting all the elements together without something giving it all away. That something was Superman's chest, as all of you spelling bee champs know, "Iron Man" does not start with an "S". Oh no. The solution was pretty simple once I realised it though, and a simple attempt to have glow lighting obscuring the "S" brought with it more context than I initially intended when realising that Iron Man himself has a bright glowy thing right there. :D

Video tutorial to follow. Full size here:

On the replay value of dead people

ds106 assignment on reappropriating game screenshots.

Game: Pac-Man

Original context: Eat dots, avoid ghosts. This is 1980! There is no context!

Reappropriation:

"Day 1000. I still don't know how I got into this maze, or if I'm ever going to get out. Frankly the way this is going I'm beginning to give up hope. Occasionally I find fruit on the ground though...which despite the mystery of how they got there proves a necessary, even delicious source of sustenance. Nevertheless I feel that my time may soon be up; I have begun hallucinating, seeing multi-coloured ghosts floating around these bland, blue halls. Little by little everything is becoming so colourful to me...and I can't help but feel a sense of twisted melancholy at this unforeseen development..."

Original screenshot here. One interesting consideration this time was how to integrate text into a game as old as this without it seeming out of place and what I opted for in the end was to use a "dot-style" font to try and camouflage the line in there with the white dots, with the intention of blending dots with the "..." that might be part of the line itself.

As for the "how", well there wasn't much photo manipulation done this time around, but a big part of the process, as mentioned, was applying the right "dot-style" font so I guess I'll elaborate a little on finding and installing new fonts to your computer. What you wanna do is basically do a simple Google search on "free fonts", which will give you a list of sites where you can download...well, free fonts! (surprised?)

You can search for basically anything (even ones which mimic a specific movie font) but once you have your file downloaded you wanna go and unzip the folder (it's usually zipped), look for a file with the font name that ends with the extension "TTF", "OTF" or similar, and do the following:

1. Go to "My Computer"
2. "Local Disc"
3. "Windows"
4. "Fonts", and basically drop the TTF/OTF file in there.

After that...well there's no after that actually. The next time you open any font-using program (can you say Photoshop?) your new, shiny font should be added to your list of selectables! Go ahead and use it for your next assignment!

On the replay value of Poke-stalkers...

ds106 assignment on reappropriating game screenshots.

Game: Pokemon Yellow Version
Original context: Pikachu is the protagonist's main pokemon, and follows behind him obediently wherever he goes.
Reappropriation:

"I met it one day while out walking in the tall grass. It was yellow...with pointy ears that stuck out from the green around it. I don't know why but our eyes met, if only for an instant and in that moment I saw the depths of absolute terror in its beady, black little eyes. This was a monster. I ran like the dickens for my very soul...and have been running ever since..."

The process here was a simple Google image search for an appropriate screenshot, with the subsequent addition of the text and textbox. I think the fact that Pokemon is such a popular franchise and that the game itself looks old-school adds to the fun of reappropriation...I'm in ur Pokemans, messin' with ur childhood!

On spubbles and tigers and bears, oh my!

ds106 assignment on spubbles. Stay away from tigers 'kay :( Oh and I lied about the bears. No bears here.. >_>

On the orange that wanted to be a lime

ds106 assignment on re-colouring an object.

Re-coloured from this image here:

Orange, by Jgoge through CC Licensing.

My consideration here, as with the previous attempt was to start with an object that was already strongly associated with a colour, and then to break that association. As such an orange seemed like an ideal subject.

A quick search on flickr provided the required image, and I began to tweak the object colour in Photoshop (which didn't actually take very long). When done, I decided to go a little further and add the "Lime" tag at the bottom, as well as the text, just to add to the subject of an orange's change of colour.

UPDATE: Video tutorial added. For full size, click here.

On demotivational fantasies

ds106 assignment on demotivational posters.

Thought a bit about what kind of demotivational poster I wanted to try and ended up with that. The main image is the official logo for Final Fantasy XIII-2 (pronounced "thirteen-two"), and the rest is just simple text etc.

On colorising worlds

ds106 assignment on re-colouring an object.

Once again done on Photoshop, with the considerations this time on taking something that seems almost inseparable from its original colour, and then changing that colour. The idea of the interaction between Mario and the red box is something that came a little after, following some thought on the character's pose and how I could play around with that.

*Admittedly, this piece was not created specifically for this assignment, having been made prior for a Daily Shoot submission on the topic of "Yellow". I thought it fit quite perfectly with the assignment goals though.

On triple trolling

ds106's Triple Troll Attack assignment.

Photo: Ronald McDonald
Quote: KFC
Signature: Burger King

So. Who's up for some pizza?

UPDATE: A little bit on my thought processes for this work. So basically one of the key elements that makes for an interesting submission here I think, draws from the fact that you're trying to relate the 3 photo, quote and signature elements together somehow with something that draws them all together. Thinking about it though it's most effective when that connection becomes quite obvious and not too "loose" as to seem arbitrary, which is what IAmOdessa does in a submission that is quite different thematically, but which shares the same concerns, I think.

In this way the draw for my work above, or so I hope, is that one is able to laugh just a little harder seeing not only the disparate elements put together, but simultaneously how they jar with each other in terms of the accepted differences between various fast food chains.

On 4 icons

My 4 Icon Challenge submission for ds106.
What movie???

...

Aaand the answer:

Here's the How:

1. Think of 4 images/concepts as per the assignment (in this case a visual "X", "Man", a Nazi swastika referencing WWII, and a mushroom cloud to reference the clash between the main characters Professor X and Magneto).
2. Search for suitable images on Google images (keywords "male toilet sign", "nazi swatika", "mushroom cloud"; the "X" was made easily enough :P). Images provided below.
3. Put images together on Photoshop (but any image editing software will do).
4. On Photoshop, just for style, turn all images into silhouettes. Alternatively people can just add the word "silhouettes" to their Google image search to find more suitable images that do not require editing.
5. Submit. :D

Images from Google image search.