When I created this movie, I did it in such a short ammount of time, that I didn't have time for anything. I filmed it in one night, edited it in about an hour, and sped over to the film festival, 30 minutes late.

In my previous expiriences, I've noticed that most of my better works are made faster than the ones I spend a lot of time on. Maybe that's why I excel in photography. It's that immediacy that attracts me. That's probably why I don't enjoy painting and drawing as much as I could. It's just too long and drawn out compared to Photo or Digital Image Design. There aren't much results in the period of a day. It's also the technical aspect that gets me. Anything involving my fumbling hands isn't going to turn out that well. I really think I just need more practice.

I thought over 5 days what I wanted to do for my final project. Nothing was coming to me, at all. I had scenes in my head I wanted to do, and my ideas became more complex. But the more complex they became, the time I had to do them was decreasing.

So I abandoned my original ideas, which weren't even that good. And then I thought of making a cover for my movie. It'd be fast, easy and I had all the resources (myself) I needed at home.

The process of making it only took a day, which was just the ammount that I needed. Thankfully I have photoshop at home, otherwise I would have been screwed.

I took all the images that appear on the cover myself. I think the part that's most impressive is how I photoshopped myself 4 times into the same picture. I'd seen it done before, and I'd always wanted to try it, but I never had a reason to. But I think this was a just reason. I think it adds to the movie, since it's impossibe to see us all together in the movie.

I looked at other DVD cases for inspiration. I think the biggest inspiration was the cover for Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. It's just a picture of her face and eyes, I I employed that in my design.

I also edited the colors. I made them have that blue tint that you always see in those cool pictures everbody likes.

I've always been interested in surrealism. Actually, I think it was surrealism that got me into art in the first place. It was in photography that I did a project on night photography, and almost all of them were surrealists. I studied Bill Brandt and Man Ray, and from that point on, I think all of my work has been influenced by them. So surrealism has been a strong point in my art since Photo 1.

This was my first strictly surreal project that I've done. All of my night photos I think can be considered surrealistic, but I've never taken them with the intent of them being surreal. It's just something that I started to notice, and I think that's better than trying to achieve surrealism, since it's more of an extension of my own ideas. My ideas just are surreal.

But back to my image. It took a long time for me to figure out what I wanted to do. I looked through all the books I had; a book on surrealism, a Man Ray photo collection, a Dali collection, a Bill Brandt collection. But it was finally in my book on Japanese Photography of the last century that I saw the image that inspired it all. It was a very grainy photo of a man on the horizon line, on top of a snowy hill, while it was snowing. I thought it was awesome, so I thought of what I could do wit ha scene like that.

My next idea came from a School of the Art Institute of Chicago information booklet. There were many picture of art being deconstructed, so I wanted to try that with one of my pictures. Sadly, the photo I used doesn't have much unity to it, but it fit in with the background and overall colors.

Probably like 5 years ago, I saw Garbage's music video for the song "Push It", and in it, there were men made of static snow that you see on the televison. This stuck with me, and I used it.

Overall, this turned out nicely. It seems minimal, and I like it like that. Something I had a hard time with was the proportions, but since it is surreal, the proportions don't matter as much. However, it does take away from the realism, which was very important in the most famous surrealists artworks (Dali, Magritte).

My piece came around very nicely. I knew I had a pretty good idea when I started, but I wasn’t sure if it would come together. I was very worried about my skills in Illustrator. I had seen examples in class and I knew that all the best were very detailed. Thankfully it did.
I find the colors to be very attractive and eye popping. I think a lot of the digital imaging these days are leaned towards the very bright, poppy type art. Art that is supposed to grab the eye with color. Because most digital imaging is so exact, I think come to the point of nearly being too perfect. I think that happened when I was working. I tried too hard to capture the exact details of the piece, and stylistically, it didn’t turn out as well. My background didn’t exactly match the details of my body.
I think I got the idea from some of the pictures I had taken with Sharon. She came up with the idea of her holding the balloons, so it actually wasn't myself that inspired myself. It was Sharon who inspireed me. The rolls I took of her turned out to be one of the best Ive ever taken, so I'm thankful for that idea she had. If she hadn't thought of the balloons, it wouldn't have ended up as well as they did.
I've always enjoyed clouds, so I think it's my every day life that inspired me to make something with clouds in the background. But I think it may have been this pic that inspired my color pallete. I noticed how well lime green and bright blue go together, and I decided that I really liked how that worked out. So I chose my lime green shirt on purpose.

Everything is going pretty well. I'm a lot better at this than I thought I was going to be. I had never really seen myself at excelling at this, but it seems like I am. I always new that I wanted to include a lot of detail in my vector drawing. Looking at other vector drawings, I knew that to easily impress, just include a lot of detail. I am having a bit of trouble at capturing the details in my pants. I think that's mostly because the pants are black. Also, it's hard to capture blotches that have gradiants in them. I know there is some way to do that, but I'm too lazy to look it up.