The Evolution of ManyMe

Inspired by my recent DS106 assignments I decided to take two of the projects I had completed this week, ManyMe and Go Daddy_Wheee, and use the skills and final products I created to visually illustrate the evolution of my ManyMe photograph. (Assignments: Multiply Yourself, Animated GIF) The objective of the Multiply Yourself assignment was to take two or more photos of yourself in the same location and combine them into one photo. I’m going to go one step further here and label this GIF project a completion of the “Photo It Like Peanut Butter” visual assignment 347 where we’re instructed to:

Use a GIF to illustrate the generation of a real world object/place by using your own series of photographs as the source material.

Phase I: The original images to work from were pulled as still frames from a 4min video taken walking in and out of the frame and placing myself at different locations.  (See earlier post for more background.) When making one of these photographs it’s important to have your camera on a tripod and that you get your shots as quickly as possible so that the lighting doesn’t change drastically.  If you have a controlled lighting environment you don’t have to worry about it.  Just make sure your background isn’t changing. )

Phase II: Using Photoshop Elements I cropped the single image shots.  I had strategically planned my placement in the photographs so that I could do a simple rectangle crop by making sure I hadn’t crossed over into another shot’s field. The guitar, iPad and chairs were my boundary markers.  No messing around with a tedious Lasso Tool.

Phase III: Next came the adjustment and fine-tuning of the cropped images for alignment and lighting.  Yes, even though I took the video in under 4min on a very overcast day, the center image of me was brighter than the two outside images.  Go figure!  I also didn’t like the diminished resolution quality of my images since they were taken from video footage in rather poor lighting.  Fiddling around with a few filters I found a combination that brightened and slightly blurred the entire photo that I found appealing. (Although my daughter later confessed she didn’t like the effect.  She thought it made me look like an alien and the image had lost its warmth.) As a final touch I cropped the entire merged image (attempting to improve the photo composition) and then created a fuzzy yellow border that complemented the yellow jacket I’m wearing in the right side image.

Phase IV: Creating the GIF… I gathered and organized the needed photoshop layers from earlier in the project into one new file.  Again, making sure that the alignment between images was spot on took some fine-tuning.  I didn’t need to worry about the lighting this time, since I wanted to show those changes if they were there. Once I had it assembled and previewed the first GIF, I noticed that I wanted it to run a bit slower so the viewer could take in each of the image changes more easily.  This was to show an evolving process, not just a quick action clip. I increased the overall frame rate to 0.8 seconds and cloned the initial empty frame and final frame to allow for lingering even a little longer on those shots.  The addition of the title text at the end capped it off nicely.

I was cruising the DS106 visual assignment choices for something that looked fun and challenging – yet would only take a couple of hours to complete. The MULTIPLY YOURSELF assignment (Take two or more photos of yourself in the same location and combine them into one photo.) really jumped out at me.  And it was worth 5 stars!

The project unfolded in three phases. (Animated GIF illustrating the image evolution)

Phase I woke me up in the middle of the night, my mind wouldn’t rest as it started planning how to set-up the shots so that the photo editing phase would be easier to handle.  I initially contemplated enlisting the aid of my partner or daughter to snap the shots, but then decided to take on the challenge of doing this all by myself from start to finish.  I decided to use my FlipVideo camera on a tripod to take video footage of me in different places in the frame. Then I’d capture still images on my Mac with Adobe Premiere Elements 11 and meld the images together in Photoshop Elements 11.

Phase II was all about setting up the location, shots and shooting the video clips.  I tested a few different scenarios before I had something I thought would work.  I added interest and personality to the mix by wearing something a little different in each shot.  (As an aside, just in case I wanted to use the video later to make a “live” version of the photo, I made sure that I entered the shots from different places in the frame so that I wouldn’t cross over into another shot when I melded them together.) The weather outside cooperated by not being too windy, the overcast morning meant I didn’t have any shadows, but I still needed to work quickly as it looked like rain was on its way.

Phase III was spent putting it all together.  I downloaded the video clips into Premiere Elements 11 for the Mac and selected several still images from each of the three “Rochelles”.  I was a little dismayed that the resolution of the images wasn’t all that great.  My decision to do this assignment without a helper or the need for a timed shot delay function was now suspect. I would have had higher resolution images if I’d used my regular digital camera on the tripod instead of capturing the stills from the FilpVideo. Alas, as I’ve found so many times before, creativity abounds when I’m seemingly “stuck” and need to find another way out. Not wanting to set everything up again, I moved forward with the “sub-optimal” material I had before me. I trusted everything would work out. Besides, I’m one of the online outside participants of the course, and there’s no real grade at stake here. 😉

I diligently went to work cropping and blending my three images into one.  It was fairly easy except that the center pose lighting was slightly lighter than the two outside images.  Why??  I haven’t a clue. I shot the entire video in one 4 min session and the lighting matches at both ends.  Maybe the clouds thinned a little or something half-way through?? Who knows…. To fix this I used Enhance=>Adjust Lighting=>Brightness and Contrast on each of the 3 poses until they matched as best I could get.  While playing around I chanced upon a combination of adjustments that slightly blurred the photo even more and suddenly it looked great.  As usual I don’t exactly remember what I did to make it happen… it was “Magic”. Finally, I wanted to give the photo a border of some kind.  I like to play with all of the dials and sliders to see what shows up. EUREKA! The combination of Edit Layer Style=>Glow Inner=> Yellow was perfect.

I now have a beautiful feathered yellow glow surrounding my ManyMe photo that matches the yellow jacket I am wearing. Yippee!

Watch an animated GIF visually illustrating the evolution of the image.