Brandon Burris on Examiner.com

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Sound Project - Iron Man

I had a lot of trouble with this project as well.  I still found sound hard to work with, more so this time because we had to make our own sounds.  The song that I remade was Ozzy's "Iron Man."  I thought this song would be cool to remake using car sounds, basketball beats, and my own voice saying Iron Man.  However, I spent well more than just a couple hours working on this project having much difficulty manipulating the sound I created.  But, I finally got this grueling sound project somewhere that I kinda like, or rather the best I could get it.  I still don't think its that great, but it works and I did my best to get the result that I did.  Overall, I came to the conclusion that I really don't like using Audacity.

http://www.public.asu.edu/~blburris/IronMan.mp3

http://www.public.asu.edu/~blburris/SoundExercise.mp3

This kind of project was new to me and I had a lot of difficulty with it because I was new to messing with sound using Audacity and Garage Band.  I finally got my project about to where I wanted it and expected to sound like, but I wish I could have done more with it, maybe with more freedom.  But, using what I had to work with, I think my first sound project came out pretty good and I am happy with it.  Please click in the above link to hear my sound project.

When I started this project, I knew that I wanted to take a comical approach in deigning my quote projects.  Therefore, when I searched for quotes, I looked at various comedians for ideas.  In the end, I chose three really good quotes that I liked, one from Mel Brooks, one from Bill Cosby, and one from my favorite comedian, George carlin.  Being new to Illustrator made it a little difficult in designing and depicting each piece the way I wanted because I am not yet familiar with all the tools that are available to me.  But, I did my best and with a little luck of clicking the right buttons, arrived at the images you see above.  I am pleased with the pieces, even though arriving at them was irritating at times.  Nevertheless, I feel more comfortable with using Illustrator now to manipulate text, but still prefer Photoshop.

I found this assignment to be kind of difficult, mainly because I have never used Illustrator before.  After much thought of what to make, which also proved to be difficult because I didn't know what I had to work with, I finally decided to make a vector type of my initials.  My initials are BB, therefore, I placed the b's back to back which created a butterfly image.  I did the same thing and gave the butterfly a little head.  As for the colors, I chose to keep the whole thing as a black and white contrast.  For the background, I put a bunch of squares that also had the black and white contrast that complemented the butterfly well.  Overall, for as simplistic as the piece is, it took me a long, grueling time to complete, but it proved to be a success and I am happy with it.

I decided to go with a science fiction theme with my extra credit book project.  Science fiction is my favorite genre, and wanted to take a stab at making one of those extreme looking space backgrounds that some science fiction books have.  Therefore, I started with making a starry sky scene to which I added a couple planets.  I incorporated a few of my own pictures to complete the project, such as my moon picture which I used as one of the planets.  After I finished composing my project, I had yet to come up with a title for it.  I pondered what I would call it for about a day, but in the end what I liked and what stuck in my head was “Journey to the Center of the Universe.”  I liked this title because it could be a part two to the renowned “Journey to the Center of the World” which would be cool if there would someday be a part two…hell I will write it if I must.

 

When I was first introduced to this project, I immediately knew what the subject of my piece was going to be, the University of Phoenix Stadium.  I chose to do my photomontage of the stadium because I knew that I had pictures of it when it was first being built and thought it would be cool to incorporate them into the piece.  So, all I needed was a set of current pictures, with which I could easily incorporate the building pictures of the structure into.

Getting the pictures I wanted turned out to be an all day event.  I spent the day taking a series of zoomed in pictures of the stadium that I would later piece together to make my photomontage.  I took three sets of picture: one set at noon, one set in the evening, and one set at night.  I did my best to set my camera in the same position in front of the stadium each time, according to my pictures I took back in 2006.  This proved to be difficult as many things in the scenery changed, but I was able to get it pretty close.

After I took all the pictures I needed, all I had to then was piece them together in Photoshop using the photo stitch tool.  I started by stitching all of the noon shots first, which took a while to do because of the file size and the amount of pictures I was stitching.  When that was done, I then took various pictures from the evening and night shots and overlaid them onto the stitched noon shots.  Finally, after I had finished with that, I added the finishing touch of overlaying the picture of the stadium being built on top of the entire image.