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First emoticon


He was a medicine man of great importance. He stood naked before the tribe, took a slow deep breath like he did before every performance, then suddenly howled and began making wild leaps and gesticulating with both spindly arms. This was to indicate that the gods were well pleased with the latest batch of human sacrifice and would now deliver the rain the village desperately needed.

The crowd shrank back as he danced, and suddenly "Half-wit" Hao reached over and stabbed a kid.

"The medicine man says the gods are angry. We must sacrifice more," said Half-wit, as the kid went through the usual post-stab rigmarole (bleeding, gurgling, dying, etc.).

The medicine man stopped dancing and grunted in annoyance. He stomped over to a nearby tree, tore off some of the bark, and scratched a crude caricature of a smiling face onto it. He began to dance again, this time with the smiley face over his face to announce the intended mood of his actions.

"Ooooooh," said the crowd.

"Sorry kid," said Half-wit, but the kid was already dead. These things happen.

Understanding Internal Memory Playback

This is a playback of some of our production crew scouting the shooting location for our final project in Media II. It is called "Flag Day."

Here is the diagram:


+


=
Now, here is the corresponding playback:


Scout Part 1 of 2 from Matthew Ballard on Vimeo.

After Effects

Doctors,
If any of you are not aware of Video Copilot, i highly recommend it. I'm not someone to recommend things I'm not one hundred and thirteen percent sure about. And I'm sure about this. So, heres the link. Andrew Kramer is really funny guy and he shows you how to make professional quality video from the first tutorial. It Very engaging. It's for those of you of that are getting tired of the Lynda.com tutorials.
-Matthew

DVD Menu

Ok, lets get something straight. ------------- (drum splash.) Sorry that's corny. What's not corny is this great DVD Menu background image I've made.

In class we took turns analyzing each of our peers images and made notes of what we thought works and what does not.
Pertaining to my image the negatives i recieved 9/10 times was that the "title" was illegible. I wasn't aware that i had a title. It works though i guess. Bigote duro frio is "Cold hard mustache" in spanish. It was just something i wanted to me lost in the background but i guess i made it stand out too much. So i decided to make it my title. I also decided to work on the rest of the composition as well. Here is what i have so far:

Thanks
Matthew

Convential Wisdom

For our typography assignment each student had to design eight well known phrases in Photoshop. The one i choose to list below is conventional wisdom.



I created this image with the idea that I wanted to separate the words into. Conventional, a static concrete adjective, i made look overbearing and stoic. The noun wisdom on the other hand i wanted to make look whimsical, as if the idea of wisdom comes from looking at the word in a different way, i.e. the "i" being upside-down.

Replica

For my Computer Image Making class each student had to replicate an ad. They had to use their own photos and find all the correct fonts and combine it in Photoshop.
Here is the original ad.


Here is my ad.


In recreating this picture, I had a friend of mine, James Ebenstein, volunteer to get tied up and go down to Maplewood Lake in Jenison. I set the camera on a tripod and ran back over to him and pushed him over and smiled. Then i drove over to the local grocery store and grabbed a picture of a car that looked similar to the one in the ad. By the time i got home it was getting dark and i had a wonderful opportunity to take a picture of a sunset. All these pictures i combined in photoshop. That night i spent multiple hours cutting out selections, resizing, and distorting shapes. I then color corrected each item separately and then all together in the end with an adjustment layer to make everything look cohesive.

Me

Hi, Im Matthew Ballard. I am a student at GVSU in the Film and Video major/program. I have been interesting in film and its production from an early age. I have been shooting still photography since i was fourteen and using Adobe Photoshop since i was sixteen. Not until recently have i started shooting and editing video. The learning process is going quite quickly and i am using this blog for my experiments and how these experiments change me mentally and therefore... physically.

Environment

This is a short video I shot for my Media II class. The project criteria was that we had to shoot and edit a two minute short that explored a landscape, but it had to communicate a different theme in its montage other than how we regularly think of landscapes.
Click here to play the HD version,
or click below to watch the standard embedded version.

Environment from Matthew Ballard on Vimeo.

Opening Credits

For CIM study, on Thursday October 2, 2008, I will be presenting the opening credits of Naked Lunch(Cronenberg, 1991). This will be an in-depth interpretation of the opening sequence's use of color, font, music, and pacing.