Lesson 2- Photoshop

Today was a photoshop based lesson. I am not very familiar with photoshop and have only ever used it when enhancing the look of my photographs for my photography portfolio, so this was quite a big learning curve for me. Since writing the plotline of the practice idea I hadn't given much thought into the look of what we would have within the scene of it and photoshop gave us a perfect opportunity to look at the style and image of the scene. We learnt how to create a moodboard looking at how tools on photoshop could be used to create a good looking moodboard as well as combine separate images together. I went to the extreme of combining images and tried to create what the scene would look like with images I found across the internet. This was a great way of teaching yourself the image you want and I felt a lot more confident about the look I was trying to grasp with the moodboard to back me up. I decided to compare mine after I had created it with Mark who is also in my group. We looked at the similarities and differences that we had and discussed them thinking about what we would rather have it looking like in the final shoot. This definitely taught me something about directing and art directing. Firstly is there are a million different ways of seeing the same scene and everyone sees it differently so mood boards are a great way to show exactly the image as well as the style you are looking for. I also found out on the directing side of production that presenting your image and style to your production team is so important for them understanding what you want out of the shoot. Just a simple discussion between myself and Mark meant that we now know what we want from this shoot and near enough what it should look like. Even if we can't get the exact image we want. I will be using the moodboard as a way to express to people what I want in future productions to help inform the team instead of just telling them.