Digital Photography ＆ Imaging - week9

 2025- week 7Digital Photography ＆ Imaging - week 9

Yang Shuo / 0384037

Digital Photography ＆ Imaging

Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media / Taylor's University 

Lectures 

DIGITAL SURREALISM

1.Realism Versus Surrealism

• Realism shows the ordinary things in daily life. It usually does not use strange or unusual topics. The goal is to stay true to real life, not to imagine something new or different.

Figure 1.1  Realism

• Surrealism is a creative style based on Realism, but with a twist. It focuses on dreams and the subconscious mind. It often changes or distorts normal things to make them feel strange or unreal.

Figure 1.2   Surrealism

2.Freud’s ideas ＆ the Dada art movement

Surrealism was influenced by Freud’s ideas and the Dada art movement. Artists like Salvador Dalí used free thinking and dream-like images to express their ideas.

• Dadaism was an anti-war art movement. Its artworks were often silly, meaningless, and made to mock serious ideas.

Figure 1.3   Dadaism 

• Salvador Dalí was a Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker known for exploring subconscious imagery.

 

Figure 1.4  Salvador Dalí  

3.Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that uses art to show the artist’s personal thoughts and ideas. Today, in the digital age, surrealism has become one of the most popular styles in digital art.

How to start creating Surrealism artworks?

• Dream-like scenes and symbolic images
• Unexpected, illogical juxtapositions
• Bizarre assemblages of ordinary objects
• Conceptual Photography Imaging

1.Capturing your Dream

• Sketch It Out  
• Find Reference Images

2.Mindset During Creation

• The best surrealist art looks almost real.
• Make it happen to the best of your ability.

Tutorial

DEMO: How to create loop animation for I.G Stories

Practical

Next, I  start to create them into fifteen-second-long animations. The animations will include the motion effects of the posters themselves and simulate the effect of unlocking the lock screen. I will use After Effects for production.

Figure 2.1 Process screenshot #4

My design idea is as follows: the main character holds a bouquet of lilies, gently swaying in the breeze. Nearby, butterflies and two birds are also flying softly.

However, because the proportions of the two posters are different, the layouts are also different, so I want to make a distinction in the animation. In the portrait poster, I added a counterclockwise rotating sunlight halo behind the characters, which is not present in the square poster; in the square poster, there are more flowers on either side of the characters, and I added a gentle swaying effect to them.

Figure 2.2  Process screenshot #5

Figure 2.3 Process screenshot #6

During the production process, I was troubled about how to express the effect of simulated unlocking. Thanks to the professor's demonstration in class, I finally succeeded in completing the animation using masking layers and keyframes.

It is worth mentioning that during my research on how to make flower bouquets sway more naturally and lightly, I discovered a practical plugin: Autosway. By adding puppet pushpins to the object and adjusting the motion parameters, it can sway rhythmically 'in the wind'.

Figure 3.4 Process screenshot #6（Autosway）