Wednesday, January 01, 2014
The year in five-minute Photoshop. So, as I've noted, I want to post less in Facebook and Twitter. It's a walled garden and because it's a continuous stream of content, searching the archive is really difficult.
You may know that I like five-minute Photoshop. I like having silly ideas for joke pics and working through how I'll make them happen. I do these pics for my own amusement and am perennially disappointed that they fail to get much traction in the 'like' and 'comment'-based social media economy.
Here is an abortive joke I did the other day based on the fact that every character in the film American Hustle pays so much attention to his or her hair. I couldn't find a similar-looking font so I had to cut and paste bits from the existing letters. I spent much more than five minutes on it and it still looked so shit that in the end I didn't even post it online. (Until now.)
For some reason I was joking on Twitter about the Romans having invented denim. I think this might have been based on something that one of my lecturer friends' students wrote in an essay?
In June I got into an argument with my former jmag editor Jenny and coworker Bridie about actor Eddie Redmayne's lips. I think they are too pale. So I 'shopped up this Eddie Redlips colour chart.
His actual lips are on the left; I quite like the third from left and the far right is intended to be absurd, but that was actually the one that Jenny and Bridie liked best.
I am so sick of hearing about the 'Chaser boys'. ARE THEY NOT MEN?
I think this was a joke about how King George V had a hipster beard. It was very difficult to get a pic of a trilby hat on the right angle and make it look okay. It still looks too small but it looked worse when I made it bigger.
HAHAHAHA, I don't like Tim Winton very much. My friend Anthony had me in hysterics on the tram when he said, "More like Tim LOSEton!" and I went straight home and sweded this up.
I saw a picture of the disembodied face of the Statue of Liberty during its construction and couldn't help thinking it looked like actor Jeremy Renner, so I 'shopped up a pic of the statue with Renner's face.
I think I was making some kind of NeverEnding Story reference on Twitter. As if anyone could forget Artax ;'-(
HAHAHAHA I 'shopped this for Rose, who had a Comedy Festival show and tweeted a pic of herself looking super unimpressed about flyering outside the Town Hall, which is almost certainly the worst aspect of having a festival show. So I made it into this Titanic image, which actually went 'viral' in that Rose loved it and used it to illustrate an article she wrote about the festival. I insisted on a pic credit!
Toby posted this pic of a co-worker's dog sitting on his desk. (The co-worker took the dog to work every day.) I thought it looked a bit doge-like, so I made Toby a doge. It was my first doge and I'm not sure I really nailed the meme (needed some more misspelling) but I was happy with it and so was Toby.
The sad thing is that the very next day, someone left the front door of Toby's work open and the dog in the photo escaped and ran onto Johnston Street where he was hit by a car and killed. RIP DOGE.
When Lynda moved to Canberra for uni in 1996, we used to correspond frequently. Writing on paper, through the post! She had an inexplicable crush on tennis player Pete Sampras so I made a postcard by gluing onto card a picture cut from the newspaper of Sampras doing his signature tongue-protrusion, with the caption in whiteout. She liked it so much she put it on her college room door.
Recently I was wondering whatever happened to Sampras (answer: not much; playing on the retired-player circuit), which inspired me to do up a digital version for Lynda's Facebook wall.
I also like to do side-by-side pop-culture pic comparisons. Here, I note that Jessica Chastain in Kathryn Bigelow's film Zero Dark Thirty has the same kind of sunglassed badass look, bathed in golden afternoon light, that Linda Hamilton does in Bigelow's ex-husband James Cameron's film Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
In Zero Dark Thirty, Chastain's character Maya is both a heroine and a Terminator: she absolutely will not stop, ever, until Osama bin Laden is dead.
Here is Leonardo DiCaprio's evening dress in three of his period-set films.
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West at the Met Costume Institute Gala are the new American Gothic! It was Kanye's buttoned-up shirt and expressionless face that did it.
Here is another one I did comparing dickhead romance author Nicholas Sparks to Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock.
And here's one where I compared the new mayor of Geelong, Darryn Lyons, to that Fred Willard character from A Mighty Wind.
HAHAHA, Goth Thomas! My film-critic friend Thomas posted an old headshot from his 20s, when he was an actor, and there was some commentary that he looked a bit goth, so I took the pic and Robert Smithed it. It was actually really hard to get enough detail for the eyeliner because the resolution was so low. (Note: I did nothing to the hair; that magnificent coif is Thomas's own.)
Poor Thomas – I used his pic again when making fun of the gothy 'rune' neck tattoos sported by demon-hunting characters in the film The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.
My friend Zoe was trying to make a mashup pic of Jonathan Franzen and Grumpy Cat, because Franzen is so grumpy. I saw this as a challenge, but it was actually incredibly hard to get the hair and glasses (Franzen's signature features) right while still getting the features of Grumpy Cat.
I think I did okay with the glasses especially, but If I did it again I think I'd try it the other way around: cut out Grumpy Cat's ears, eyes, nose and mouth and paste them onto a pic of Franzen. Fuck it, I'm actually gonna do that right now!
HAHAHA that looks terrible!
I was inspired to mash up White House Down with Step Up when I realised they both star Channing Tatum in a white singlet. Also, I liked the up/down reference. (Note I painstakingly changed the tagline too.) Then I sweded some stills from White House Down with lines from my fantasy mashup movie.
I also got into the habit of making my friends (especially my film critic buddies) personalised birthday cards. I think it began with Lee's birthday in May, because I saw people 'shopping him pics on his wall. This was the best I could do at the time:
The birthday cake theme continued for Gavin, who is Irish. I did a Google Image search for "Irish birthday cake".
Guy got a Jackie Chan birthday card with his head pasted on Jackie's. I was trying to make 'Happy Bday' work with the original 'Jackie Chan' up the top but I don't think that really came across.
HAHAHA a simple but good one!
Poor Thomas – when it was his turn for a birthday card I wheeled out the goth headshot again.
This was Angela's. She really likes scotch and had recently been travelling in Scotland, so I got a pic of her from Facebook and put her head on all the characters from the Ken Loach whisky-heist dramedy The Angels' Share.
Hahaha, Anthony's still makes me laugh! He really likes the comic book character the Punisher, who is an ex-military guy named Frank Castle who goes vigilante with 'extreme prejudice' after the mob kills his wife and kids. He is a brutal antihero who basically murders, kidnaps, tortures and terrorises criminals using military weaponry. So this was the card I did for Anthony:
Proving that I like a celebratory swede, here's the pic I did for the Facebook event in which film critics were meeting up for drinks on the final night of MIFF. The closing night film was All Is Lost, starring Robert Redford as a solo sailor who runs into trouble in the open sea.
I even sweded him a new hand holding a beer. I am LOLing now as I realise it is clearly a right hand and I have made it his left. It looks like some unseen person below deck is bottle-suckling Redford.
Then when the festive season came around, I did the now-traditional film-related swede for my film buddies, where I got the schlockiest movie of the year and gave its protagonists Santa hats. For context, here are ones I did in previous years:
This was the first one, from 2011, featuring Taylor Lautner from Abduction.
In 2012 it was the shark from the absurd Australian sharks-in-a-supermarket horror film, Bait. (Or, as we called it, Clean Up On Aisle Death.) I especially like this because of the absurdity of the shark not really having a proper head to rest the hat on, and the hat looking exactly the same underwater.
But in 2013 I couldn't decide which film to choose. We did a lot of ridiculing of the Danny Boyle film Trance, in which (mild spoiler alert) Rosario Dawson says to James MacAvoy in the throes of passion, "I know what you want," and then departs for the bathroom, leaving him in the bedroom, from where he hears this buzzing sound. Then she returns, naked and with no pubes.
But ultimately I chose Fast & Furious 6, which I enjoyed a lot.
I spent a lot of effort on the title. Then when Paul Walker was killed in a car crash a few weeks after I 'shopped this, I felt I had to commemorate him in a tasteful manner, so I altered the image to create Festive & Furious: Ghostyo Drift.
Someone on Twitter spelled it 'Xmis' rather than 'Xmas' so out came Five-Minute Photoshop again:
As far as a regular Christmas card went, I decided to make a Stephen King's IT-themed card, as I read the book when I was away at Mallacoota and I felt I was ready to attempt a re-watching of the TV miniseries, which was so scary I couldn't get past the first ten minutes when I was a kid.
I have bought the DVD for myself as a Christmas present but I haven't watched it yet.
You may know that I like five-minute Photoshop. I like having silly ideas for joke pics and working through how I'll make them happen. I do these pics for my own amusement and am perennially disappointed that they fail to get much traction in the 'like' and 'comment'-based social media economy.
Here is an abortive joke I did the other day based on the fact that every character in the film American Hustle pays so much attention to his or her hair. I couldn't find a similar-looking font so I had to cut and paste bits from the existing letters. I spent much more than five minutes on it and it still looked so shit that in the end I didn't even post it online. (Until now.)
For some reason I was joking on Twitter about the Romans having invented denim. I think this might have been based on something that one of my lecturer friends' students wrote in an essay?
In June I got into an argument with my former jmag editor Jenny and coworker Bridie about actor Eddie Redmayne's lips. I think they are too pale. So I 'shopped up this Eddie Redlips colour chart.
His actual lips are on the left; I quite like the third from left and the far right is intended to be absurd, but that was actually the one that Jenny and Bridie liked best.
I am so sick of hearing about the 'Chaser boys'. ARE THEY NOT MEN?
I think this was a joke about how King George V had a hipster beard. It was very difficult to get a pic of a trilby hat on the right angle and make it look okay. It still looks too small but it looked worse when I made it bigger.
HAHAHAHA, I don't like Tim Winton very much. My friend Anthony had me in hysterics on the tram when he said, "More like Tim LOSEton!" and I went straight home and sweded this up.
I saw a picture of the disembodied face of the Statue of Liberty during its construction and couldn't help thinking it looked like actor Jeremy Renner, so I 'shopped up a pic of the statue with Renner's face.
I think I was making some kind of NeverEnding Story reference on Twitter. As if anyone could forget Artax ;'-(
HAHAHAHA I 'shopped this for Rose, who had a Comedy Festival show and tweeted a pic of herself looking super unimpressed about flyering outside the Town Hall, which is almost certainly the worst aspect of having a festival show. So I made it into this Titanic image, which actually went 'viral' in that Rose loved it and used it to illustrate an article she wrote about the festival. I insisted on a pic credit!
Toby posted this pic of a co-worker's dog sitting on his desk. (The co-worker took the dog to work every day.) I thought it looked a bit doge-like, so I made Toby a doge. It was my first doge and I'm not sure I really nailed the meme (needed some more misspelling) but I was happy with it and so was Toby.
The sad thing is that the very next day, someone left the front door of Toby's work open and the dog in the photo escaped and ran onto Johnston Street where he was hit by a car and killed. RIP DOGE.
When Lynda moved to Canberra for uni in 1996, we used to correspond frequently. Writing on paper, through the post! She had an inexplicable crush on tennis player Pete Sampras so I made a postcard by gluing onto card a picture cut from the newspaper of Sampras doing his signature tongue-protrusion, with the caption in whiteout. She liked it so much she put it on her college room door.
Recently I was wondering whatever happened to Sampras (answer: not much; playing on the retired-player circuit), which inspired me to do up a digital version for Lynda's Facebook wall.
I also like to do side-by-side pop-culture pic comparisons. Here, I note that Jessica Chastain in Kathryn Bigelow's film Zero Dark Thirty has the same kind of sunglassed badass look, bathed in golden afternoon light, that Linda Hamilton does in Bigelow's ex-husband James Cameron's film Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
In Zero Dark Thirty, Chastain's character Maya is both a heroine and a Terminator: she absolutely will not stop, ever, until Osama bin Laden is dead.
Here is Leonardo DiCaprio's evening dress in three of his period-set films.
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West at the Met Costume Institute Gala are the new American Gothic! It was Kanye's buttoned-up shirt and expressionless face that did it.
Here is another one I did comparing dickhead romance author Nicholas Sparks to Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock.
And here's one where I compared the new mayor of Geelong, Darryn Lyons, to that Fred Willard character from A Mighty Wind.
HAHAHA, Goth Thomas! My film-critic friend Thomas posted an old headshot from his 20s, when he was an actor, and there was some commentary that he looked a bit goth, so I took the pic and Robert Smithed it. It was actually really hard to get enough detail for the eyeliner because the resolution was so low. (Note: I did nothing to the hair; that magnificent coif is Thomas's own.)
Poor Thomas – I used his pic again when making fun of the gothy 'rune' neck tattoos sported by demon-hunting characters in the film The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.
My friend Zoe was trying to make a mashup pic of Jonathan Franzen and Grumpy Cat, because Franzen is so grumpy. I saw this as a challenge, but it was actually incredibly hard to get the hair and glasses (Franzen's signature features) right while still getting the features of Grumpy Cat.
I think I did okay with the glasses especially, but If I did it again I think I'd try it the other way around: cut out Grumpy Cat's ears, eyes, nose and mouth and paste them onto a pic of Franzen. Fuck it, I'm actually gonna do that right now!
HAHAHA that looks terrible!
I was inspired to mash up White House Down with Step Up when I realised they both star Channing Tatum in a white singlet. Also, I liked the up/down reference. (Note I painstakingly changed the tagline too.) Then I sweded some stills from White House Down with lines from my fantasy mashup movie.
I also got into the habit of making my friends (especially my film critic buddies) personalised birthday cards. I think it began with Lee's birthday in May, because I saw people 'shopping him pics on his wall. This was the best I could do at the time:
The birthday cake theme continued for Gavin, who is Irish. I did a Google Image search for "Irish birthday cake".
Guy got a Jackie Chan birthday card with his head pasted on Jackie's. I was trying to make 'Happy Bday' work with the original 'Jackie Chan' up the top but I don't think that really came across.
HAHAHA a simple but good one!
Poor Thomas – when it was his turn for a birthday card I wheeled out the goth headshot again.
This was Angela's. She really likes scotch and had recently been travelling in Scotland, so I got a pic of her from Facebook and put her head on all the characters from the Ken Loach whisky-heist dramedy The Angels' Share.
Hahaha, Anthony's still makes me laugh! He really likes the comic book character the Punisher, who is an ex-military guy named Frank Castle who goes vigilante with 'extreme prejudice' after the mob kills his wife and kids. He is a brutal antihero who basically murders, kidnaps, tortures and terrorises criminals using military weaponry. So this was the card I did for Anthony:
Proving that I like a celebratory swede, here's the pic I did for the Facebook event in which film critics were meeting up for drinks on the final night of MIFF. The closing night film was All Is Lost, starring Robert Redford as a solo sailor who runs into trouble in the open sea.
I even sweded him a new hand holding a beer. I am LOLing now as I realise it is clearly a right hand and I have made it his left. It looks like some unseen person below deck is bottle-suckling Redford.
Then when the festive season came around, I did the now-traditional film-related swede for my film buddies, where I got the schlockiest movie of the year and gave its protagonists Santa hats. For context, here are ones I did in previous years:
This was the first one, from 2011, featuring Taylor Lautner from Abduction.
In 2012 it was the shark from the absurd Australian sharks-in-a-supermarket horror film, Bait. (Or, as we called it, Clean Up On Aisle Death.) I especially like this because of the absurdity of the shark not really having a proper head to rest the hat on, and the hat looking exactly the same underwater.
But in 2013 I couldn't decide which film to choose. We did a lot of ridiculing of the Danny Boyle film Trance, in which (mild spoiler alert) Rosario Dawson says to James MacAvoy in the throes of passion, "I know what you want," and then departs for the bathroom, leaving him in the bedroom, from where he hears this buzzing sound. Then she returns, naked and with no pubes.
But ultimately I chose Fast & Furious 6, which I enjoyed a lot.
I spent a lot of effort on the title. Then when Paul Walker was killed in a car crash a few weeks after I 'shopped this, I felt I had to commemorate him in a tasteful manner, so I altered the image to create Festive & Furious: Ghostyo Drift.
Someone on Twitter spelled it 'Xmis' rather than 'Xmas' so out came Five-Minute Photoshop again:
As far as a regular Christmas card went, I decided to make a Stephen King's IT-themed card, as I read the book when I was away at Mallacoota and I felt I was ready to attempt a re-watching of the TV miniseries, which was so scary I couldn't get past the first ten minutes when I was a kid.
I have bought the DVD for myself as a Christmas present but I haven't watched it yet.
