A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

2014: the year in Five-Minute Photoshop. I am feeling sad and despondent right now because my annual Christmas carols singalong had to be cancelled this year because the Victoria Hotel, where it was always hosted, has renovated its lounge and got rid of the piano. Somehow it seems emblematic of how little I have achieved in 2014. I feel like I've basically been treading water this year, not actually moving ahead or kicking any real goals.

So anyway, I thought I would cheer myself up by reliving the stupid sweded pics I made this year. I did a similar post a year ago; maybe this can be another tradition.



Early this year Schapelle Corby was released from jail in Bali, and people couldn't stop talking about this stupid hat she was wearing. So this is my surrealist art homage.



Lefa is a massive Midsomer Murders fan, so I sweded this up for her birthday. It's a joke because Detective Inspector Barnaby is never happy. He is serious because he is always investigating so many murders. The text is my attempt to replicate the spoOooOOOky Midsomer Murders title card.



This birthday card for Ben started with the phrase 'it's all about the Benjamins' but then I got sidetracked by Swingers quotes.



Haha, once you have noticed that Queensland premier Campbell Newman looks like a reptilian, you cannot unsee it! This is perhaps my finest piece of sweding all year.



In case you cannot read my subtle labelling (I'm actually quite pleased with how I warped the text to appear as if written on the box) this was a birthday card for Chad, whose surname is Parkhill so I gave him the means of performing a 'hill park'.


This was a birthday card for Zoe, whose surname is Sanders. Another top-shelf bit of 3D sweding if I do say so myself, in order to make her picture appear printed on the tub.



I made this image to celebrate Dracula Untold, aka a film that basically nobody liked as much as me.



I think there was some stupid joke on Twitter re: 'a fascinator for cats' so I sweded this pic of Graham in his best racewear. What a cool and fancy cat he is.



Just the other day I saw Unbroken, which stars Jack O'Connell (right) as Louie Zamperini. When I looked up his IMDb profile I was struck by how much he resembles a younger Michael Fassbender (left). They both have a certain kind of Emo Ginger thing going. They should totally do some Plausible Family Casting.



I always get James Spader and Kevin Rahm confused. I went and saw Nightcrawler and was convinced that James Spader was in it until one of my fellow film critics kindly corrected me in the foyer outside. Of course, now Spader has gone bald it's easier to tell them apart.



A valuable infographic correcting all the errors made in a stupid Facebook ad that came up in my feed.



A while ago I was reading about feral cats, and I became fascinated by the question of how large they get after generations of breeding in the wild. So I was looking up Google Image Search and I found this pic of a really munted-looking feral cat who reminded me of what Graham might become if he were ever to go feral. It also looks like those munted cat decorations made in China from real rabbit fur, which you can get at terrible $2 shops.



This is a pic I made to accompany perhaps the least-viewed article I've ever written for Junkee: my Terminator 2-themed Game of Thrones recap. (Every other recapper made Law & Order jokes for that episode; I was trying to be different! But of course I forgot that pretty much nobody is as massive a Terminator fan as me.) I also did a terrible mashup of the two theme songs, which you can torment your ears with here.



I don't know why I decided to make this joke for Saige's birthday. FYI – that is the typeface used in the Law & Order title card. It is called Friz Quadrata.



I knew I wanted to turn Guy into 'Guy Incognito' from The Simpsons so I was going back through his Facebook pics and found this one of him sitting on the Iron Throne of Westeros at a promotional event.



This is Paul's birthday card. His surname is Nelson. The most period-appropriate font I had was Zapfino.



The reason Lucy looks so weird in her birthday card is that I was inspired by the airbrushed, colourised look of this pic of Lucille Ball.



It is kind of hard to get that look from a recent colour photo so I used a lot of blurring and colour-balancing.



Becky's surname is Harkins-Cross, so she gets a Harkins-Cross bun as a birthday cake.



Hahaha, another masterful swede for Simon's birthday.



This car belongs to a film critic who is notorious for his inability to park accurately. I've taken several shots of it transgressing several different sets of white lines, but this is the stupidest.



This is a piss-take of that genre of 'inspirational quote' where you paste the quote over a picture of the person being quoted. I've always found this pic of Jeff faintly hilarious, although I have tremendous respect for him as a writer and thinker.



The year's finest film poster, which I sweded after Kate raved about how much she was looking forward to this film. Kate was right though – Mr. Turner is a really excellent film and I recommend it to all.



After the triumph of Mr. Turner, people on Facebook asked if I could swede up a poster for Turner & Hooch. Note the paintbrush in Hooch's mouth.



Myke's expression in this photo reminded me of the Shepard Fairey Obama poster, so I posterised it. There are websites where you can automatically Obama your own pictures, but they didn't look any good when I tried, so I did it manually.



This one has previously appeared on the blog.

Around Easter this stupid and inaccurate meme was widely shared on Facebook:



But basically I just wanted to make a stupid Sean Connery joke!





I'm not even sure if Shannon is a Michael Jackson fan, but I just like making "Shamon!" jokes… Note my use of the novelty brush shapes.



Yep, there's that "Shamon!" joke again. This time it is because Steph's surname is Harmon. For some reason I always use Brush Script for my Michael Jackson swedes.



The Harold Holt pool party was an under-18 poolside disco held at the most ironically named swimming pool in Melbourne during the 1990s. This is a diagram of the time in year 9 when a chick from my year level at school spewed Scotch on me from the pool's entry bridge. Luckily I could just go to the showers and wash it off.



During the recent Sydney Siege, the conservative Australian commentator wrote an awkward colour piece ruminating on the fact he'd been just outside the cafe as the siege kicked off. He made a ridiculous reference to "the sliding doors of the cafe playing a brutal game of chance and fate". I'm not even going to get into the way that chance and fate are basically diametrically opposed principles.



This was a Political Parody of the Sydney Biennale poster – the biennale was sponsored by a company involved with incarcerating innocent asylum seekers in offshore death camps. Here, for reference, is the original poster.



Getting the gradient right on the text was the hardest bit of this swede.



So, Chad wrote something for the Wheeler Centre, which uses markdown as formatting, and the house style is to bold the author name. So I would be **Mel Campbell**. Anyway, you can see this formatting when Wheeler Centre articles are shared on Facebook. Clem referred to the asterisks as 'rad sparkles', and I quipped that we should refer to Chad from now on as 'Rad Sparkles'. And I made this GIF from Chad's headshot but was foiled in my stupid joke because Facebook doesn't support GIFs. WELL BLOGGER DOES, SO ENJOY!



This was just a pun on Dylan's surname, so I was looking for pics of rain and then I remembered that Shawshank Redemption pic.



This pic is inspired by the line in the song: "Heaven help my heart, cos it's a lot like me". Derbrain, your heart is you. Anyway, in order to get the anatomical heart the same sepia colour scheme as the original single cover I had to tweak the colours and now it looks like a turkey on Tina's head.



(Who wore it better: Mr Bean or Joey Tribbiani?)


Andrew moved to Woop Woop this year. I don't ever expect to see him again. But luckily for him, he really likes beer, so he will fit in just fine in rural Australia.



I'm also very proud of this pic I did for Max's birthday. Max likes to refer to beers as 'cold ones'.



Every year for my film buddies I swede up a stupid Christmas picture based on one of the worst films of the year. This year it was Winter's Tale.