The assignment for Project 2 of Steve Romaniello's Pima CC DAR 222 Advanced Photoshop was as follows:
Altered Reality Sequence
Using one source image, you will create at least 4 sequential images that indicate a change taking place over a period of time. The change could be environmental - like the coloration of a landscape over the seasons or like the changes to the wheather. The changes can be astronomical like the phases of the moon, or organic-like the growth of a plant, or a change in position or age.
So for the first image (above), I used a photograph I recently took in St. Petersburg, Russia of the General Staff and Ministries Building in Palace Square this summer.
In the second image, above I downloaded a .3ds file of a Sukhoi P 50 jet fighter from a great website, TurboSquid. With the 3D functionality of Photoshop, I could rotate, color and resize the jet from all perspectives and place in the original image. The explosion effect was easily created using Photoshop's Filter Panel (Render - Difference Clouds), Cloud Brushes and a Color Gradient Map (Black/Orange/Yellow/White). You will note that in the interests of humanity, all the tourists were painstakingly removed before the attack. Not that I would not mind a little blood and gore, but a "clean" courtyard is much easier to construct than trying to scatter bodies and limbs.
The third image portrays the after effects of the attack with the buses damaged, tower toppled and some debris in the courtyard. More rubble should have been placed there, but I was pressed for time and found that rubble creation and replacement was very time consuming. This destruction is very hard work, even for a retired Army guy!!
The last scene, portrays a time some centuries later than the attack. What was the courtyard is now a desert (an easy image to obtain, living in the Sonoran desert). The wall grafitti, as well as the overall grungy texture was obtained from another great site, Pixedin, and the sky was replaced with a blue gradient and a sun brush.
I'm sure that there is some sort of a semi-hidden message here regarding the futility of war, man's inhumanity to man, or perhaps the truism of Pogo's famous line "We have met the enemy and he is us"....
