Creativity Perfected...
How we made the 1Tree Productions lawn logo.
At over twelve feet tall and over eight feet wide, this beauty took about two weeks to create.
We arrived at the idea after an unexpected cold snap came through town in early February. Trees creaked and limbs cracked as the earth was littered with a thousand giant toothpicks. The result was a mix of back breaking labor, tip-toe-ladder-standing photography, a bit of Photoshop magic, and the enduring creativity of our awesome team.
First was compiling the fallen branches. Organizing them in several different sizes and shapes...
A new perspective was needed...
Individual pieces were shot and compiled in proper order.
Then we had to photograph the different major chunks which would create the final image. We ended up moving the ladder around in different places throughout the logo to attempt to keep the curvature of the lens at a minimum, and even though some warping did occur, we were ultimately able to correct most of the issues in Photoshop.
The images, once pieced together, very much like different pieces of different puzzles, had to be cleaned up. Above, and below, we recorded the painstaking process of healing, which ultimately took a solid three hours. It's a matter of lining up the edges, matching colors, blending seams, until you have an acceptable enough image that will trick your eye into thinking nothing strange is afoot.
Even with the warping, shifting of perspectives, and general frustrating labor poured into this project, there were still some issues. Some of the edges (seen above) were blurred slightly more than the surrounding photographed area, a by-product of the camera lens.
To combat this awkward blurriness we added more blur (seen below). In the form of a duplicated layer thrown over the entire image with dramatically blurred corners. This served the purpose of correcting the mismatched shots, but it also adds a cool effect/style to the finished image.
Once the seams and the blurriness were addressed, we added a quick color correction and levels adjustment before finally topping it all off with a nice gradient overlay of our favorite colors--gold and violet. The end result, seen far above, can also be seen below, as well as on our Facebook page.
What can you take away from all this? I don't know. Maybe the lesson is that creativity can be found just about anywhere these days. Maybe it means you're never too old, nor too poor, nor too stupid to make something magical. Or, maybe it simply means that the things we saw on TV or on billboards when we were kids, displayed like the untouchable deities of mythology, the impossible things we never thought we'd understand, are actually right here. Right now. Just within reach. All we have to do is leap.
copyright 2014 by 1Tree Productions and W D King
