Worth 1000 tutorial

I decided on the "lighting a giant elephant" tutorial http://fx.worth1000.com/tutorials/161386/lighting-a-giant-elephant. I originally brought this up in class and wanted to try it out on my own. The idea behind it is that if you cut and paste an item into a photo with already dramatic lighting, you can edit so that it seems to fit the surroundings. Here is my original image:

Next I selected a special friend to add. I opened up the image in PS and selected just the figure, then cut, pasted, and transformed to where I wanted:

Selecting the image you need to "re-light" duplicate so you have 2 of the same image on top of your original image. Rename them "highlight" and "shadow". Then comes the hard part... adjusting highlights and shadows so not only the tone and color match, but then erasing the dark to let the light shone through in a natural-ish way. It's going pretty rough for me right now:

Alright so maybe it's good I have to post my progress because I forgot that the original hasn't had any levels done so there is no true black. My cut and pasted image is way too dark

Here it's getting a lot better once I lightened up my shadow layer. Still not there yet, but progress is being made:

I worked a lot with burn and dodge to tweak the lighting, and the color tones were STILL not working for me. At this point I decided to re-work the tutorial a bit and switch to black and white which ended up a little abstract, but still really giving you a much better effect than the above pic. b&w was a lot more forgiving for me, I also went back through and dodged the edges the make the image seem more "contiguous" to use a Photoshop word:

YouTube artist - Fagottron

Aside from the potentially offensive screenname, Fagottron is someone that was actually shared with me in an Art Ed. class last spring quarter. The most popular (according to the number of Youtube hits) is "Alice by far. I'm not exactly sure how to embed video, so I will provide the hyperlink.

The denotations of the artist's work are fairly similar and consistent. He (pretty sure the artist is a "he") takes iconic children's movies that are recognizable to most generations, and remixes them into electronic melodies using only sounds and clips from the movie to become something completely different.

Connotations are completely across the board. The most highly recognized "Alice" definitely has a hypnotic effect through the repetition of beat and "lyrics" (as seen in many others). Also the piece takes on a new meaning just like other types of art through what it chooses to emphasize. The repetition of words however is not always decipherable. For example in Alice, many comments from other viewers included:

"There is a long way to love that i ... gravel",

there is sail lawrence sail  up -on- this -here- up grobble , and

"We choose to love and grovel"?

Alice in Wonderland is already fairly notorious for its association with hallucinogenics and marijuana because of the reference to the bright outlandish situations, and the caterpillar smoking from a huge unidentified contraption. This video only enhances the hallucinogenic experiences as it mixes up audio and video clips to create a more confusing yet interesting composition.

Here is the link to "Alice", the other videos can be located by clicking on the artist's screenname which will take you to the channel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAwR6w2TgxY&feature=channel_page