I never got to do any blogging towards the end of Malta, and now we're back home, but I had to do one last post about it saying what I managed to do in the two classes during my stay in Malta (see lists below). Unfortunately I got sick our last sunday and I was sick for the rest of the stay, so I never got to do any school work then. Apart from that I just want to say how amazing this trip has been, and I can honestly say it has been better than any of the expectations I had. I've gotten to know so many great people and it was really cool going to school somewhere other than in Norway.

Digital Image Creation and Development:

- Finding 10 manipulated photos online and comment them

- Creating a booklet for the findings

- Sketching 4 portraits (one of myself and 3 of others) and manipulate them in photoshop

- Making a magazine cover for one of the edited portraits

Communicating with Images:

 - Finding 10 images and find out what’s being communicated in what way

- Make a logo for the program Int Min Int?

- Picking a song of my choice, which I had to visualize

Today I've mostly focused on finishing the avatar portrait. I've worked with a lot of layers, and I've watched a tutorial in addition to looking at pictures from the movie. I think it was good to work with a lot of layers and filters, because I haven't done that a lot the past months so it was good with some repetition on doing that.

These are some screencaps i took while working on it, and below you can see the before picture and the final result.

I'm happy with the result, and now the next task is making a magazine cover with the final picture as the cover photo. Other than that I have one last picture left to edit, but that probably won't take that much time editing as it will mostly focus on bigger, cat-like eyes and cat ears.

Today I've finished all the sketches for the four photos we're manipulating for one of the classes, but and I've worked some more on the editing of the photos. For the past days I've learned a lot about a filter called "Liquify" in photoshop, which is what I've used when I've made the eyes/lips/nose bigger or smaller etc, and so far I've used it on two of the portraits. 

I wrote down some key words on what I'll focus on when editing the photos so that it's easier to remember what I'm going to do when i edit them, and if I come along with some other ideas that's good as well, but those are the main ideas I've had so far.

I've finished the logo for the TV-show "Int Min Int?" that I mentioned in an earlier post, but I'm not completely happy with it, so I might make some other logos as well. The logo below is pretty simple, like most logos should be, and I chose the varsity font because I think it's a typical "school-font", and question mark in the background in red because it's a question, and in red because it brightens things up and I wanted a more warm color than a cold one, like blue. 

Our second task in the Communicating With Images class was to make a storyboard with 8-10 pictures that fits to a song of our choice, and I'm thinking about either using the song Where Happiness Lives by the norwegian band Magnet or Not In Love by Crystal Castles featuring Robert Smith.

We're currently at school editing pictures of each other. This is the before/after that I've done with myself, and I've edited some other people in class. I'm currently looking at an Avatar tutorial on youtube, because I want to try doing that with one of the portraits.

On saturday we went to a beach called Golden Bay, and after a couple of hours we found ourselves on a speed boat to somewhere. We jumped from a 6 meter tall cliff and we were bathing in really blue water where we practically lit up when we jumped into it. We spent our sunday in Gozo. We saw the Azur Window, spent a few hours in Victoria, the capital in Gozo, and then spent some more hours in another city by the beach before we headed home.

Today, when we got to school, we got the message that our teacher was sick, so we headed back to the residence to continue our task there instead. We are currently working on a task where we have four portraits of people, and we're gonna manipulate them and i.e. make them look younger, older, give them huge eyes and so on. 

Yesterday we were in Valletta to continue on or other project, which is making a movie from Malta. We got a lot of clips, and we're probably going to continue recording whenever we go out. Other than that we've gotten more in contact with the students at MCAST. We've done some exercises with them and also talked a lot, and they seem really nice. 

Here's one of the exercises we did together. It's inspired from the surrealism, and it's called "exquisite corpse".

Other than that we've been tanning today, and generally having a really good time with all the people down here. Tomorrow we're going to the beach and then to a festival, and on Sunday we're going to Gozo, one of the six islands that makes Malta. Below are some other pictures from yesterday, when we were in Valletta.

Mandager og tirsdager er lange skoledager, til 16.30. Vi har ikke timer hele tiden, men vi jobber stort sett med skole hele tiden når vi er her. Siden i går har jeg laget skisser til logo + logo, som var for et tv-show på malta, og ellers skulle vi finne 10 manipulerte bilder og skrive hva vi syntes om dem, for så å lage et slags hefte med dem inni, og lage forside/oppsett til den. Nå skal jeg begynne å lage storyboard med bilder som passer til en valgfri sang.

Ellers har vi hatt det kos de siste dagene. På søndag var det litt regn, så vi var inne mesteparten av dagen. Noen av oss gikk ut noen timer for å se kamp, og senere på kvelden bestilte vi pizza hut og spiste det sammen. I går hadde vi pannekaker som vi lagde sammen, og utover kvelden gikk noen for å se kamp mens andre spilte basket og knakk tenner (!!! den store hendelsen i går).

I haven't been able to blog before this post because I haven't had internet on my computer due to a misunderstanding so I figured I might as well borrow some of the other students computers and blog now.

So far Malta's been great! We got here in the middle of the day on tuesday, and our first impression of the island was that it was a tiny island, about the size of Karmøy, but with way more people living in it, and with that comes way more (and crazier) traffic. The people in Malta seems shy but really nice, and so far all of them have been helpful when we've asked them stuff. Friday (yesterday) was our first day of actual school, and the class we had is called "communicating with images", and it was really fun. The school looks really nice, and has a lot of interesting classes and courses such as graphic design, tv-production, jewelry and a lot more. 

The pictures above are from MCAST (the school).

Other than that we've been to Valletta and Sliema with the people we're here with, for both shopping, eating and sightseeing. Today we went to see St John's Cathedral, and after that we saw a 5D movie, which was really cool. Below are some other pictures from the past days (including our messy room and last night's McDonalds visit).