The Making of My Artifact

David Richardson

For this artifact, I was inspired by a scene from the film “Being John Malkovich” when John Malkovich goes through the portal and everyone he sees is himself. Because most artifacts I have made for graphics courses have used images of Professor Venkat Guruswami in some way (not sure why), I figured why not adapt that theme to this artifact? I decided to use a picture I had taken at the Big Time Brewery of a bunch of first year CSE grads at their weekly gathering and replace their heads with a number of head shots of Venkat from other gatherings at the Big Time. The original photo is given below:

For the next step, I used my Intelligent Scissors program to create masks for 3 pictures of Venkat’s head. These three images (scaled down for space considerations), along with the their masks are given below:

The masks were particularly difficult to create for these images because since Venkat’s hair is black and much of the background is black, defining the edges of his hair was tricky. I used blurring techniques in the final composite image to take care of any sharp differences.

Finally, I loaded the masks and head images into Photoshop 7.0 and applied the techniques of creating layers and resizing/rotating images to create the final composite image. As a last step, I used the Photoshop drawing tools to touch up rough edges and color discontinuities to make the final image appear cleaner. My resulting artifact, entitled “Being Venkat Guruswami” is given below: