3D project-- a little more

This was a somewhat frustrating experience. The outdated hardware and software that we are using in this class, in addition to time limitations, caused me to have to turn in yet another project I'm not completely happy with.
My original idea was to have my iPod standing, as if it were a building, in an empty spot between two buildings on a sidewalk. Taking the right pictures was a problem, so I had to settle on completely making my own environment for the iPod.

The simplest part of the video was the iPod, and even that was riddled with complications. At certain angles or positions of the camera, the wrong layer would be showing. For example, if the camera moved sideways in front of the iPod, instead of the front showing, the side or the back might show. My teacher took a look at it and told me that calculations were being done wrong by either the program or the computer itself. The solution we came up with was to turn down the opacity of whatever layer it was, for that point in time. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to go through and do this. Software/Hardware: 1. Me: 0.

The next big thing I had to do was piece together four separate pictures of the Cultural Center into one image, and duplicate that to make the four walls of the building. This went pretty well, using the transform properties in Photoshop. However, the image was too big for After Effects to use it in the ways I wanted, due to a limitation in the computers we are using for now. Software/Hardware: 2. Me: 0. For the third building, I took one picture and duplicated that. For both of these buildings, I created the roofs myself in Photoshop. I chose two older looking buildings in order to create the contrast with the iPod and make it stick out more.

I also couldn't add any special lighting, thanks to some strange issue that it seems a lot of people were having. Software/Hardware: 3. Me: 0.

The last part of the video (which is shown first in the video) is just 2D images that I added keyframes to and edited in Photoshop in order to appear to be three dimensional. I cut the road out of a picture in the middle of the road, I took the sky out of a picture of a random city's skyline, I took the sidewalk out of a picture of someone jogging and transformed it in Photoshop to appear that it was on the side of of the road, and I found a picture of the Chicago skyline. In the end, I had SOMETHING to turn in, so the final score is Software/Hardware: 3. Me:1. Which is okay, I guess. I guess.