Problem after problem

After I finally found time get kick start my project (it's already November and I have not done much so far) the inevitable happened I straight away I begun to have problems. 

The only reason I decided to do a photo session in the studio (318B) was to use a plain screen and be able to cut out the background from the pictures. But it proved to be a challenge! When I used the magic wand in Photoshop it either left me a green edge around me or cut off a part of my hair. Egle who was working next to me advised that I AfterEffects for it but as I never worked with it before I did not know how to do it. She showed me but it was not a magic touch, rather time-consuming and when I though of doing it with ALL my pictures (I have got dozens) I started panicking. 

I was trying to find a way to resize and remove background from all the pictures at the same time but nothing I tried (Photoshop, AfterEffects, etc.) worked. Someone people felt that the background does not look that bad at all but I was desperate to get rid of it as I planned to import separate pictures into individual frames in Flash so when played it looks like a stop-motion movie. Someone advised me that I can simply use Windows movie maker to make that very simple movie. I thought that it was not so good idea but decided to give it a go. As I work on mac I opened iMovie and found effects that you can apply to the pictures that melt the background. But it still looked cheesy and was a sort of solution for the beginning scene only. On the home page when my picture is supposed to be surrounded with colored menu bars this would not work!

I just want white background on ALL my pics!!! Any help???

So finally I thought that I cannot change unchangeable and decided to narrow down the number of pictures that I will use for the project and remove the background using traditional method it Photoshop (or AfterEffects with someone's help).

Also, I had planned to use bitmap tracing to make the British mask change into a Polish mask. Mask only as oppose to the whole picture. And I did not managed to execute this idea either!

On the top of all this, after spending the entire day and evening in the computer lab I wanted to save whatever work I have done to my memory stick. And my memory stick decided to stop working just like this! I have emailed the files to myself eventually so nothing was lost but the fact that even technology turned against me that day only added to my frustration.

 

Yes, all this made me feel rather frustrated and demotivated. This isn't the way I've planned it!!!

Anyways, this is what I ended up with after two hard days! And please, do not laugh - I know I am not a miss world and having my photo on the screen makes me feel at least weird...