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First we would like to thank everyone for their supportin creating the first issue. Surreal EFX was created withthe intention of helping artists get out to the public, whether it be music, digital art,painting...the list goes on and on.

We hope to get the public involved in the contentof the magazine, put into an informal style our goal is tomake it into something that everyone can relate to.If you have a suggestion or would like to be featuredin future editions please feel free to contact us via E-mail.

surrealefx@live.co.zaThe Surreal EFX TEAM

Welcome to

.......”something that looks like a scene from a horror movie”......

i then decided to go and do a little digging as to what or where exactly it is i find my inspiration. i soon discovered that there is a million answers to this question, hence the long pause...overclocking my brain...and then just a ramble of words, when asked what inspires me.my buddy and i were driving out of town the other day. it was just before seven so the sun has already started setting and a thick cover of black clouds has moved over the open landscape in front of us. Being able to look back on a clear sky with that classical peach color and then turning around and seeing something that looks like a scene from a horror movie was bluntly put, breath taking. With kilometers of open fields you could literally see the lightning racing down, striking the face of the earth before quickly disappearing.music blaring in the background i simply sat there staring at this awesome scene.so, i guess in the end the closest explanation i got was that inspiration comes from an emotional connection to a visual element or happening...inspiration is not about understanding your emotion but to embrace the mystery behind it, “cause when the mystery is gone....so is the magic”. -D.J.

I get asked quite a lot “what inspires you?” and I never really have a specific answer to that question. I always respond with a moment of silence and then an answer that makes no sense, even to myself.

Inspiration....What is it exactly?

We get to talk to alternative rock band....The Fourth Quarter.

What its all about, the hard work the good times..we find out.

Punk retro-blend. whatever..

BOOM!!!

Rock bands seems to be something the Vaal triangle is quite short of. With

Limited resources like recording studios and venues for local talents, youdon’t get to meet new bands on every other street anymore. Where are thedays of local bands each having their own weekend venue for gigs and that

classical tape recorded on an ordinary stereo system? Even with todays advanced technology it still isn’t anybody’s game to just record a demo

album.So today were talking to a local band, The fourth quarter a alternativerock band to find out exactly what it’s like being in a band and what

exactlyare their plans for the future.@

xX4thquarterXx

A little band history? ...Just kidding give us all of it..

Well, The Band started back in 2008, originally a two piece band consisting of drums, guitar and vocals. First known as Creating chaos Martin (Bass) later joined as rhythm guitarist and so a few more songs was added to our play list. Zanthe, our previous bass player then joinedwith the intention of only doing vocals but after receiving a bass guitar as a gift, we now had a full 4-piece band complete with Bass and backup vocals. Things where looking good and even though we never aimedat going international the band sounded great. A big change came whenMartin made the suggestion of practising in a spare outer building theyhad which enabled us to get out of the three-by-three meter corner we used to have and to concentrate more on making the music sound better rather than worrying about where everyone is going to stand. A couple of months later the bassist left the band, fortunately not in a bad way (She still helps with the recording of our vocals). So stuck without a bassist

Martin decided to put down the guitar and pick up a bass…Match made in heaven. That’s when Jean started playing with us as rhythm guitarist. So with the new sound and members we decided to change our previous name Creating Chaos to The Fourth Quarter. We still weren’t completely happy with our sound and something was still missing. We then held auditions for a female vocalist and that’s when we stumbled upon Chandre or rather when Chandre stumbled upon us. Needless to say we were blown away. We are currently doing home recordings, in the hope of spreading the word and getting our music out there.

!!! FAILURE IS NO LONGER AN OPTION!!!WE SHOOT THE FOURTH QUARTER WITH A

COUPLE OF QUESTIONS TO FIND OUT EXACTLY WHERE THEY ARE HEADING AND

WHAT THEIR PLANS ARE...

Wow, there’s a title coming to mind...5 years of events bulged into a 10 min. story...lets make a movie.With that said, Where have you guys performed before?

We’ve done a few, not all good though. We started out back when it was still a 2- piece band, playing at a local bar called Pin a colada. Martin joined two weeks before we went to play battle of the band in Johannesburg even with a few line-up errors from D.J. (Guess the nerves got to him) it went pretty well and we advanced to the semi-finals but due other dedications we never actually went to the semi-finals.

Other awesomegigs I would have to say where Battle of the bands at BarnyardVereeniging we never advanced any fur-

ther than the first night but theexperience of playing in such a professional environment with professionalsound engineers etc. was some-where beyond epic. After Jean joined the band we played at a place called The magic tavern (I Believe) It felt good getting back on stage again after so long. (Thanks Jean) The feedback we

got was very positive.

OK, What exactly are your plans for the future and what can we expect from T.F.Q. ?

Next up, a headlining tour in the U.K.No we keep things realistically impossible so we actually plan to start playing shows ASAP.. or shall I say ASAWR (as soon as we’re ready) In the mean time well continue with our home recordings and hopefully well soon be able to record in a professional recording studio...Failure is no longer an option for the band. Thankfully we’ve got each other. Everyone has their specialty that they bring to the table. Ryno makes a killer beef stew, Martin makes what we call “band coffee”. On a more serious note. We all try to keep one another motivated

When doing a gig who carries the most pressure or would you guys say that its divided evenly with each member carrying his/her own responsibilities?

We perform as a band, so I would say that everyone has their weight to pull no part is more or less important than the other. I have a motto that every performance has to better than the previous one so its up to the whole band to entertain the audience whether its making the stage look busy or interacting with the crowd we all try to do our part.

Do you guys have any last word or thoughts?

Never be afraid to step outside your comfort zone, and never give up your dreams no matter what the odds are....and who’s up for some coffee?

CATCH THE FOURTH QUARTER ON TWITTER AND SOUNDCLOUD FOR THE LATEST UPDATES

nEVER GIVE UP YOUR DREAMS NO MATTER

WHAT THE ODDS ARE !!

full image

Why the glowing square, you may ask? The answer is simple, it implements a lot of the great features (Even though its CS2) of Photoshop.

Where it all began.

I remember back when I still played around on Elements 4.0. My buddies and I used to see who can modify a car the most realistically....thats where my Photoshop journey began. To say the least I was hooked, from painting doodles on my dads office PC running Windows 95 to being able to create whatever came to mind was a priceless experience.

“Photoshoping” was merely a hobby and I would sometimes sit till 3 AM just making random images. But I really started taking it “serious” and putting in effort to learn when I started working at a digital printing company. I soon decided to venture of on my own journey dragging a few friends along. Together with their motivation and my constant urge to create, Surreal EFX was born.

So here we are my very first Photoshop tutorial.

Well be making a glowing square with a name inside. Its a very standard tutorial and for those who have been using Photoshop for a while will most likely already be familiar with the features used in this tutorial.There is no right- or wrong way to achieve certain effects in Photoshop and most of the time there are multiple ways to achieve the same effect....eg. Using the Hue/saturation adjuster vs. using the photo filter to get a sepia effect. My way is definitely not the only way....but I hope it helps.

and for those only starting out ....be sure to check out our next tutorial where we get creative with flares and starfields.So without further adue......lets begin.

First lets start by creating a new document I’ve chosen to go with a 12 x 8 inch but its completelyup to you on exactly what size you want to make this.

Next we want to apply a gradient on the background. I used black fading to gray. Color selector shown

You can select the gradient tool by simply pressing the G key on your keyboard. So with our colors selected and our gradient tool armed we will now drag a line across our blank Canvas. Your gradient will go in the same direction as your line starting with your foreground color (in my case black) fading to your background color (in my case grey). With this done your image should look like the following.

Next we want to create the square. In order to do this click on theRectangle tool( should be right underneath your text tool, depending on your Photoshop version and preference settings. Make sure to set the following settings after selecting the rectangle tool.

Now holding in the Ctrl key (that’s to keep the square’s sides perfectly equal) drag across your canvas until the square size is to your liking.

Don’t worry too much about getting it perfectly center, well fix that in a bit. Your image should now look something like this.

Next we need to set a few blending options, so right clicking the square’s layer in the layers palette click on blending options and the blending window pops up. First, if you take a look in the styles column the very first one says: Blending options: Custom here we will make our first adjustment setting the fill opacity to 0 %.....like this

Once that is done we need to set the outer glow. Again in the styles column click on the outer glow option and make sure that it is ticked.We must set blend mode to screen.opacity to 75% (usually set by default) The color is a personal preference I went with blue.In the elements block set the spread to0% and the size to around 141 px this will create a nice glow effect..

We will now save the preset for later use with the name inside the square. If you look to the left of the window you will see the “New Style” button. Click on it and a second window will pop up...choose a name for your preset, I called mine Outer glow..then click OK

With your blending options set move the square to the center of your canvas. Next we are going to add some text to the cube.

Using the text tool click on the canvas and type in your text..make sure that its not too large and will fit into your square...Once that is complete, using the move tool move the text to the center of your square. It should look similar to this.

Remember that preset we saved? This is where were going to use it. With your text layer Selected go to your styles palette and click on the preset you saved earlier.

For the background I implemented some lighting effects (probably one of my favorite features in Photoshop). Click on your Background layer(the one with the gradient) Go to filter _Render_Lighting Effects.Again, this is completely up to you on how you want it...This is what I set mine to.

And there you have it..feel free to play around with the blending options and lighting effects on this one, like I said not the most advanced tutorial but worth a shot when your new to Photoshop....

But is this really practical?

I’ve taken a look at some of the A. I. programs available for computers and even the integrated voice recognition on PC’s. To say the least, they didn’t function as well as I would have liked them to. Boldly put, I don’t think its ever gonna live up to expectations..I might be wrong, but for now I do not see a future for this technology. I think the reason for this is that it uses a mic (duh?) to pick up wave signals and then converts them to commands according to what the computer “thinks” you said. Think about it, sound is always present whether its talking, playing a game or even just listening to music. This means that you will confuse your poor PC to a point where it might just blow up and in the process delete all your valuable information. I’ve had countless encounters with such scenarios. Where your friends abruptly speaks to the phone like you would teaching a 3 year old to talk. CAAAALLL, CAAAALLL JAAAAYYYYMS -”did you say tall frames” ? Same goes for the PC versions.I remember my friend trying to “speak” to his computer and next thing you know the computer starts deleting stuff like there’s no tomorrow, its like trying to make sense of the sound coming from your engine..What was that Engine? Set you on fire? M’kay. You get the idea. Even though it has advanced a lot over the last couple of years. I don’t see this kind of technology establishing itself just yet. Not only will you have the device, wether it is P.C. or mobile phone interrupt you every 5 min. its still something that is frowned upon by many people....including myself. It feels stupid talking to a device and then having to repeat the process three times sounding more and more weird every time. Until the day where voice recognition can “understand” the circumstances and who im talking to I think ill stick to the old Keyboard and mouse for giving instructions.

When we think of Jarvis from Iron man, voice recognition seems like the way to go.It seems like the end of old keyboard and mouse and Hello computer...start word processing program and listen...

Stock graphics plays quite a big roll in the world of design. It can give your creation life and make it stand out above the rest. It makes get-ting images for your design hassle free andwhipping out the old camera is no longer required for those who prefer not to.

I present to you...Pixabay.All the stock images your heart can desire and the best part is that most, if not all, of their images are in the public domain. Meaning that you are free to use them for...well whatever it is you please withou having the need to provide credits or link backs....Although it would be nice of you to do so.With a user-friendly interface and easy navigation to cool features like the editors choice or camera’s section where you can browes images by camera model used, you can rest assured that every visit is going to be a pleasant one.Even for the everyday person this site delivers breath taking photos perfect for wallpapers, and that empty spot on the living room wall. It can be viewed in about 20 diffrent languages and with their wide range of images your bound to find something that’s to your liking. Proffesional stock images made easy. Needless to say this site is probably my most visited site and when im not downloading images its awesome to just browes their never ending list of images.All images are downloadable in several diffrent sizes so you can download the exact size applicable to what your going to use it for. If your into landscapes, textures, clip art or even space scenes, Pixabay has something for you.Check them out and if you like them as much as i do buy them a coffee.

www.pixabay.com

“Professional stock images made easy”

Whether your into landscapes, textures, clip art or even space scenes, Pixabay has something for you.

Alot of us has faced a similar scenario where processing power has deminished our gameplay experience. Not everyone are full on gamers with a monster pc able to launch a nasa rocket, so what can we do to improve this? The answer is Razor game booster, a program that selectivley mows the never ending lawn of procesees running on your computer to enable more resouces to go into your game. Besides opening up more resources it has an array of other features that’ll knock your socks off. With an easy to use interface, not only does this work for games, but you can use it for programs as well.

Say goodbye to lag, and hello 60FPS

Your running through the battlefield and your team is counting on you to pull your weight in your (interactive) war. Nearing the enemy base you run around the corner spot an enemy and...laaaag. You end up getting frag due to that split second lag before you could say, fire.

Selecting the games/programs that you would like to be “boosted” has been made super easy and you can also customize the game selection screen with custom images for each game. In the utilities section it has multiple option for you to choose from.Under the Boost tab you can let Razer game booster automatically select the appropriate porcesses not directly linked to the game or you can select the processes you want silenced when the booster is active from a list. Other utilities include a diagnostic panel, driver defragmentation to name just a few.

Just when you thought that it couldnt get any better you stumble upon the screen casting section. Built in screenshot and video recording allows you to take a screenshot of that epic landing. because of preset activation keys you can now start recording videos in an instant and sharing them on facebook and youtube is a click away.

all and all this is a great program to have for your computer its easy to use and with a perfectly made GUI its not something you have to spend forever getting used to but rather get right into the action. With better performance on your games and the ability to record either videos, im-ages or both you cant go wrong with this. If your someone like me that enjoys a clean desktop to show off that awesome wallpaper...No more game icons, woohoo.

you can download this amazing program for free from : http://www.razerzone.com/gameboosterand while your there you can check out some of the other cool stuff they have there as well.