Baruch College’s Encounters Magazine hosted a “Game of Thrones Workshop” during club hours on May 7 to show beginner photoshop users how to use the program to put themselves into scenes of the show.
Encounters Magazine has a partnership with Adobe through Creative Cloud, making this workshop sponsored by both of the organizations. The reason for hosting this workshop was to “promote Game of Thrones and strengthen our relationship with Adobe,” according to David Betancur, the marketing director for the magazine and a freshman majoring in marketing.
This partnership has been “super successful so far,” Encounters’ Managing Editor Britt Molloy said.
Molloy said that the magazine tries its best to promote Adobe and in return, the multimedia company has been “on top of giving us themes for our events,” which is good because “we definitely use their products a lot.”
For those who aren’t familiar with the show, Game of Thrones is a drama series that depicts two powerful families playing a deadly game of control for multiple kingdoms and the throne. With this workshop specifically, Encounters was “giving students at Baruch access to Adobe products using free trials,” Betancur said. “With these free trials, they have access to Adobe products.”
It is with these products that Betancur and the rest of the staff allowed event attendees to create either Game of Thrones-related memes or their own family “sigils,” which exist in the GOT.
In addition, students also used Photoshop to edit themselves into a scene of the show, so they could appear to be with their favorite characters.
“I think it’s really cool from a historical perspective,” Molloy said of the show. “I feel like, for me personally, I’m really into shows that have to do with like parallels to history. It kind of, like, puts a little jazz of magic in fantasy, so it’s really interesting to see how they diverge from history and go more into fantasy.”
The magazine’s staff said that Adobe Photoshop has been proven to be pretty useful, a sentiment which Molloy also holds.
“You could really use each of the programs — Lightroom, Photoshop, etcetera — independently, but they also have a lot of layover and overlap between all of them,” Molloy said. “The Adobe Creative Suite in general is super useful for projects where there are graphics, typing stuff out, etcetera. It’s definitely useful for a number of classes.”
If Baruch students are interested in working with Adobe products, such as Photoshop, Adobe offers discounted plans for college students. Baruch also offers all Creative Cloud applications for free at the desktops in the library.
“[Encounters] hopes to continue working with Adobe in the future,” Betancur said, implying it is the backbone to the production of their magazines.
