Assignment One - "Wacken Open Air Festival" Project

In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll learn how to use the Displace filter and a displacement map to add an interesting texture to a person's face in a photo. The displacement map will allow us to wrap the texture around the shape and contours of the face, rather than having it look like we simply pasted a flat texture on to the photo.

Wacken Open Air (W:O:A)
source: From Wikipedia

Wacken Open Air (W:O:A) is one of the leading summer open air heavy metal music festivals. It takes place annually in the small town of Wacken in Schleswig-Holstein, northern Germany. With 80,000 festival visitors, and including personnel a total of roughly 82,500 attendees in 2010, it attracts all kinds of metal music fans, such as fans of black metal, death metal, power metal, thrash metal, gothic metal, folk metal, and even metalcore and hard rock from around the world.

The festival was first held in 1990 as a small event for local German bands. By 1998 the event had become the major festival on the European metal calendar and has included over 70 bands from all over Europe, North America and Australia. W:O:A is usually held at the beginning of August and lasts three days, during which the festival-goers camp on several large camping grounds surrounding the actual festival area. The 70 or more bands perform across four separate stages over the course of the event.The 2009 edition set a sales record; it sold out on 30 December 2008. All 70,000 tickets were sold over 200 days before the opening of the festival. 

Review of Wacken Open Air 2010
Source : Review Stream

This year's trip to Wacken Open Air was my second. My debut as a W:O:A virgin was in 2009. Wacken is the greatest metal festival in northern Europe and it is really quite massive. Some say 85.000 ticket holders.
The camping grounds are huge which means there is plenty of room for tents and camps. The music area is however not that large and it actually becomes a problem at some of the greatest crowd pleasers like Iron Maiden and Slayer. They really should value comfort for the crowd higher than cold profit which I know will never happen.

Livescenen is the buscompany that I travelled with just like the year before and they do a very professional and great job. The first evening they even hosted a great BBQ party and there's a lot of cool metalheads and guides travelling every year. If you are going from Denmark I will surely recommend to go by bus with Livescenen (unless of course you have your own autocamper with built in electricity, tv, bath, toilet and air-con...) This year I was aboard the special Iron Maiden bus mainly filled with hardcore Maiden Denmark fans. It certainly ensured great music all the way to Wacken!

Immortal blew me away (again.) There is something so dark and cold and beautiful about their black metal that simply hits me deep within. I've only seen them live twice (Roskilde 2003, Wacken 2010) and both times I've been in a trance. This time they mostly played newer stuff especially from their excellent 2009 album "All Shall Fall". Most impressive was however the song "Beyond The North Waves". It was the first song that I ever really connected with on an Immortal album, so to hear this live was more than I'd ever dared dream about. This concert alone was worth all the pain it involves surviving a week at a festival (obviously mixed with a lot of joy and fun.)

Cannibal Corpse was without a shadow of doubt the funniest gig. Their leadsinger Corpsegrinder is a bastard in his very own class and he threatened to break everybody's necks if he didn't see some more (devil)horns. He banged his head like a fucking propella and it was so much fun witnessing this insane display of pure aggression and extreme energy from the entire band. Obviously the crowd were very much into it as well. Quite an experience and so are some of the lyrics.

Iron Maiden was too crowded and they played way too many newer songs for a festival gig (but sadly enough only one from "The Final Frontier"), Alice Cooper couldn't sing (on the day) and the soundlevel was way too low, Slayer was way too crowded to even bother. W.A.S.P., Mötley Crüe, Arch Enemy and 1349 all played good gigs that were enjoyable. I saw a few more gigs than these but let's just stop here.