No Smoking Breaks

I took this picture with my phone outside of Texas Roadhouse, where I ate dinner with my family tonight. Instead of drawing their own smoke, they’ve used a musical quarter rest symbol- this tells the musician to take a break from playing/singing for a quarter beat.  (I rotated the camera so that the symbol would be upright.) I thought it was a funny little cheat. My sister’s in love with this restaurant, so I’ve been a million times and this was the first time I noticed.

Project Outtake

Today I worked on some footage of a sheet moving around in water for the background of one of my senior project videos. My setup started out looking like this:

When I noticed there were a lot of reflections on the water I added a tarp:

But I couldn’t get away from making the ripples in the water, so I eventually dumped my pet rat out of his tank, filled the tank with water, and filmed it from the side. I think there still are some reflections on the glass despite my efforts to shield it, but I think I can make it work. I had the Oracle from 300 and the Ghost of Christmas Past from A Muppet Christmas Carol (at the last 30 seconds of that clip) in mind. The fabric wasn’t quite as light, so it’s not as flowy, but hopefully if I play with the speed it will be cool.

Also, just for fun, here’s an outtake from my recording of Wicked’s “No Good Deed.” And, warning, there is one expletive.

Printing Freedom

Hardcorps just informed me that Mitchell talked to the printer he used to work for, and they said they’d print 1,000 cards in four colors for thirty bucks. I feel like I’m working with TasteBuds again, when we were given such a big printing budget we had to work to think of ways to use the entire thing. I like my clean and simple design, but it seems a shame not to take advantage of the deal. I bet I can come up with something cool.

Hardcorps

I recently finished designing a logo for a new Chattanooga personal training business, Hardcorps. Along with the logo, I’ve done some business cards and will soon start working on t-shirts and whatever other merchandise we can think of. A website is in the future.

Stephen and Mitchell are ACE certified trainers, and their clients I’ve talked to seem grateful for their knowledge of both fitness and nutrition. They are very proud of their brand new equipment in their gym, and yesterday they had me fight their combat dummy, Bruce. Bruce won. If anyone wants to take on Bruce, you can call or text Stephen at 423-802-5896, or Mitchell at 423-304-8259. You can find them on Twitter.

Thesis Experiment

I’ve been focusing primarily on my senior thesis project since last semester. I haven’t been comfortable posting any results quite yet. It’s nowhere near finished. But I’d like to share a little of it anyway.

This project is completely selfish. I almost said narcissistic, but I’m not doing this because I love featuring myself in my work. I’ve used myself in my video work before simply because my own body is the most readily available, and I don’t have to direct myself. In this case, I’m using myself because I’m doing something I love. In this project, I’ve married two of my passions: design and musical theater. Yes, that’s right. I’m singing show tunes.

There’s one small problem with this project. When showing the first roughs to an audience for critique, I started hyperventilating and had to leave the room. This project is ridiculous. Hopefully my nerves will calm by the time I complete all of the manipulations I’m planning. I want these videos to be moving posters, so I’ll have lots of patterns and video on top of and behind my image. Although this has been my plan all along, I now think the fact that my image will be hidden behind all off this distraction will help me feel more comfortable showing it off.

I’m using chroma key (also known as the green screen effect) to achieve these effects, and I’d like to share one of my failed experiments. I wanted the image to slowly disappear as the song progressed, and for this I used a green background and a variation of a Nickelodeon slime recipe. Because of all the irregularities in the slime, I could not control what I keyed out to my satisfaction. Ultimately, I used a fully digital effect. However, the result of the experiment is still a hilarious piece of art. Enjoy.

Madeup: Video 1

Madeup is a stop motion video I did, I believe, in August. The visual bit came from simply trying to think of something visually interesting. The sound was built from the video, which gave me a schizophrenic vibe. I am terrified of getting schizophrenia because I don’t think I’d be able to handle it. So I recorded a couple hours of my voice just talking casually and pieced together the interesting bits to make up the voices in my stop motion head.

Email Standards

A few months ago, near the end of the semester, I promised myself that, when I was out of school and finally had some free time, I’d do some research and post about email standards. Well, the summer’s mostly gone and I’m finally getting off my lazy, vacationing butt to do it.

For the TasteBuds project, I designed a newsletter email template. When the thing didn’t hold up in real life, I designed it again. And again. Coding and recoding. I asked for the help of web designers. Most of them said, “You’re coding an email? Good luck.” I thought, there has to be a better way, but the general consensus was that email standards didn’t exist and probably never would.

After I was finished with the project, I decided to take on the extremely difficult task of finding out for myself. This involved Googling “email standards.” The Email Standards Project was the first link. Their goal is both simple and impossible. They’re simply trying to get email clients to agree on a standard. This consists of calling the companies and bugging them until it happens. Trying to figure out the “secret handshake for the Gmail team.” Basically, getting the word out. (Gmail, incidentally, is on their “poor” standards list. Guess I picked a bad email provider to test my code on.) Besides email standards, the site also gives great advice on how to code emails now–something I wish I could have come across a while ago.

So I’m waiting until this email standards thing actually kicks in. ‘Til then, here’s my contribution:

Rant: Cover Art Rip-Off

I realize this is coming a couple years too late, but keep in mind that this rant is for my personal satisfaction.

I should be in bed now. Actually, I think my sister is already getting up for work. But I was just looking through my pictures on my phone today and must blog about something. A couple of months ago, I was browsing through Barnes & Noble and came across a copy of C.S. Lewis’s Words to Live By. I’d just gotten finished reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, and realized there was a shocking similarity in the cover art:

I looked at the copyright page and my fears were confirmed: this edition of the Lewis book was published in 2007, Twilight in 2005. The C.S. Lewis estate ripped off Twilight. Twilight! I’m sorry to any Meyer fans out there, but the book is worthless. And, remember, I did read it. I’ll give you that it is quite entertaining, but only on shallow and often times carnal levels. It has no literary value whatsoever. Parents think it’s fine to allow their children to read it because the author’s a Mormon and the characters stay chaste, ignoring the fact that she falls madly, blindly, self-sacrificingly in love with this guy with whom the little conversation she’s had has been composed of obvious lies and warnings to stay away because otherwise she’ll get hurt. That’s right, little girls, go for the sexy, dangerous guys. It always works out for the best.

C.S. Lewis is way too cool to be ripping off Stephenie Meyer. I’ll admit that, while the design isn’t impressive by any means, it isn’t bad. It’s very striking, attractive. And, even though I know I should, I don’t mind the apple cliche, although it reinforces everything that’s wrong with the book. I’m not a fan of the typeface used for the title, and I actually think Words to Live By is handled better in that respect.

It’s just . . . c’mon! It’s C.S. Lewis! You guys couldn’t hire someone to create an original design? Has the money from the Narnia movies run out already? I suppose it could be an accident. I haven’t been able to find anything to confirm or deny it. It is a common image. But I can’t convince myself that it’s anything better than an attempt to get the Twilight audience to buy a C.S. Lewis book. It’s just pathetic.

Final Photo Project

The final Photo II project was self-motivated. I wanted to do something about people’s diets. I had several ideas that involved diagrams and food charts. Sadly, such ideas are obviously type-motivated, and didn’t really have much to do with photo. I had some of my friends write down everything they ate for four days, not really knowing what i would do with the information. With Phillip’s help, I eventually decided to take one day from each person’s food diary and make a food sculpture out of everything they ate that day. I tried to get a wide variety of shots from each sculpture. What resulted I think is caught somewhere between repulsive and delicious.

TasteBuds

In a week we’ll be completely finished with TasteBuds. The designs are finished, the identity guide is wrapping up, the press release is on Friday and soon we will sign the TasteBuds rights over to Vanessa. It’s kinda sad that we won’t be involved with it in the future.

I’ve learned a lot from this class. It’s been crazy working with clients- over a dozen clients, actually. We get a whole lot of opinions from all different directions, and have to piece them together to form a design. In one meeting with Vanessa, I misunderstood her to say she wanted three email templates produced: a general newsletter, a volunteer news letter, and a community garden newsletter. All of which I ended up coding and subsequently tossing two. I felt terrible for a lot of my classmates who received changes to the print guide last minute and pulled a couple of all-nighters just before sending the final copy to print. I felt the need to take some of their burdens from them, but sometimes you just can’t split up design work.

I’ve really been concerned about the lack of email standards. I expressed my feelings to Leslie and Josiah at Medium about this, but Josiah simply said, “How would you do it?” This sort of crushed my dreams about some sort of movement going on that I didn’t know about. However, I did finally happen upon the Email Standards Project. I’m swamped at school at the moment, but when I get the time I’m going to actually research them and see if they’re legit.