Tendril’s opening title sequence for the Style Frames New York conference
After a couple of weeks I’ve had some time to step back from SFNY and actually process everything that went on there. New York City is a complete and total reversal of Savannah, especially in pace. There is no getting stuck behind horse-drawn buggies in the Big Apple. My trip was bookended by a series of all-nighters: two before I left, and two upon my immediate return. Snow storm Nemo hit New England halfway into the conference, so I ended up staying in New York for a couple of extra days. Exhaustion has become less of a problem for me and more just a simple fact of life.
But I really did have fun! I was very proud of SCAD’s presence at the conference. All but one of the 21 volunteers in the conference were SCAD students, and I met a couple of SCAD alumni among the professionals in attendance. Several of the featured style frames that made it onto the slideshow that played in between panels and presentations were SCAD student work. Read the rest of this entry »
Our last assignment in design for motion was to create a series of design boards off the concept of “knolling.” Our concepts also had to be a self-portrait of sorts, but within those constraints we could devise any narrative or context we pleased.
Interestingly, a lot of my classmates focused on travel as a means of self-portraiture. So did I. But instead of knolling the places I’ve been or the things I’ve collected, I decided to knoll places I’d like to go. Aside from being born in Germany, I’ve never been out of the country. Traveling abroad has been my biggest desire for as long as I can remember.
These boards represent my dreams of places I’d like to go and things I’d like to see. And yes, I do have a knollingly organized list of future destinations and sights . Read the rest of this entry »
My latest adventure in Design for Motion class: matte painting! Matte painting is not something I would have normally associated with motion media, but it can be a huge part of developing styleframes and storyboards. Typically when one thinks of matte paintings, they think of visual effects and movies. But mattes are used in tv shows and video games too. Our professor mentioned Dylan Cole as a point of reference. Cole is a matte painter who’s done work for The Lord of the Rings series, Avatar, TRON: Legacy, Halo, Assassin’s Creed… just to name a few.
I almost died doing this assignment. Having put it off over the weekend, I worked around the clock for 48 straight hours to get it done. I really enjoyed it though – I wouldn’t have been able to focus so hard on it if I didn’t like it. My original concept was to depict the netherworld from Aztec creation mythology, but I ended up with a Happyland Pyramid more than a dark jungle with blood sacrifice -___- How did that happen? If this is nothing but an exercise in matte painting and compositing techniques, I’m happy.
In digital media, compositing is the practice of combining multiple source images into one cohesive image. It is a technique used in matte painting, concept art, styleframes, and storyboards. We had to create six animal composites as our first assignment in Design for Motion – a class focusing on the development of boards, frames and other design elements for motion media. Styleframes and storyboards are the preliminary steps taken before animation begins. Being able to create realistic composites allows the designer to give their client (and the production team) a better idea of what the final animation will look like.
All too often I skimp on the preproduction process when tackling my animation assignments, so with this class it’s really nice to get back to basics and practice my Photoshop skills. Click through to see the rest of my composites and some of the source images.
Since last we spoke, fingers to keys to whatever goes on in your little computer brain (LIE! — new computer is a badass bohemoth of RAM, Graphics Cards and HD capacity), I have been busy.
I parted ways with the writing department momentarily. Over the summer I completed the last of my art history credits, took 2 other classes and worked 2 jobs and purchased aforementioned Mickey Rourke of a computer (The Wrestler version Rourke because, being a PC, it is ugly, and potentially virus-ridden, but does have muscle) for a cool $750. I payed out approximately a quarter of my soul to the corporate restaurant where I worked in order to pay for the damn contraption. I broke up with my boyfriend, cried for a week straight, atoned for my sins and got back together.
I moved into a new apartment, one where the kitchen is not perpetually splattered with the remnants of my roommates’ carnalism. In the Fall I took 3 motion media studios. I way underestimated the magnitude of work that would come from 3 studio animation classes, but somehow I survived. And I have a lot of work to show for it. Take a look-see!
For MOME 310 “Alternative Techniques” class at SCAD
Spring 2012
In this class we explored alternative and avant garde film and digital video techniques like handmade film, scratched film, oil wipe, feedback, glitch, interference patterns, windowing, and others. For my final piece I focused mainly on databending, but it also ended up being somewhat of a catalogue of all my experiments over the course of the semester. A lot of the source footage is from handmade and scratched films I created towards the beginning of the class. I also used some After Effects project files from the previous quarter as masks in which to drop my glitched imagery.
Final project #2 of 3 is now finished! For this project we were assigned a important graphic designer or typographer. We had to make a brochure for an event pretending that our typographer was coming to speak at SCAD. The brochure/booklet had to be 8 pages long, and incorporate a fold-out poster.
One of my classmates showed us a folding pattern for a booklet that unfolds into its own poster! I thought this was ingenius, especially because my tyographer, Herbert Bayer, was a member of the Bauhaus, which emphasizes a direct relationship between form and function. Bayer was a master of almost every aspect of art, design, sculpture and architecture. Almost all of his work relates directly to the ideals of the Bauhaus. So I decided that each page of my booklet should correlate into one whole. I wanted the booklet to unfold into the poster. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m doing a glitch film as my final project in Alternative Techniques class. Or rather, I’m experimenting with glitching, and we’ll see how the results accumulate in the end. After working at a festival this weekend and doing homework up into the late hours… I’ll explain these later. I will say that I used Hex Fiend to edit the data and various video players/codecs including VLC, QuickTime, and my favorite, MPEG Streamclip. I also glitched a lot of .jpg images, which I’ll post tomorrow! Read the rest of this entry »
<— (Click for larger version) Here’s my third assignment for Typography 1 class. We had to make a vertical 3x30in composition consisting of ten 3x3in squares, each containing one of the letters from t
I wanted to make it so that each square flowed into the next, in an attempt to disrupt the compartmentalizing quality of the squares as much as possible. I think that in part of the sequence, especially Y-P-O-G-R-A, I was really successful. It got a little hairy with the first T and P-H-Y, but overall I’m happy with it. Fitting the numbers in was really the hardest part – first I just slapped them on top of the letter composition I’d already made. They totally looked like just an afterthought compared to the carefully-considered letters. Then I got the idea from the first T, where I simply made a notch in the cross bar to show the shape of the number “1,” that I could find a way to fit all of the numbers harmoniously within the letters (or the negative space around the letters). My favorite example of this is with the “r” and the “6,” because in that square they both really carry the weight equally. Depending on how you look at it, the “r” is dominant OR the “6″ is dominant. That play with foreground and background, positive and negative, complete and incomplete shapes is what I was going for. For the most part I think that it was successful, and I hope that’s reflected in my grade….he word “typography.” Then we had to also incorporate the numbers 1-10 into the squares, in order. Several of my classmates had very interesting concepts and narratives for the way they chose to arrange their letters and numbers, but I really only focused on one thing: the negative space and counter shapes.
And, dear lord, I spent SO much time on this assignment fighting with Illustrator over the most miniscule things. I wanted all the lines and curves to be flush with each other. Damn “snap-to” lines!!!
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