This project was hard.

Just thought I’d get that out of the way. No more complaining for the rest of the post.

In this assignment we had to find the letters of the alphabet and numerals 1-9 in objects where they weren’t intended to be. So, I decided that I would purposely try to find all of these things in my apartment, so as to emphasize how we are surrounded by these characters and interact with them often. With some diligent search, I managed to find most of what I was looking for at home. However, not everything was in my sparsely furnished apartment. So I ventured off to Target to take pictures of more things that you might find around someone’s home, just not mine specifically. After my trip, I had captured all of the characters (and well as the most ridiculously tasty Sweetart jellybeans ever).

Now my dilemma was how to assemble them all in a way that was poignant and interesting. Instead of printing them all and mounting them, I thought I’d get creative and present them as a .gif animation, since those are so relevant to our time. I also thought it was an excellent way to represent how we may miss these symbols (and usually do) if we are moving too quickly, despite the fact that they are all around us. So here’s the animation:

I tried to create a subtle emphasis by cutting around the symbols themselves in Photoshop and darkening the rest of the photo. They’re all relatively easy to recognize without the extra tampering, but I thought, design-wise, it gives each image a nice zing. Aside from that, and the square cropping of course, the pictures are untouched. If you click and drag, you can pick each individual letter and number. If you don’t want to take the time to pick out every single one on your own, here’s a gallery of them all.

In this assignment, we had to recreate the story of Jack and Jill in six panels. Sounds pretty simple, right?

Except for 3 things:

1) We had to do this in a group (of which I’m not particularly fond of)

2) We were challenged to reinvent the story and make it about more than just two kids getting some water and

3) We could only use these wingdings to depict our story

And so the challenge was on.

I did some initial brainstorming on my own both by embellishing the narrative and by selecting certain symbols I thought would be appropriate for the story arc.

And then came the hardest part (at least to me) – collaborating with the group.

At first, the group dynamic was a bit tenuous so, although it’s very much against my nature, I tried to instigate a little conversation and pull some firm ideas out of the group that we could then figure out a way to mash together. Because I really wanted this to be good. We took several tangents on the narrative and compositional ideas before we got to the beginnings of what our final piece would look like. We began dwelling a little more on the figure than I had originally wanted, but, in that, started to develop a more dynamic narrative that would allow us to use a more relatable and recognizable vantage. Then came the idea of using the pieces (the given symbols) as part of a whole and animating our characters from those pieces, really bringing out the original idea of creating the story just from the wingdings. After mulling over these several ideas, we came up with these general sketches for our storyline.

With a couple more work sessions and some extra collaboration, we arrived at a final product that I was thoroughly pleased with. Fiona drew a lovely template for our hill of symbols and the three guys (Nick, Will, and myself) tackled the execution of a pair of panels each. I got the simple shapes and bold design that I wanted out of it and the group produced a pretty cool narrative in a well-devised layout.

Overall, it was a valuable experience in teamwork and certainly a worthwhile endeavor in collaborative creating. I’ll definitely use some skills I learned in this process in the future.

The sound in the computer lab in Anderson Hall from 11:30am-12:30pm on February 20

Documenting sound is something I do on a day-to-day basis. It’s a necessary part of creating aural environments as a sound designer. So this procedure was nothing new. The difficulty of making the documentation into this kind of map was the loss of any time axis, which is a key component to how sound is usually captured. So I tried to create a system that would focus on the type and movement of events without having to worry about the timing of said events. The result turned out pleasingly simple and easy to follow.

I rarely draw inspiration from sound related blogs. Largely because sound design blogs are few and far between and, in part, because they are usually a bit on the uninteresting side to me. That being said, I did find three sound blogs that piqued my interest. The first is called DesigningSound and features everything from links to new sound libraries to plug-in reviews and more. I might not actually go there for inspiration specifically, but it would be a nice place to check back in for tech updates and whatnot. The second sound site that I look at on occasion is Massive Synth. It isn’t quite the broad spectrum sound design blog that DesigningSound is, but it does have some interesting tips and tricks for one of my favorite software synths. The last is dance music producer Zedd’s tumblr. He often answers music production questions that are helpful to me specifically because I work on music much like his.

Inspiration is as interesting subject when it comes to sound design. What you may be inspired by depends on what type of sound design you’re doing and what part of the process you are involved in. Since I am involved in the production electronic music at the moment, I mostly draw my inspiration from dwelling on visual media when trying to think of and create interesting soundscapes. Here are a few of my favorite blogs to go to when my creative brain is running low on  fuel:

• From Up North
• Pascal Campion
• Brock Lefferts

Order

A gridded “O” can’t get much more orderly    and   “Can I get an order of fries with that?”

Increase

I believe these speak for themselves.

Bold

A firm “NO” is always a bold statement (especially when accented by such a large period)

and what could be bolder than a solitary white square on a black square assignment?

Note: The background is definitely made of black squares.

Congested

Packed together like a rugby scrum or Times Square at New Year’s.

Playful

How do you get an ordinary black square to be playful? You make it dance.

Tension

Teetering on a cliff

Or facing a bullet

We may have never done either. But we’ve seen people do them in the movies and it always keeps us on the edge of our seat.

A Study Of A Machine

There is a hole somewhere in my heart that only machinery can fill.

Simply four minutes of a film projector being filmed, and yet so captivating.

The project started with us using a combination of two shapes to form a new, different shape. I tried to be a little more creative with my shapes than just your basic set like circles or triangles. I also wanted to maybe get a lined effect so I used really long squiggling shapes as well.

After the shape combos, we had to put those shapes into a tile for the grid. Knowing that they would have to work together, I tried to make my shape fit to the edge of the tile to make it more like a puzzle piece and less like a solitary design.

(Click to embiggen)

After deliberating over shape combinations and placement, I arrived at my final tile design. I then used the angular quality of the tile to try to create focus in my designs.

(Click to embiggen)

After that, chose the design that I felt had the most potential for intrigue and did several inking plans for it (although I was sort of set on one from the beginning).

(Click to embiggen)

Then it was just a matter of choosing the design with the strongest appeal to my/the viewer’s attention. I picked my final design because of the positive weight distribution and how, as the lines get lighter, the shapes also become more diverse as well as rounded. Once chosen, I took several long hours to make sure I got my design juuuuuuust right.

I ended up with a little something like this.

Critque Notes

• Good craftsmanship
• Done on the wrong material
• Negative space works well
• Really precisely inked… almost too perfect
• Doesn’t really seem like a grid
• Nice contrast of shapes
• Nice contrast of straight and curved lines