Artist Statement - Week 11

I was thinking of what could be fun, yet manageable. I figured Spider-man would be fun, and doing it in a similar style as the 1966 Batman series would be fun and uncomplicated. It ties themes together: both are live action series based on a comic book character, which is why animation for the trailer fits well: it references the original medium.

I had wanted to do a more visually interesting (and easier to draw) character than the Lizard, but I felt that since I was basing the trailer on the upcoming film, which has him as the villain, I ought to put him in there. I was pleased with the outcome: the green added a nice colour (though it had prevented me from setting the backdrop as green, which is what I had originally intended, and what is used in Batman).

As for the action, I figure, Spider-man pounds on bad guys. Have him do that. So Spidey gives an uppercut to the Lizard, jumps out and grabs the title with his web. It all just fell into place and made perfect sense.

The text resembles the text used on the Amazing Spider-man comics (blocky letters). And I set the colours to that of Spider-man's costume.

As previously stated, I hand-drew each frame (five in total: Spider-head, Spider-arm, two Lizards and the web). I Sharpied and scanned them and coloured them in Photoshop. The rest is just basic animations an movements.

Show the Motion - Week 10

Here are the Spider-man stills with which I am working:

The method I used was to simply draw them free-hand with pencil. I then went over them with a Sharpie and scanned them. I put in the colour and darkened the Sharpie through Photoshop. I also warped the web in Photoshop to fit my size needs. Here is the Lizard:

After Effects is simple, for easy things. It gets harder the more complicated you go. That sounds obvious, but the curve is steep; I was able to do simple things (ie: what I needed to do to complete this assignment) with the knowledge I gained from the first hour of fiddling around with it.

Stop! Motion Time - Week 9

I've always been a fan of stop motion animation.
Correction: clay animation.

Gumby is king of the genre.
Correction: Art Clokey.

The creator of Gumby did his first animation, titled "Gumbasia," in 1953:

The art-style video is free form clay animation; it's a visual piece, not a story piece. Gumby, nor any character at all, makes no appearance. But it was so well done and innovative that it led to the production of the first Gumby short, Gumby on the Moon:

Clokey's series was picked up and ran for 233 episodes spanning 34 years and a movie in 1995.

Clay animation is something I did as a child. Typically violent shorts, about five to 15 seconds of little characters murdering each other in various ways over and over. No dialogue or any audio at all. I used a low quality web camera and shot at 15 frames per second. A decent amount, but the videos often looked very sped up. I'd also shoot little shorts for assignments in high school. These typically yielded near-perfect marks despite poor production quality. It doesn't take much to impress a high school teacher. These productions would have monologue/dialogue and audio and would span for several minutes, depending on what was required to be said.

I'd like to get into it. But it's a tedious and arduous task, animating. Something for which I do not have the time or funds to produce what I would deem acceptable today. Perhaps if I find myself so inspired, I will make time.

I Have a Vision - Week 8

Five seconds isn't a long time, but it also is.
I'm finding After Effects to be simple, so far, and I can't imagine anything too complicated being done in it. But I also barely know the program, so I'm expecting to be surprised, if that's possible. I can see it as a useful tool for the credit roll/opening credits. Like I said, simple animations, words/images flying across the screen. Maybe I'm just expecting too much of it. Perhaps I saw it as an application for full animation, but it's looking more like an assistant to pre-done video and the like. I'm interested to see what people at this level come up with.

My vision: Spider-man meets Batman. I'm going for a video of the new Spider-man film due out next year or something, but in the style of the 1966 Batman series intro. I'm not terribly interested in the new film (I think it's called The Amazing Spider-man?), but I do like the guy, and I do like Batman. And I feel like this vision I have will look good at the current level with which I am working.

Fonts, fonts, fonts, fonts. Now the word is weird. - Week 7

A wise man once said "Fonts are the lifeblood of written word."

Maybe. Probably not. But they are kind of neat, they way in a simple design of a letter can evoke emotions and draw relationships to events, culture or styles. Where does that come from?

The Beatles' Yellow Submarine, likely a custom font for the album, evokes a throwback to the 60s.  The font was created to correspond with the album's cover illustrations, in with which it fits perfectly. It also fits well with the album's content: bubbly, happy, psychedelic and cartoony. The lack of any kind of corner removes any anxiety or stress that could possibly be associated with text. It really gets across the playfulness and love that is the center focus of the album.

No Doubt's Rock Steady uses a filthy mess of a font. Each letter isn't necessarily done in the same way every time. Which brings forth the question if it can still be considered a font. All the letters are certainly the same style. Either way, it's dirty. It's uneven. It's all over the place. That's how this album by No Doubt works; no particular consistency.

Weezer's Weezer (1996). Century Gothic. Simple. Lower case. Goes really well with the art, though not either way in terms of the album content. These guys were among the first to set indie style in the mainstream, and their use of lower case simple font is still used by indie artists now. Placement justified left at the top keeps it more simple. Sans serif also keeps any complication away.

Motion Commotion/Devotion/Emotion/Promotion etc. - Week Six

Thank Each Mistake - Maniac

This is an animation created only using the iPad Brushes App. A statement from the artist, Shawn Harris:

"I illustrated this video for "Thank Each Mistake" using the Brushes app for iPad. I heard about it through Jorge Colombo's New Yorker covers, but for me, the best media for this technique wasn't print, but video! By taking advantage of the actions playback feature, and by using a brushes viewer application for my Mac, I found I could export my painting as a quicktime movie. The app isn't designed for animation, but the playback feature, which records each brush-stroke as a separate frame, lends itself to a coarse morphy style of stop-motion fingerpainting, if you can manage to be deliberate enough about not lifting your finger from the painting..."

What I appreciate about this work of motion graphics is it's (almost) seamless transition from each section/animation to the next. It's a little choppy, but it flows nicely. It's interesting how the brush/finger strokes are both the foundation and the animation.
The content in interesting; I can't conceptualize the flow of imagery. Night sky to teeth to an eye? Or faces as icecream melting into a palm tree? There is no logical flow and it's refreshing because you can sit back and let it guide your mind fluidly.
And in the spirit of the music, it's not afraid of the mistakes; there are clearly errors in the video which could have been cleaned up, but the artist wanted to have used only the iPad app and put artistic integrity over neat and polished. The video and audio fit well together, thematically (and sometimes literally).

Artist Statement - Week Five

My inspiration came from a theoretical dirty punk band named Rat Funeral. I was inspired by the general re-imaging nature of punk culture: army boots in fashion, heavily distorted sounds, alternative piercings, etc. Alternative uses of typically mainstream/systematic things.  I needed something dirty and punk juxtaposed with a typically "normal" item. I find the combination of milk and cigarettes unwholesome. Milk is often symbolic of purity and life force, and cigarettes are seen as dirty and death. In the combination, the cigarettes contaminate the purity of the milk, making it seen as the mucusy bodily fluid that it actually is. I also tinted the photo a slight yellowy green, to give it a sickly feeling.
For the logo, I created something that could easily be stenciled, because it's an easy way to piss off authority figures without heavy, if any, repercussions (and isn't that what punk is all about?). So it had to be simple. The face of the rat is obviously appropriately relevant to the band's name, and it's important to have something that can immediately be recognized as the main logo. The colour scheme red, white and black is common among the dirty, punk and seemingly "unpolished"/rough music scene (The White Stripes, Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf, Green Day's American Idiot). I split the logo to give a "two rats or one rat?" question.
I named the album "Honesty Versus Tact" because sometimes you can't have both, and you've got to choose. Like dairy and tobacco, they don't mix.
Overall, Rat Funeral is a way to capture punk culture, all the while being tongue in cheek enough to put it on the edge of sincerity and parody.

On the technical side, I did a whole lot of clone stamping and heal patching. With those I removed the lettering from the cigarette and milk cartons. The graphics (lettering, logo) were made with text and basic shapes and then warped/distorted/skewed to fit the perspective. I also played with the colouring, changing the wall colour from a bright green using the magic wand. Most of the text was done in Photoshop except for the "Rat Funeral," which I drew and scanned.

From this, I learned that if I look long enough, I can figure out how to do what I want in Photoshop. Unfortunately I also learned that I am not too good at remembering how to do things. I tried working with a tablet and learned that it's not as easy as I thought it might be. In-class critique wasn't anything less than positive, and hearing that my piece looks like it was "professionally done" is a nice shot in the arm.

The Curse of the Photoshop Blessing: Pandora's .exe - Week Four

Photoshop has turned people into either a skeptic or a fool. Being a powerful and useful program, much digital imagery's legitimacy is questioned. There is a social responsibility that ought to come along with Photoshop, as it may be one of the most powerful tools for deception we have.
The social responsibility of Photoshop is multiplied with the ease of distribution over the Internet. Individuals have more of a personal responsibility about this as they have no repercussions; the anonymity of the Internet allows safety.
Official publications have to worry about fact-checking their information. For text, this could involve  research, knowledge or communicating with people. For pictures, it involves trusting sources or a very keen eye. For example:

This photo of George Bush shows him reading a child's book upside-down. Pretty stupid.

This photo shows him with the book right-side-up. However you feel about this man, and there's no bias coming from me, but for truth's sake it's likely that he's not so stupid that he can't tell the difference between correct and upside-down text. The top image is the logically Photoshopped one.

So what? Well, this is similar to libel, and what people don't seem to understand is that publishing something to the Internet, anywhere on the Internet, is still publishing something. If half the people who saw that photo believed it to be real, that's real damage to Bush's reputation.

It's a powerful tool, Photoshop. Seeing is believing. Or it was, before digital photo manipulation was a household activity. Now everything we see is absorbed with skepticism, and we can never recover that comfortable trust.

CRAP - Week Three

There are no rules to art.
But actually, there are, if you want it to be appealing. And in design, that's the point: making something that grabs attention and looks good. The obnoxiously named CRAP system is a universal tool for visual artists and designers that, whether intentional or not, is usually employed in good displays.
Here's some album art wherein the designers used CRAP principles:

Contrast
The Strokes - Is This It
This album art for the European release of the record shows the basics of contrast: black over white. The black glove pops out in the image, from both the pure white background and the white-tinted female form. The stark contrast of black on white is much more appealing, eye-catching and attractive than, say, a brown glove on a flesh coloured behind would be.

Repetition
The Used - Lies for the Liars
The repetition shown on this cover is the hair/tentacle effect used in the text and the image. The artist created a theme of... whatever those protrusions are supposed to be in the image and applied it to the text of the piece, creating an effective consistency to the album cover, as a whole.

Alignment
Michael Jackson - Bad
The designer's choice of aligning the text to the right side of the album, running sideways, allows for a good placement for a photograph of the artist. Although a simple cover, the placement of Jackson's name, the album title "Bad" and the artist makes for a great looking cover. The placement of the album's title is especially effective; "Bad" is almost an "anti-alignment," seemingly just pasted anywhere. It just happened to be the perfect spot.

Proximity
Weezer - Weezer (2008)
Known as the "Red Album," Weezer's 2008 release has the band on the bottom with simple text of the name on the top. The four members are close together, neatly lined up across the bottom. They are given equal positioning and distance, giving a visual sense of unity and neatness.

The CRAP principles are great for judging work. However, I feel as a part of the design process, the artist should not be worried, asking him or herself if there is enough repetition used. CRAP shouldn't hinder the process, but be used as a tool for review. With that, the best of both are employed: the artistic process is untainted, and the designed principles can be applied to punch up the first draft for maximum appeal. And a really good artist will likely use the principles instinctively.

This is a Las Vegas Post Card.

I have never been to Las Vegas.

Your Digital Footprint: How I Avoid Putting My Foot in My Chatbox - Week Two

I have small feet.
I typed my name into the Google search bar, at which point it accused me of spelling my own name wrong and was rude kind enough to correct me.
There's one hit on the first page: a blog I set up three and a half years ago as a portfolio of my work from Sheridan College. There is one hit on the second page, and it's this blog. Seven pages in is an article I wrote for my church in 2007 that I don't remember doing, and another blog that I set up post-Sheridan. I gave up after page 15.
Spezify yielded no relevant results.
And I'm okay with this.
I realize that with having a Facebook account, a Twitter account (now) and a blog, that I am publishing things for the public. Yeah, there are privacy settings (which I typically crank up) but things posted on the internet:
a) are put there with the fact that it's possible that everyone can see; and
b) it stays there.
So I shape my footprint by limiting my footprint.
I'm a private guy, and I do minimal sharing on a personal level with close friends, much less mass-informing mild acquaintances and strangers. But that's just me, and I fully appreciate others' needs to share themselves. There is a line that people cross, in my opinion, where lovingly sharing turns into attention grabbing. I keep myself back from that.

Digital Media and You - Week One

A clarification of the term was in order. Ambiguous on it's own, Digital Media was a class I couldn't place within the context of Ryerson's Radio and Television program.
I took the term Digital Media to mean internet/computer-based production. It's turned out to be what I half expected: Photoshop, After Effects and Dreamweaver. I thought there would be some Final Cut Pro thrown in as well. What I wasn't expecting was the required use of Twitter and Blogger. I can understand it. It's how most people get their news now: short bursts and/or uninfluenced sources. 
I was hoping to avoid Twitter indefinitely; I'm on a slow boat to the digital age. I don't misunderstand Twitters value. I just wanted to be a non-participant. But now I'm on it, giving, receiving and participating, and I feel it's value. Being dragged into digital media, not quite kicking and screaming, more along the lines of grumbling and scowling, might be a good thing.
I begrudgingly  admit it: Twitter is necessary for damn near everything. To have a media-based university program require students to be familiar with Twitter as a medium makes sense. Cross-platform media, in news delivery, story telling and information sharing is a growing trend. Likely, most, if not all, possible job and career outcomes will require, or at least benefit from, Twitter.
So here I am, talking about Twitter. The medium. I think Marshall McLuhan was right. News on Twitter is as immediate as it gets right now, save from first hand experience. Character restrictions shape what's important, and people can react, immediately and on what's important. Print cannot invoke that reaction.
If I understand the phrase correctly, McLuhan was extremely insightful. There's no real right or wrong to it, but he definitely knew what he was talking about.