only bad because it adds more time

I didn’t think the damn text thing was going to work, so instead of sliding through it and stopping like before, I wanted the last part of NLCV to slide through the first half NL and keep going off the screen right to left, then the bottom CV would fall from the top and crater into a snow bank. It would be the National Lampoon’s with Christmas Vacation a bit skewed and stuck in the snow centered below it. It didn’t happen because it would have needed more frames than the final as it is now. More frames = bad.

Do web logs cry every time someone uses the term 'blog?'

Initially there were two elements of type on this frame: first half of the title NLCV was moving left to right and the second half of NLCV was moving right to left. NL was going to be big lettered and white and the CV was going to be slender font and black. Once they met in the middle the CV was going to go “inside” the NL and you could see it through the contrast of the two colors white and black. But once again the damn logistics weren’t working out and I didn’t think it would easily understood by some dude. I talked with Valerie about it for a bit and while that didn’t directly give me the final result, it did inspire it.

I think it looks snazzy.

Adobe is stupidly expensive

Since you already know my fondness for titles on my projects, I shouldn’t have to press upon you the importantness of the title of the movie inside my project. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, or as I like to type it, NLCV. The drawing of the having the letters going through each other was actually done in class while something else was supposed to be happening.

I was estatic (That has to be the most professional looking sketch I have ever made.) and it was another case of where I didn’t put a time limit or any other limit on myself until the I put what was in my head onto the paper.

thanks, Natalie, for showing me the outline thing

In the little time that I’ve been building this NLCV project, I have gotten better at it. I’m listing colors and brushes and strokes and other logistics in the margins where before would be a few random notes on some random element in the design. I’m starting to implement a standardized location for the colors of the backgrounds and the font and other things. I also named these cats, of course

Snow Leopard, Crash Dummy, and Hit ‘n Run

I would not want to fight a snow leopard.

it's thinking hard about something irrelevant in order to proscrastinate something else

When I got the idea to sprinkle some snow in the proof, it was right before I put the sketchbook away for some long period of time. To like eat or sleep or something. I had a feeling it was going to look good because the longer I stayed away from the proof, the more I thought about it. My classmates seemed to enjoy it, too, which is pretty much awesome. I was literally walking around geeking out in my brain about how cool this looked in my head, lol. It’s those little things that make me want to create

i bet this must look like I post fast.

These little boxes were drawn as I was working with Illustrator. I believe I interrupted myself with a question for Paul and never got back to the page

The other random stuff were just idle sketches and notes. I ended up driving 40 hours in four days that long weekend. I'm never driving again. When I see that little demon book/pizza box guy, I usually call him the Necrowombicon. You see what I did there?

have you thought-escaped before?

The name of the game for Project 2 was confusion. I have done storyboard type “thought-escape” stuff before, so I kept trying to connect this project with that somehow. We were storyboarding but with only limited text options and no real animation. Do I put commentary in the margins and illustrate movement with arrows in the frame? So I put off starting these sketches for a bit while I avoided the confusion.
I found the National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation intro web-surfing and I enjoyed its production value and relationship with the actual movie. It’s just a little skit about a bumbling Santa and it’s a light-hearted animation. St. Nicks is constantly falling down or somehow destroying what is around him. That’s where I got the thought of crashing the words into each other.

blogs move at the speed of heat

Most of the time I don’t take myself seriously when I try to visually relate my thoughts... Drawing hasn’t come as easy to me as writing and somehow I am more impatient for results with drawing then I am with writing. That has been a problem for any sketchbook I have thought about starting in the past. You do that thing, you know, when you are alone somewhere thinking and you declare to your headspace that you will go out and do that thing you keep putting off and it’s going to be awesome! This time I actually picked up the sketchbook here and forced my hand to transcribe the picture in my head onto paper. I didn’t waste any time thinking about it and I made the conscious decision to not worry about time(I always worry about the damn time.) until the sketches were done.

I’m proud of what I did there.

The page pulls that self-portrait idea and grounds into a reality that I could create: a pair of Aircrew wings and an Xbox 360 controller sitting on top of a school book. Beside the book sits a #2 old-school pencil. It follows a simple rule of thirds and I could arrange the wings and pencil to symmetrically flank the controller on top the book. It was – for all intents and purposes – a solid proof. It feels so damn good when you set your mind onto something and accomplish it.

why would you abbreviate yourself moma? seriously. just get a new name

The concept here almost made it to final. It was kicked around almost immediately after watching the Intro movie that Paul played for the class. The idea goes that there was a murder and the cops have come and blocked and taped and captured pictures of the incident. Now they have left and it’s time to go to an art exhibit and you come right up on the crime scene in all its frozen and unfinished glory.

Unfortunately, this one ran into a lot of problems once I started worrying about the logistics. I didn’t know how to warp pictures around a simulated light pole and I couldn’t nail down the right grayscale for all the textures and the top left corner of the image just wouldn’t sit still, shakey bastard. I ran out of time and had to slap together the final. It turned out looking pretty cool, though, and I was surprised by the result.

lights, camera, action!

This one is me trying the layout for the Saul bass exhibit. It was my first attempt at this type of sketching in my entire life and I found that I rather enjoyed it. The laying out of the design elements, the brainstorming and working around logistic problems (That’s what I call the nitty-gritty stuff needed to actually make something work. Like how many pixels wide are my columns going to be?)
I like the idea of naming projects you work for and these carry the three names, “Caution Tape, Redrum, and Usual Suspects.” The funny part is when I actually get to saving these after I put them on the computer I’ll have forgotten these names or just replaced with something else.

what would i look like in your city?

A couple days has passed since I last thought about the self-portrait. I want every little pixel to have a meaning for something in my life and it means a lot of (what I think) as cool stuff won’t make it into the picture. I think half the battle of any design track is building the courage necessary to discard your own ideas. There are so many things I want to put in there… yet I know some of them are going to go away. It's never an easy thing to do.

When presenting a lot of information for someone to look at, you run the risk of overwhelming them and turning them off. I thought through several ways to get around this and I came up with a wide city shot looking isometrically (MS Word doesn’t think that’s a word, hehe. It’s probably right.) down on it all. Like a helicopter doing a tour over a city. The roads were big decisions in my life that I had, thus carrying me further into town. The buildings were to be stages of my life, like an sports arena for my 10+ years of sports or an airport with C-130’s parked on the ramp. The perspective would be tight enough to show little people/caricatures doing their thing around the city. Like the Stay Puft Marshmellow would be climbing up a building to show that I like the Ghostbusters and my Dad driving his truck down a road. Cool concept, but waay too difficult to honestly hit on time

title. here. now.

Here I was tasked with coming up with a self-portrait for my digital photography class. The top image I was playing with perspective and a little balance. I don’t know how the little me looks nothing like me, lol… I know I see that guy every day.
The bottom is another concept of the self-portrait. It turned out that most of my ideas were beyond my picture –taking skillz and well beyond my Photoshop skills. A lot of my ideas turn out like that

From the beginning

This was done shortly after volunteering (and getting paid for it) as a lab monitor for my design concepts class. As you can see, there is little in the use of any of fundamentals we have covered so far, but it is fun to imagine yourself as a Lab Monitor.
At the bottom in pen is a list of amazing photographs that I will hopefully be able to put up in my apartment.