Personal Identity Assignment

"Brightside Design Co." Is my personal brand. I created this as an attempt to market myself as a designer professionally, accurately, and effectively. I used  Illustrator and Photoshop for all of my graphics and After Effects to animate an intro for myself.

Brightside is a is a graphic design company with a young simplistic take on modern design. My philosophy behind my logo is a simple sans serif lowercase font to emphasize my brands modern simplicity. I put a simplistic shape behind the "side" portion of the text and reversed the colour  to separate the "Bright" from "Side". I put a copy of this shape behind the original, offset it it, and made it a bright orange colour to symbolize the "brightside". In the logo animation I used simple movements and quick cuts in synch to audio in order to keep an air of modern simplicity. I chose my music because it sounded youthful and fun with the upbeat guitars and drums.

I chose to create a t-shirt for additional marketing purposes because I believe as a freelance designer a well designed t-shirt is a great way to get a name out there. T-shirts would just be the start. There could be wrist bands, and other merchandise. I am trying to create a brand with youthful modern characteristics so I definitely want to be creating merchandise youth would want to wear.

brightsidedesignco.weebly.com

Silence of the Lambs Movie Trailer Recut

When given this assignment I knew I wanted to do something drastic and funny. After exploring some options I nothing stood out until I watched the Silence of the Lambs trailer. I noticed all the lingering glances between Hannibal and Clarice and thought to myself how hilarious it would be if I recut the Silence of the Lambs into a romance. It fit the selection criteria perfectly as it was a huge change of pace/mood.

I selected Hello by Lionel Richie as the soundtrack. The song slowed down the pace of the trailer gave me time to develop/build up their relationship before the big "HELLO" pay off. The upbeat romantic nature of the song changed mood of many of the scenes (especially the winking scene) to be less creepy and more romantic.

The way the original trailer was edited I knew I needed to take my scenes directly from the movie. I hadn't seen the movie in a while so I decided to watch it and write down the time stamp of scenes I could take out of context. Doing this I was able to manufacture romantic moments and create some light drama. By changing the sharp jump cuts into slow transitions I eliminated the some of the uneasiness the original trailer was trying to create. Overall I think with my careful scene selection, smooth transitions, and mood altering music, I managed to create an effective (and hilarious) romance movie trailer.

Original:

Recut:

Daily Create #1

Plastic object that I used today

Logo Design

The bp logo incredibly well designed. It meets all 5 essential characteristics of a logo. At first glance it might seem like a complex design but in reality is actually quite simple. It uses very few shapes and a simple colour pallet. It also utilizes simple typography. The "bp" in the lowercase sans serif font is minimal, yet leaves a big impact because of how easily recognizable it is. All these simple components have a great deal to do with the memorability of the logo. If a logo is overcomplicated and convoluted, it makes it much harder for the logo to leave an impact on the audience. Of course it is impossible to tell if a logo will stand the test of time, as most do not. This logo however, I believe has staying power. Most of the logos of the past went out of style because they were overcomplicated and had tacky typography, while this logo has simple as well as elegant form and typography. This logo is also versatile because it can easily work in grayscale at any size and it is compact enough to fit on anything. The logo is appropriate for what the company is trying to communicate, however ironic that may be. The company is trying to trick the audience into thinking they are environmentally conscious even if obviously they are not. You can tell this is their objective due to their colour and form choices.

This logo is also shows the elements and principles of graphic design quite well. Its use of shape simple and elegant, as it repeats the same simple shapes. The balance is a little interesting. The pictorial portion of the logo is perfectly balanced while the text is placed almost as an after thought. This in my opinion puts the logo off balance which is a shame because I am a fan of the typography. If a little more thought was put in I believe it would bring up the quality of the logo. The rhythm of the piece is also a little confused and the flow goes from in to out in all directions. It does not flow in a particular direction. I would have maybe changed the form of the shapes to flow more in the direction of the bp text. This would fix the issue of balance and rhythm and would add emphasis to the text.

This logo for "Smooth Festival" a Polish Jazz festival is a very interesting logo. This is another logo that perfectly executes the 5 essential characteristics of a effective logo.  It is very simple only using a few key overlapping shapes, as well as simple sans serif typography. It is memorable because of the interesting affect that is created with the overlapping colours. It's originality really carries this logo. Like the bp logo, the simplicity of the shapes and the simple typography also help with memorability. I feel like this logo will stand the test of time as it doesn't have the complex typography that tends to date logos. Maybe the art will be seen as cheesy in a few years but I enjoy it. The logo is not versatile due to the fact that it would not work in grayscale. It wouldn't have the same colour effect that makes it so memorable. I do however believe this logo is very appropriate for a music festival, as the smooth shapes and colour effect makes me think of art; more specifically music.

It uses the elements and principles of graphic design in many ways. It uses colour to create an interesting effect which adds to the memorability of the logo. It uses simple organic shapes which adds to the art feel. It's almost perfectly balanced without being symmetrical, and there is a strong sense of unity because of this balance. The dark contrast between the centre and the outside colours put emphasis on the typography as well because it is placed in the dark centre. 

Overall both logos do a great job summing up their brand and design wise they are very effective.

Self Portrait

PERPECTIVE by Cyrus Fonseca

My self-portrait “PERSPECTIVE” is an attempt to communicate a day in my life, in the medium of video in one minute or less. I used all point-of-view shots to make the experience look like it's coming through their own eyes, in an effort to have a more personal experience for the viewer.  I filmed everything slightly shaky to show a sense of confusion, and movement.

I utilize a different lens that let me focus in and out of things quickly, because I wanted to mimic the way the eye focuses on one thing at a time, and add to the feeling of confusion and tiredness. I don't sleep a lot before school a lot of the time (it's 5am as I'm writing this) So showing this tiredness and confusion is important, due to it being a school day from my perspective. A lot of the clips in the morning contain my friends, because CyberARTS is where most of my friends are during the day, and where I’m most communicative.

I use quick jump cuts to show a fast passage of time. I do this, because I feel like school days go by very fast. I put them along the beat to “The Ocean Breathes Salty” by Modest Mouse, because I spend a lot of the day with my headphones in accompanied by Modest Mouse songs, and this one in particular I identify with greatly on a lyrical basis. It's a song about someone being sceptical, and even sarcastic about the “afterlife” and religion in general. I Identify with the opinions and ideas of the speaker in the song.

I had difficulty communicating everything I wanted to in such a short time period. If there was no time limit, this project would be 3 times as long. I ended up adapting to my time frame, and got what I needed to across in the end. I am very happy with my final result. I had a lot of fun during the filming and editing process and I feel I have learned a lot. 

Kinetic Typography Assignment

The title of my kinetic typography is “I don’t wanna be alone tonight”. It  uses the song “I don’t wanna be alone tonight” by Masked Intruder, and I used Adobe After to animate.

I am very happy about the final product. I put in a lot of work, and didn’t stop working until I was positive it was the best it could be. I had a lot of fun learning different techniques and learning the program itself. The only thing I might change about it would be finishing the entire song, or implementing some of the techniques I learned later on.

I used the “Century Gothic” font because it was a nice clean modern font that in my opinion matched the tone of the song. I used quick pans, and fast rotations of the text; speed depending on tempo, because the song was energetic, and fast.

The thing I had most difficulty working with was the 3d camera. I used 3d camera rotations for transitioning many times, and learning to create and manipulate the camera was difficult. I had to work within an imaginary 3d room and in the beginning that threw me off a bit, but I eventually got good at working within the 3d room.

The most satisfying and successful solutions I implement in my kinetic typography were also my work using the 3d camera tool. I was quite happy with the effect it created.  The fast transitions with the camera perfectly matched the tone of my kinetic typography and without  them, the project wouldn’t nearly have turned out as well as it did.

Downtown Photography.

We had some time after the OCADU trip to take some shots.

OCADU Areas of Interest.

Well the trip was certainly interesting. When I graduate I will be definitely looking at OCADU as a possible university. So many interesting things were going on in that building. It was truly a worth while experience. I was surprised that the area of the facility I actually found most interesting was the drawing and painting section, due to the fact I had gone mostly looking forward to the Graphic Design section. Here are 2 of the paintings that stood out to me the most during the visit.

Inverted
By, Nazli Nahidi

This painting initially caught my eye due to the flawless fading of inverted light/dark colours, back to regular. Another thing that caught my attention is the slightly off-putting colour palette. The intensity of the colours on the right side of the face contrasting with the dark inverted purple/black colours on the right make for an interesting experience.

Stuck
By, Elis Tarelli

This painting caught my attention for reasons I feel are obvious. The image of a man contorted in all these strange ways is in my opinion, quite shocking. It's beautifully done. I feel like it shows how an artists mind can get when they're suffering a bad case of creativity block, due to the how "stuck" the figure is. Immobile, not able to create. That's just my take on it though.


-Discord

OCADU Trip

I'm very excited with my upcoming trip to explore OCADU's areas of interest. Since i'm interested in exploring a career in design, it's great to be able to explore somewhere I might be interested in going.

The first and main area I wish to explore would be the Graphic design department. Graphic Design at this moment is the career that interests me the most. I think it'd be great to learn about things covered in the class such as branding, editorial and publication design, interactive communication, motion graphics, and typeface design.

Another area I wanted to explore is the Digital Futures program. It seems like a well rounded program  for someone going into the field of graphic design. It takes into account how things will change over the years, and stresses collaboration with industries and institutions.

The last area I wish to explore is Illustration. Illustration has always interested me. I'd love to learn different areas of illustration taught in this department such as: Merchandise, CDs, websites, etc.

Overall, I'm very excited for the OCADU trip tomorrow.

Kinetic Typography

Today I'll be looking at some kinetic typography to get me prepared for my classes upcoming assignment involving it. After browsing youtube for about half an hour, this was one of my favourites and I thought it displayed the principals of animation quite well.

The entire piece is solid drawing, because of it's 2d "pencil doodle" style. At the 13 second mark during the intro, the Beatles logo drops down causing the little animated character to bounce. The logo then slowly falls backward. I believe this shows the principle of secondary action. At 24 seconds the words form an arc which obviously shows the arc principle of animation. around the 40 second mark it shows the little animated character falling. I think this is an example of anticipation, because you are anticipating where/how he is going to land. At 1 minute and 15 seconds, letters begin to fall around the character showing small amounts of squash and stretch. a few second later cloud shaped words appear in the sky, and more solid words appear forming the ground for the character to walk on. I think this is a great example of staging. At 1:28 the character lands in a canon is launched on the kick of the drum, which is a great example of timing. After he is launched he appears to be floating through space in a very cool rendering of space in this 2d typographic world the animator has created. In my opinion this is a fantastic example of staging and appeal.
Looking through these kinetic typography examples has me excited to try my hand at it.

-Discord

I decided to save my vector rendering of an apple in the .png file format. I did this because it handled gradients better than the other .tiff, and .gif formats, and I didn't believe the colours were complex enough to warrant saving it in .jpeg.

I used the pen tool to create a vector version of  an apple. I used few anchors, and tried to curve the path to fit my apple exactly. I had a lot of trouble getting the yellow colour to work, because of the way the colours faded, so I decided to leave it out. I added some text in photoshop to liven it up a bit.

I am not overly pleased with the final result. I regret choosing an apple, because I wished to challenge myself with something more complex. I know not to do this for the future of my assignments.

Pixel Portrait

This week I made a pixel portrait of myself in Photoshop.  I then saved both files in the .png, and .gif formats.  When I looked at both file formats, they were almost completely identical. There was only one noticeable difference, the colour. The gif is slightly more vibrant. The was trying to really show the levels of colour to give it as much depth as a pixel portrait can have. I tried to showcase the different levels of colour, and used colour to show my more obvious facial features. To make this easier, I used varying sizes of pencil tool, and a soft eraser to help with different levels of colour .
I used the smallest size pencil tools to add fine details, and the larger pencil tool, so save time on areas with no deviating colour. I think I did a good job of showing my nose, and mouth because of the variety of colours showing the depth.

I am very happy with the result of my work.

Gif

Png

The Pen Tool

For this blog post I thought I'd talk a little bit about the pen tool, and how useful it is. When I go around my class it frustrates me to find that everyone seems to be using their brushes for masking. That's fine, but it just seems like everything comes out more accurate when you pen too your mask. Brushing is musch less accurate, and often times comes out more messy hen pen tool'd maks. The pen tool is a tool for making vector lines and curves to make more accurate selections.

I hope my classmates see the usefulness of this tool in years to come, I know I have. Bellow I have embedded a video explaining how to use the pen tool for you newcomers.

-Discord

Recently I found another really cool photo manipulator on Youtube. His name is Alexander Koshelkov. His style is very similar to Flew Designs. He's very good at taking elements from different photographs, and combine them in a realistic way. One of my favourite pieces by him is called, "Life On Mars". I think the main idea of this piece was to create an interesting visual and nothing more, but it could also be trying to symbolize the whole "Don't judge a book by it's cover" thing. Underneath is a picture of the piece with a speed art of him making it.

-Discord

Editing Software

Instead of my regular style blog posts, I thought it would be fun to talk about the variety of editing programs I've used in the past, and my experiences with them. First let's talk about the first editing program I've ever used, Windows Movie Maker. The WMM version I'm familiar with is probably dated by now, but I remember the UI was simple, and easily understood. It was an easy program to use, and was functional enough. The problem with it though, is it's limitations. You simply can't do the same amount with WMM than you can with After Effects. I had a brief glimpse if the new(ish) UI and I hated it, but that was just my first impression.

Now let's talk about the Mac OS equivalent, IMovie. I HATE this program. The version I've been using is much older, but it's caused the most headaches. It's way over simplified, and there's all these small glitches. Let's just say this isn't my favourite program.

Moving up from IMovie, we have Final Cut Pro. This program is a HUGE improvement. it was a little prone to crashes, (I had a cracked version, so I'm not sure if that contributed) but it had so many great features. The UI was relatively easy to navigate, and easy to understand, and my version auto saved, which is a feature that should be implemented on everything. I spent a lot of time with this program, and I was impressed.

Finally let's talk about the editing program I use the most today, Sony Vegas Pro 11. I've been familiar with Sony Vegas since I first started editing, so for about 5 years. It's a bit harder to learn the Final Cut Pro, and a lot harder to learn than WMM. It's a great all around program, and probably one of my favourites. The only problem is that it's pretty prone of crashes, so you really got to remember to save. It seems like it's the closest out of any of these programs, to what I would have designed if I were to create an editing program.

As for my favourite program, it really just depends what OS you have. If you have Mac OS get Final Cut Pro X, if you have Windows get Sony Vegas Pro 11.

Now inevitably, it's time I learned After Effects. Wish me luck!

-Discord

Jerry Uelsmann

When I first heard about Uelsmann's work, I wasn't too impressed. What interested me was the fact that he does all his work in the dark room.  NO PHOTOSHOP.  How he manages to blend his components to effectively amazes me.  The shadows on some of his pieces look perfect,  now it's hard to get shadows right in Photoshop, but in a dark room?

This piece is called "Untitled" and it was done in 1982. Since Uelsmann does his work in the surrealist style, it is very interpretive. The way I interoperate it is because of the roots connected to the house,  is I think it's trying to say that the house has been there  a long time because of the how long the roots actually are. The house is also abandoned and broken, which could be saying that the environment is abandoned and broken, because it's connected to roots.

Flew Designs

Hey Guys. Today I would like to talk about and artist that I admire. This guys are is what inspired me to try out photo manipulation. He goes by "Flew" and in my opinion, his pieces are amazing. He very good at taking components from other things, and integrating them in a way that looks real.

 One of my favourite pieces by him, is this piece called "Out Of View". It's in the surrealist style, and there's many ways to interoperate this piece. One way could be it symbolises people being born, because of the people in the bubbles lying in fetal position, and the way their floating onto our world, and how the concept is "Out Of View".

His website if you're curious:
http://www.flewdesigns.com/
-Discord
 

Public Service Announcements

In class we've been looking at PSA's and what makes them effective. One PSA I found effective was the one embedded bellow. The reason I think it's so effective is  that they try to make it as relatable as possible. They use actors that are at the usual age that cyber bullying occurs. They also show how devastating cyber bulling can be, and what kind of effect it can have.  I think the main thing that makes a PSA stand out is how relatable it is to the audience they are targeting, and I think the makers of this PSA pulled it off.

Video Production Assignment: 3:6:9 Exercise - Shooting and Editing

The point of this assignment, was to create an emotional experience with an inanimate object. I think  some of the strengths in my video were the music and the imagery. I think both combined, elements really did a great job of setting the mood. Also the dim lighting added to the mood. Some things I could've improved on would be maybe canting some of the shots to create a more uncomfortable feel. The soundtrack definitely added to the mood, because it had a slow build up, and uncomfortable off pitch noises. I edited the video to fade in to every shot. This was an attempt to create build up. I also ordered the shots to reveal more and more of the context each time, until the middle, then the shots start to get closer and closer to the focal again.