Final Project

Our team name was the iSole, which was a phone with a back that served as a solar powered charger to replace wires and electrical chargers. We definitely were all good with criticism, as whenever someone had to fix something, such as the web banner- there wasn't any complication. We just redid it. We struggled the most in actually being productive and sharing the efforts equally in some aspects. The next group project, I think it would be better to assign more specific roles. I would change that, as the team would flow more smoothly. Additionally I would change the revision process between everyone. I have improved in my skills as a communicator who will be honest even if it's hard to deliver what they truly want to say. I worked on the video- planning and filming along with everyone else, and I edited the video.
I made the logo after Spencer came up with the idea, and I made the website.

















I also made the phone in our animation.

3D Modeling in Sketchup

 Lately in animation, our project has been to become more acquainted with the program Google Sketchup. Initially I thought because of my background knowledge with it, that it would be relatively easy. However, a lot of the things we focused on were completely new to me, making it slightly more challenging to get technicalities correct. I can definitely see why having the capability to use this program would be significant to one in any of the field in E-Comm, though, so I should most likely get better at it. Once I've gotten the hang of it, I find that it's quite fun.

My Name Animation

So far, e9 has been a great learning experience. I've grown in many aspects of all the courses offered- film, graphic design, and animation. I definitely would not have been capable to learn these things on my own. All the teachers truly care about and are well educated in their field. The things we learn are very elemental, however extremely useful as a strong basis to develop skills with. All the projects have been creative and enjoyable.

Based off of all the experiences I've had this year, I believe next year I aspire to delve further into web design and video. Those two focus areas were the most enjoyable for me; I felt as though I could efficiently work, and dually have a creative outlet for my ideas. The other two, graphic design and animation, were entertaining, however they are not what I'd desire to do as an occupation for a long period of time.

Keyframe Animation

In this project, we created an animation with ten words that we believed described ourselves. As opposed to using the frame animation in photoshop, we now use the video timeline. This uses keyframes to animate whatever you are animating; you can transform it, move it, and alter its opacity. Primarily I just changed the position of the words as they translated into the frame. The fact that you had to deal with the words one by one in a long and meticulous way was the most challenging aspect. I basically just had to have a lot of patience and pay attention to detail.

Bouncing Ball

Our initial animation project was to create a simple ball that bounced up and down. This was to introduce us to two main principles of animation: squash and stretch and ease in/out. We created the animation by creating a background layer, a layer of the ground, adding gradients with the gradient tool, then making an isolated layer for every frame of the animation. We took it into the video timeline and turned all the layers into frames, making it a moving animation. This animation was slightly difficult as it was my first time creating an animation, but the biggest problem that translated into the final product was the problem that I didn't keep the volume constant as I transformed the ball, which in turn made it appear as though it were growing smaller when it goes down. Also, the squash at the bottom is slightly choppy, making it less smooth.

Bouncing Smiley Face Animation

The Project

This project was to create a simple arc animation. We had to create a great deal of layers, practicing ease in and ease out (Slowing up and slowing down), and squash and stretch; two very significant and elemental rules of animation. We also worked with changing the expression on the face. Lastly, we worked with the concept of arcs in animation, executing it by drawing a path for the curved arcs prior to placing the frames of the smiley. This project went fairly easily and simply, until I had to save it for web, which is how we convert it into a gif file compatible with the internet. The speed you see the animation going is quite slow compared to the actual speed it is intended to be, and the speed it was in photoshop. This lack in speed creates a sort of lagging, choppy animation effect, and I would like to know how to fix it.

Links on the basic principles:

A Tutorial on Squash and Stretch

A Tutorial on Ease in/Ease out

A Tutorial on Arcs

Website Reflection

 Our final project in this quarter was creating our own "website" in Dreamweaver. I enjoyed this project; I've very extremely slightly worked with this before, and I find it enjoyable. The fact that it is much easier to execute than just plain HTML, due to the split view, makes it a great deal more fun. Creating this website from scratch, seeing it form into your own thing- it's very satisfying. Although it may not look as professional as an actual website, I can envision myself reaching that point of capability to do that, eventually. I had a slight amount of excess time, so I changed the fonts to what I wanted, and changed things such as the colors and the border and slight measurements. Overall, I found this very fun. Slightly challenging, due to how foreign the program is, but fun.

Photoshop Projects

 The first project we did in photoshop was this butterfly; we recolored the wings to be vibrant and multicolored, and gave the wings a transparent layer with the clone tool. I also duplicated the layer of the butterfly and erased everything except the colored part of the wings and added a gaussian blur so the colors weren't so pixelated at the edges.

 This project was a collage themed around Northwest. We selected a raven symbol from it's original image and pasted it onto a picture of the front of the school. We then used layers and masks to add multiple other images and fade them together. I lowered the opacity on the images, and made the raven symbol soft light.







This project was resizing an image of the school, and adding a large ONW on top, and another symbol representing the school. Mostly this dealt with layers and blend modes.






In this project, we made a masked layer of text, and used that to inverse it as if it were a window to the image of the school underneath, outlined it in white, and created a custom gradient to fill up the remaining space.

Planet in Illustrator Tutorial

 

 First, create a circle by using L and holding down shift while you drag to maintain a perfect circle.  

Then, create another circle, but remove the fill to make it an outline. Go to Effects > 3D

It'll initially look like this. 

Rotate the cube with your cursor to alter the three dimensional point of view, until it's tilted in the manner you want the rings to be.

Resize the stroke size of the outline until it's thick enough.

Select the knife tool, and divide the circle in half. Bring the top half to the front with Arrange>Bring to Front .

Adjust the ring until it appears as if it is around the planet.

Our Personal Logo

After creating multiple slightly different versions of planet-centric logos, I decided to stay with this one. It is simplistic yet effective, which demonstrates the efficiency I would expect myself to uphold in my own business. The color scheme is purple due to it's symbolism of sophistication and power. Dually, it represents mystery, fantasy, and creativity; which is reflected in astrophysics- as it is the study of furthering knowledge of the universe's unknowns. The background seems as if it is spreading; expanding like everything we know and are coming to know with math and science. Obviously, the planet represents the 'astro' in astrophysics.

Archer Hairline Font

Meyers-Briggs Personality Test

My personality type is INTJ; Introvert, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging. Essentially, I am an introvert by a wide margin, and I excel in most things related to thought. Originality, analysis, and possessing knowledge are some of the most significant ideas in my life. I set high expectations for myself and am very determined if I care about something. I have difficulty with things such as expecting too much openness in relationships and small talk. Stephen Hawking and Annie Clark (St. Vincent) share my personality type, which absolutely thrills me, due to the fact that if you asked me who my main inspirations were, they would be my immediate answers.

I believe the personality type fits me well, and am assured by the fact that I’ve taken this test two other times, and received the same results. The majority of how I am described is accurate; my introversion, my love for learning, my high expectations, my combination of imaginability and function. However the aspect of being determined I feel might be slightly inaccurate, as even when I care deeply about something, I have to muster up the energy to actually carry it out. Moreover, it is as close to me as anything could get. It definitely helps me understand why I am gravitated towards the things I am, such as philosophy and physics. It’s how my thought process works, very abstract but trying to pick up on patterns and evidence.

INTJ clarifies my role in a team, as it describes me of having the potential to be a leader, but letting someone else take the role if they offer it. The introversion is the most evident, as in social situations I alienate myself frequently, and tend to stick around reserved, quiet people unless I am in a certain mood. As for people’s perception of me, I believe one of the statements I identified most with was the statement that I expect an exhausting amount of openness of people whom I have relationships with. People have definitely misunderstood my intentions because I have an odd way of having friendships with people.

I’ve learned that I wasn’t wrong in my thoughts that being a physicist or philosopher would be well suited for me. Dually that the people a person tends to look up to are similar to themselves, personality-wise.

Color Wheel

Essentially, in graphic design, we made a basic color wheel to introduce us to the program Adobe Illustrator, then were given the opportunity to create our own color wheel based off of merely our creativity. Using this program was definitely more difficult than I had expected- I've never been introduced to a program so intricate and complex. Definitely infinite things to learn and potential to fulfill. Additionally, we briefly studied the psychology behind the color wheel- how each color represents a specific human emotion and how the use of those colors can be utilized in marketing. An example is how mint products are green- which represents health and freshness. Blue represents calamity, red represents passion and love, purple represents royalty and glamour. 

graphic design

In the video we watched, I learned a great deal behind the purpose of graphic design. On the surface it seems like it's primarily simply for the purpose of being visually appealing- which is a factor- however it has much more merit than that. Graphic design is significant to all aspects of our human life currently; persuasion, attention grabbing, emotion producing, communicating. It involves essentially all the combined factors that funnel into art. Personally, graphic design is connected to my life due to the fact that I already love making art. Graphic design is a universal, powerful medium- another medium of art that I enjoy. It's extremely versatile (and unlike tangible art, there is an undo button) and there is endless potential. Graphic design is the form of art that is the most resemblant of possessing it's own language. In terms of profession, in the field of film, graphic design is still significant. When I enter film, I will need the power of harnessing people's attention, and making them feel emotionally drawn and connected to whatever I decide to make.

The album cover of Angles by The Strokes is one of my favorite examples of graphic design. The colors are so opposite and vibrant, yet they match in a very attention demanding way. The plane of vision is slightly odd and skewed- resembling an optical illusion. It signifies a sort of flamboyance and oddity that is reflected in the music on the album.

"They loved your GPA, then they saw your Tweets" Review

 This article was discussing the fairly recent concept of college admission officers browsing applicant's social media, and the controversy behind it. According to this article, one hoping to apply to a college should pay close attention to making sure everything they post under their name isn't questionable. We should pay attention to our supposed 'digital footprint', as if they browse our social media and find something they deem negative, it could hinder our chances into being accepted into that college. Many people believe it to be a practice that could be vindicated as typical, while other people believe the practice to be immoral. 

One of the statements that surprised me was in paragraph 6, "30 percent of admissions officers said they had discovered information online that had negatively affected an applicant's prospects." It also mentioned the general visitation of applicant's media as a get-to-know-you has been happening five percent more frequently this year than the last. This surprised me due to the fact that it's becoming more common and occurrent- prior to that, I had assumed that it wasn't a usual thing; that it was infrequent enough for me and my peers to not stress too much on what we post. I wasn't aware that it was relatively normal- and happening more and more. As technology advances, it seems probable that by the time I apply for college, it will be a tradition for all college admission officers. Upon that realization, it surprised me how serious a single digital comment could be. 

While reading the article, a quote in paragraph 10 made me begin to question some moral ideas. The quote read, "If colleges find seemingly troubling material online, they may not necessarily notify the applicants involved." To me, that poses the question whether this practice is truly effective. If the applicant is not involved or contacted, how would the admission officers know for certain whether there was a justification? Or an explanation? Their accusation based on a post could be completely derived from misconception, and their misconception would never be understood if they refuse to discuss with the applicant. Does this not seem slightly unfair? 

After reading this article, I've surely given more thought to what I post. Personally, I didn't have too much of trouble keeping things appropriate initially, but now I will definitely make sure to keep a close eye on it. I don't completely agree with the inspections of social media as I think it biased, however it is the truth, and I will account for it, as getting rejected from a college for a mere online post seems quite unappealing. 

Chase Scene Reflection

 The scope of the project was to create a succinct scene in which it demonstrates characteristics of a chase scene from an action movie- suspense, quick pace.

Initially me and my partner Brett brainstormed ideas for the plot- just briefly- since that wasn't the main objective. After we decided on our "plot', we created a two page storyboard of all the shots we wanted to acquire. Due to the short window of time we had to create this video, we started filming right away. With the iPad, we shot everything we had planned on our storyboard, out of order. We primarily shot it depending on what part of the school we were in, and assembled it into its chronological order later. During editing, I realized the way I had structured the shots around the school wasn't too easily comprehensible. Brett agreed; so we hastened to reshoot some of the clips we had of Amanda. Her prior clips were in a different part of the school than where mine were, so we looked like we were in different universes, almost.

That was definitely an aspect I learned a lot about. Dually, the fact that I had to reshoot and reedit within the matter of a day taught me a thing or two about deadlines. I did stay after school, but had I not, I doubt I would have finished it. Additionally, I learned that in teamwork it can be hard to focus solely on the task at hand if you're friends with the people you're working with.

I'll definitely pay more attention to continuity in storyboarding from now on, viewing it from a perspective of someone who doesn't know anything about the video. Also, I'll try to get the task moving a little quicker, instead of spending a lot of unnecessary time fooling around. I know continuity in clothing wasn't supposed to be regarded in this video, but it's definitely something to remember.

As for keeping things the same, I'd definitely keep doing my color correction in correspondence to the mood of the video- making everything slightly metallic toned can have a big difference in something that's supposed to appear dire and intense.

Overall, I think this project was a good incentive to learn how to create things by a deadline. I think structure of shots in a technically correct way is becoming more of a habit, after creating this video.

e9 commercial

printing project for ecomm