Sometimes things tend to come back around. I'm not saying that stuff "happens for a reason," because I'm not that type of person; fate isn't an idea I find comforting in the least. Neo (from The Matrix) said it best: "I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life." Having said that, "coincidences" are still interesting and sometimes worth talking about because they make good stories.
In the first blog post here on Digital Barf I wrote about the Sketch Adventure outing at Chelsea Markets, where "when all was said and done (and drawn) a couple of us got tasty gelato." What I never mentioned was the spectacular business card I picked up at that little gelato stand.
I've been collecting business cards for a while now. Each one has something that intrigues me. Usually it's a good design, clever layout, sweet color scheme, but every now and then I take business cards that are terrible to remind me what not to do. In this instance, that wasn't the case.
The card I picked up had a beautifully designed logo on the front. It feels old school and modern all at once, something I've been trying to understand and learn. The colors are interesting too; I like how the one bold color and one soft color play off each other so well. My favorite aspect of the card is that it's square (I have a thing for squares).
Jessica Hiche, a popular typographer and graphic designer, visited SVA a few months ago and I was lucky enough to be invited to sit in on her talk. As it turns out, she is the designer of the business card I liked so much! Awesome. She told us all about her obsession with typography and about her ongoing project Daily Drop Cap. It works like this:
Each day (or at least each WORK day), a new hand-crafted decorative initial cap will be posted for your enjoyment and for the beautification of blog posts everywhere.
I thought this was a great idea so I started working through the alphabet, doing a letter whenever I could get a chance or felt the urger. Mine aren't nearly as awesome as Jessica's, but we all have to start somewhere.
Anton, my figure drawing teacher, gave me a sincere hug and I did my best to match his intensity. His freshly cut white hair pressed against my curly brown locks. "Thank you," he said with fierce eye contact. "Thank you," I replied. That was the last class.
(Check out more pictures of Anton on his website.)
Over the last couple of months our class spent twelve hours a week exploring the nude body through drawing. Anton is exceptionally open-minded and his teaching style reflected that. He always asked us what types of poses we wanted, how long they should be, and we often sat down in a group and had mini round table discussions with our models. He urged us to connect with them on a deeper level than as mere subjects - they were people with stories and passions just like us.
Here are some of my favorite drawings from Anton's class.
Some time ago, my friend Joey asked me if I’d like to write an article somehow relating design to animation. Back then I had just finished working on a pencil-test sequence for my animation class at SVA, so I could easily use it an example. Easily? Not quite.
The easy thing would be to bore the hell out of everybody by writing a subjective harangue on character design. But that’s just the shortsighted way of understanding design in terms of visual storytelling. Designing a character isn’t even an inherent step within the process of filmmaking. It can be applied to anything from mascots for the FIFA World Cup to LARPing. Therefore, I’m going to talk about editing and storyboarding; or how making choices about angles, shot composition and duration of frames can determine the meaning and set the mood of a movie despite the fact that most people take these things for granted. Because that is what designing a film is all about in the end.
Take a look at the sequence above. Nothing too fancy, we didn’t even have time to add some backgrounds and polish a few animations. There isn’t much of a story either; just two kids playing cowboys and Indians. Yet nothing is there by accident. That sequence is a minute long series of choices.
Think about the way it starts, a sudden cut that comes out of nowhere. Many movies have that sort of opening, like Oldboy or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It takes you right into the action and works especially well if your scene depicts something very dramatic or physically intense. It’s unexpected, it takes the audience off-guard, so they have to process the information really quickly. With Cowkids, we wanted to exaggerate everything about our main characters’ game, so a blunt opening was the way to go.
We also chose to start the movie with a traditional hip-level shot of our character’s hand reaching for his gun to establish that we were about to witness a duel. From there, a series of mirrored shots emphasize even more this particular scenario at the same time they present our characters. One thing we realized when going for the mirrored shots formula is that the girl would have to be a leftie if we wanted to repeat the first shot from a reverse angle. Directors like Sergio Leone avoided this problem on classics like The Good, The Bad and the Ugly by filming the gunbelt from the front. However, we wanted to keep both characters on frame, so the leftie choice won over new camera angle option.
Soon, both characters get separated and we show them performing ridiculous acrobatics. First, we see the boy jumping and rolling. Second, we see the girl completing a full circle on a swing before brandishing her weapon. And lastly, both run around the playground to avoid each other. By doing this we accomplish two goals: we hint that the girl is better than the boy, as her dodging tactics are more spectacular and creative. The audience will probably want her to win after that and, in fact, she does win the fight in the end. The second goal is to establish the playground as the setting, which is merely suggested at first and eventually confirmed with a wide shot of both characters running in circles within a limited space.
Later on, the boy tries to top the girl’s latest move by going down a slide to surprise her. She answers by jumping on a merry-go-round to become a moving target. We decided to show how close the boy was from actually hitting the girl by drawing her feet in the foreground, framing the figure of the boy as he opens fire. This is another traditional composition that you can find, although fitting entirely different situations, in movies like To Catch a Thief or Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The slow motion simulated during the merry-go-round sequence emphasizes the girl’s advantage at this point, focusing on how she pulls out her pistol to deliver what may be the final shot. Slow motion can work in two ways: it draws attention and gives the moment a certain degree of magnificence. However, it only works if used scarcely, otherwise it becomes vulgar and redundant. For that reason we made sure it was seen just that one time.
Zoom ins and outs normally are a disgusting choice in live-action, but for some reason, they work just fine in animation. We used them a couple of times to emulate the more elegant tracking shots, most notably in the scene with the boy running towards the bouncing pony. Here, first we show the boy running alone and then we zoom out to reveal the pony. This gives some motion to the shot, something necessary to keep the pace in an action piece, while avoiding excessive cutting, which tends to be confusing.
The tire swing jump and collision between the two characters is something that evolved through time. Originally it was going to be shown in one shot, again, to avoid too many cuts. Unfortunately, the complexity of such shot proved to be too time consuming and it had to be divided into three. Even though the result looks fine in terms of animation, this was one of our most frustrating decisions because in the final movie is hard to tell that the girl loses her gun in the clash. That particular piece of information was relevant because it set up the outcome of the fight, when the girl is briefly at the mercy of the boy right before getting miraculously saved by the Indian toddler.
In terms of choices, the final destiny of the boy had more to do with sound than angles, composition or elaborate animations. We wanted him to fall in a dog park and make it look as if he was being eaten alive by the animals without showing it. Therefore, we just animated a few dogs pouncing over the fence and then played around with sound. As with the rest of the movie, the goal was to exaggerate, so instead of some recording of actual dog barks we resorted to Jaguars roaring. That way, our dogs sounded fierce enough and anyone would think that the poor kid never made it alive after his villainies.
As a closing note, I apologize if anyone thought that this post had nothing to do with design and felt misled. However, I still think that design is a very broad term and professionals from many fields use it in very different ways. Would a car designer think in the way a company logo designer thinks? And what about a videogame designer? What I offered here is what I see as the way filmmakers think whenever they face the challenge of designing a motion picture, no matter how big or small.
In March I wrote about the Crate Chair I was designing: "We just started working in sculpture class on our final projects made of wood. I've always wanted to make a chair and I thought this would be a great opportunity to do it. Objects that have more than one use pique my interest so I'm making a chair that has more than one function. In short, it's a storage container that transforms between a chair and a small table.
My obsession with squares and cubes led me to doodle a crate that opens up into a chair. I researched simple crate designs and recreated them in 3D. Once I had all the pieces together I began figuring out how I could manipulate them in order for it to open."
Closed Crate Chair. AKA small table mode.
Open Crate Chair with the closed phase on the right.
Image from my progress update in March.
I have good news and bad news. Since I can't ask you which you want to hear first, I'll start with the bad news: I lost the Crate Chair. The good news is that I finished and took pictures before I lost it. Let me explain.
The chair was actually in a sculpture show here at SVA despite the fact that it's more aptly categorized as industrial design than sculpture. Clay heads bursting with all sorts of oddities and plaster freakiness filled the room that my chair sat in. When people reached it after walking around they usually seemed a little confused as to why it was even there. (I confess, I stood in the corner and watched. Wouldn't you?) Because it was different, however, it garnered more attention that it would've in a room full of chairs.
So how did I lose it? In a nutshell, I didn't pick it up after the exhibition ended and the clean-up crew threw it out. Am I sad? A bit, but I what's done is done and the real fun was the designing and building of the chair, not the staring at it.
Unfortunately, because of my blunder, the only pictures I have are cell phone pictures.
The chair just after I finished it. Closed up and ready to go.
At the exhibition.
Open in all its glory. The seat lifts for storage underneath.
For scale, the chair in the wood shop.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed the pictures! If you ever come across my missing chair tell it I said hello.
Eight months ago I moved to New York City, and during my time here I've grown to appreciate a lot of things I didn't expect. One aspect in particular is the city's absolute non-cleanliness.
People often describe NYC as very dirty, but to me it's simply lived in and experienced. Think of the crease lines in an elderly person's face - they represent the time they've witnessed and the wisdom they've cultivated. Like those lines, New York City has marks of age, experience, and wisdom in its own way. The uncleanliness is part and parcel in expressing character and personality.
I love that the desk I'm sitting at as I type this has been used before, complete with paint stains, doodles, carvings, and dents covering every visible surface. I love that the rug leading to the elevator is worn at the center from all the feet that have gone to and fro. Scratches oscillate around the orange call button from all the nails that begged to be satisfied by a glowing arrow and a "ding" sound. Everything screams of human contact. And I haven't even left the building yet.
Imperfections like these give the city a very home-like atmosphere for me. Just like myself (and all of us), the city is imperfect, and there's something very powerful about that simple association. I feel like I can relate to the people who occupy the same space, like we're all part of a team that communicates through our surroundings as opposed through direct interaction.
A couple of years ago I took a trip to Chicago to meet up with a close friend. During my visit she took me to the heart of the city and the waterfront. While the sights were absolutely beautiful I felt a growing uneasiness as I the trip went on. I couldn't put my finger on it while I was there, but when I got home and was asked how I liked the city I could only say, "Very clean." And that's when I realized that it's cleanliness was the quality that was so unsettling to me. There were so many people packed into the city, yet there seemed to be few traces of life beyond actual people.
Recently we were assigned to place art in the public eye in any way we like. This was an opportunity for me to contribute to the character of New York City. I toyed with an idea that required a small team of eager artists, but since I couldn't gather the masses during finals I decided to simplify it. I took four abandoned paintings from the studio, packed them up in my backpack, threw my camera around my neck, and looked for a public place to present them. The video below shows my short journey.
This is the third time I've been able to lend a helping hand to Haiti and, I have to admit, I'm a little surprised at how easy it is to get involved in positive action. After the earthquake struck I pretty much felt like everyone else, wondering if I could spare a couple bucks and if 100% of it (or even 10%) would get to Haiti.
Then I was asked to help organize and design materials for a fund raiser called Drummers for Haiti; I got the chance to witness what could be achieved by just a few people with solid determination. A few weeks after that I was presented with the opportunity to raise some money through SVA by co-running a Valentine's Day fund raiser, which not only ended in successful generosity towards Haiti, but also towards our fellow students. And earlier this month I was asked to design a logo for a Haiti non-profit group, which I hope unites them well enough to assist in their success.
So here I am, a couple of months later, with a completely different perspective about helping those in need. When tragedy strikes it isn't always a matter of asking myself what can I give, but asking myself what can I do.
There's an old Haitian proverb that goes, "Men anpil, chey pa lou", which means "Many hands, light load". The idea behind the saying is simple and powerful; if we all lend a hand then no task is too difficult, no goal too lofty. It makes sense, then, that a group of positive thinkers dedicated to providing support to Haiti named their non-profit organization according that mentality. Maha-Lilo's mission is clear: "to improve the health and well-being of young people in Jeremie and the rural surroundings."
Maha-Lilo was formed in February, 2010, in the aftermath of the earthquake that destroyed much of Port au Prince. Though not physically harmed by the earthquake, Jeremie also felt many of the effects. Much of the aid that was flowing into Haiti was not reaching the Maha-Lilo’s founders’ friends of family. In response, the founders raised funds but also realized that the rebuilding efforts will carry on for many years. In addition, the response would have to involve more than just immediate relief of food, water, and shelter. Maha-Lilo was formed to aid in those efforts.
While still only in the early stages of development, Maha-Lilo has already raised $4,733.66. Please take a look at their burgeoning site and consider aiding their efforts.
Last semester, Erik Guzman introduced Google SketchUp to us in his Visual Computing class. If you haven't heard of it, it's basically a nuts and bolts 3D modeling program that allows you to quickly and easily visualize complex ideas. (SketchUp is the same program I used to design the Crate/Chair that I finished building today.)
After a few weeks of lessons and assignments it was time to work on the final project for the semester - we were tasked with designing a video game and presenting it in a trailer using SketchUp. I came up with a 3D puzzle game called LUCiD. If you're familiar with the video game world, imagine a cross between Portal, Eternal Darkness, and Psychonauts.
LUCiD: a puzzle experience
I was pretty excited by the logo I made for the game case. Still riding the excitement wave, I wrote a little intro for the back of the case that goes like this:
You’re stuck inside your own twisted psyche. Your world is nothing more than an empty hospital.
Each room is a threat to your sanity. The only way out is by facing the challenges that lie within.
Your guide is a silent man with a ghostly face. His name is red.
Free your mind.
Now I know "free your mind" is super cliche, but it just fit so well that I couldn't resist. Whenever I think about how appropriate that tag line is I still get a little giddy inside. Check out the trailer and you'll see why it fits so well:
We just started working in sculpture class on our final projects made of wood. I've always wanted to make a chair and I thought this would be a great opportunity to do it. Objects that have more than one use pique my interest so I'm making a chair that has more than one function. In short, it's a storage container that transforms between a chair or a small table.
To begin, I drew up a few sketches to explore ideas. My obsession with squares and cubes led me to doodle a crate that opens up into a chair. I researched simple crate designs and recreated them in 3D. Once I had all the pieces together I began figuring out how I could manipulate them in order for it to open.
Closed crate chair. AKA small table mode.
Open crate chair. The closed phase is on the right.
Once I had the design down I recorded the measurements and began cutting. The majority of the crate is made up of twenty five 2' pieces, which makes the process a lot easier than having many different sizes to deal with.
My progress thus far.
If you're wondering how I'm going to make this seat comfortable (or even sit-able), you'll have to wait for the finished product to find out!
My drawing class is not the one SVA originally placed me in. The teacher I initially had was a cross between Godzilla and Paris Hilton. Truly terrifying. So I found my way into Matt Archambault's class the second week of the semester. What I failed to notice/realize/research before I made the switch is that the class is pretty much all Animation students (I'm graphic design). It turned out to be a really good thing.
Since last September I've learned a lot from my classmates. (Now I know how awesome Disney is for drawing on 1s, what a "walk cycle" is, and that The Lion King was a completely ripped off story.) After being around them for so long and having a little extra time in my visual computing class, I decided to mess around with flash and make a little motion braindump. By no means is this a serious attempt at a coherent animation - it's more like a doodle that sprouted a life of its own. From the looks of it you might think I was on some awesome drugs.
I have no idea what I was thinking. I wasn't thinking.
And to my classmates, thank you for broadening my horizons.
The sun is snuggling into the horizon and dinner is on the table. Your family jokes with you about not drinking milk because it makes you gassy. You pour a glass anyway, smiling and holding the carton with one arm and the naysayers back with the other. They make believe they're trying to get past you, but they don't really care. What started out as light-hearted jostling turns into a warm-hearted embrace. Gassy or not, they love you. And you love them.
You hear a low grumbling, like an old pickup pudging along on its last whim. The sound doesn't match the image, though, because it's approaching much faster and louder than any old pickup you've ever heard. The floor begins to vibrate, then jitter and shake. The kitchen appliances start to jerk across the countertops and fall to the floor. Your family looks at you for an answer. Then the world roars.
You open your eyes. They sting with wetness. You smell milk and metal. Someone is crying. Many are crying. You're crying.
This is the type of scenario I imagine when I try to envision the devastation that happened in Haiti. It is something akin to a sudden, merciless scene change, like a snow-globe shaken after a lifetime of settling, except that the little white pellets floating in the air have been replaced by human cries. We have all seen the images and words in the media expressing a dystopic landscape. Unfortunately, only a fraction of the horrific truths translate to us in the videos, pictures, and stories we see and read in the media. To make matters worse, they are often slipped in-between clips of upcoming action movies or the latest fashion style. Many of us have become numb to reality because we are saturated with surreality; it is hard to tell what's real and what's fake when everything looks real. This is why many people look to art.
One of the primary reasons I enjoy studying typography stems from my interest in the handwritten letter. Since I was a child I always paid attention to how others constructed their letters and tried to mimic different styles. Over the years I've assimilated enough letter variants and handwriting styles to throw a writing analyst into a spasmodic fit. From curled serifs to straight capitals, flat bottoms to swooping curves, I delight in practicing and learning new ways of writing the alphabet. Last semester one of my final projects was to design a book about typography. I decided to do it on handwriting.
Once I had the idea/book laid out my mind I hit the streets with Heather Quercio, a good friend and photographer. The book's introduction summarizes the journey:
I set out on the streets of New York City with a simple mission: to interact with strangers, find out their story, and take a look at their handwriting.
The majority of people I approached were not only willing to hear what I had to say, but also eager to tell me about their lives. It was refreshing to discover how quickly a stone-faced stranger could transition into a smiling, talkative temporary acquaintance.
Each person has a unique and interesting story that gives life and personality to their handwriting. Often, we see a stranger’s signature or short note and never get to discover the thinking, breathing being that created the lines. I put this book together as a porthole into the soul of script. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did making it.
In my sketchbook I have a list of tenets I try to live by. One of them is "Enjoy the process." Oftentimes we perform a process only to get to the product. By doing this, I feel that we're cheating ourselves of existence. After all, life is simply one long process encapsulating innumerable smaller processes. Everything from brushing your teeth to getting a degree is a process we partake in, and if we don't learn to enjoy the micro-processes of life we can't possibly appreciate the one great macro-process: living. For all those who enjoy understanding the process I broke down the steps I took in making a recent poster.
Last semester I had a class slot to fill and I decided to pick one titled What's Your Type? Choosing solely based on the fact that it was the only class with an interesting name, I ended up in Lara McCormick's experimental typography class. I am glad I did, because her's turned out to be one of the most rewarding classes I have ever taken. Lara brings an excitement for design and typography to the classroom that rivals the vigor Richard Simmons brings to each workout. And her excitement is contagious. She also manages to perfectly traverse the practices of pushing us to do better and leading us to do better. I realized this when she worked with us through our first assignment.
