Kismet Arts Tangent

First day of Production Design. Among other things, team assignment, expectation layout, role types, we discussed box design. Dielines are very important to design with accuracy and consistency, though the vendor will give you a design layout that is more structurally sound than the one that you will come up with in the designing process.

In class we worked on copying one that was made up by the instructor. I think it was important that you make the template and scoring lines “global” colors in Illustrator so you can change them at will based on the color of the design so that they contrast appropriately.

The first day of photoshop with Mr. Hoppe was very interesting to say the least. It reminded me of the scene from Full Metal Jacket where a few select people acquire new nicknames and are drilled with questions to the point where the only acceptable answer is “I don’t know. Sir!”

Mr. Hoppe knows his stuff. He briefly went over all the tools and noted how to make custom shortcuts and what the symbol that has a ramp with a “booger” is. (Apparently, the option key.) He discussed resolution, one of his mottos: Garbage In, Garbage Out. The worst thing you can have in photoshop is the jpeg. As he says, “It should be banned and outlawed.” I now know what is hi res vs. lo res, what pixels are and what increasing photo size vs. file size vs. pixel size.

Tom had everyone take this color test.

We have an assignment to make a color wheel, bonus points for creativity.

Here’s mine. (I might decide to redo it.)

First day of New Media for the quarter.

We go through past work of previous groups that have done the modules we’re about to do.

There’s a one minute video entitled Deja Vu that resonates. I still think it was very witty. And the long awaited Spice Demon video. Due to technical difficulties, this first module made video was shown this day and we all laughed. A good trick for movie props: Buy your puppet, shoot with the tag still attached and return upon completion.

First day of photo essay class. We pour over photographs. They are a series. They tell stories. Their captions clash, accentuate and steal the show. The captions sometimes say where the action is happening. Sometimes, they are editorial. This series by Bill Owens, entitled Suburbia, struck me as particularly powerful and very creative captions.

We ran down the syllabus, some of the pages included advice on brainstorming, critique guidelines, storyboarding information, interview tips, collaboration tricks (a.k.a. conflict resolution) and ways to caption photographs.

Here’s an acronym (also in the syllabus):

Points of View in Shooting a Subject: EDFAT

Entire- Observe/shoot the entire subject

Dissect the subject into specific details

Frame those details into strong original compositions

Angle- Shoot from a  variety of angles

Time- Use slices of time