Final Presentation "Ferrari"

ferrari

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The first time I was on a racetrack, I was about 12 years old. I was riding shotgun in a dark silver Ferrari 360 Modena. My father and I went down to Limerock, Connecticut to a attend a Ferrari race day at the local track. All my life I have had a passion for cars, but this day stands out over all the rest. Since then Ferraris have continued to mesmerize me with their beauty and grace, so I figured they would make the perfect subject for a “photojournalistic slideshow”. For the main project I used Soundslides to create the visual elements of the presentation, and PhotoShop to clean up a few of the images that were not in the greatest condition or had watermarks on them. The visual part was relatively simple, just a bunch of gathering followed by some click-and-drag goodness.

The audio, on the other hand was a bit more involved. With the recent launch of the newest Ferrari, a remake of the classic California, Ferrari has set up a separate website to showcase the vehicle, www.ferraricalifornia.com. One of the pages is solely dedicated to the sounds and feel of the vehicle under different driving conditions. With the use of my trusty iPhone, I was able to play the sounds of the engine revving and being driven and use them in my presentation. All of the engine sounds within are from the V12 of the new Ferrari California. All of the voiceover work was also recorded using my iPhone. After recording, I simply synced the phone with my iTunes and imported everything to Audacity where it was all cut together. To only audio trouble I encountered was a severe stuffy nose due to seasonal allergies.

The major trouble with this assignment was getting it posted. FileZilla and webNG failed me for several days before I redid the presentation in PowerPoint and posted through slideshare. I even went as far as to create my own website in order to host the file.

I really enjoyed embarking on this assignment because it is something very close to home for the photojournalistic part of media, something I genuinely hope to become a part of post-graduation. I am proud of the way the presentation flows together, and stays general enough for a non motorhead to enjoy without losing the passion for autos Ferrari embodies.

Bind in / Blow In Cards

For the BiBi card assignment I gravitated more towards Quark than InDesign, but neither one seemed to work better than the other. The first frontside attempt is the InDesign version. For this side of the card, InDesign worked rather well, because it allows more of a free hand approach to putting the cards together. Quark on the other hand is much more of a mouse-oriented application. The placement methods in Quark seem much more exact in comparison as the card creation was mostly a “input measurements and bang its there” type of task. This made it ideal for the backside of the card because it is simply a universal template that never really changes card to card. However the frontside is much better off using InDesign because it allows much more creativity while still remaining exact in the placement interface.

After a bit of research I decided that Helvetica was the best font for these cards. It is a common choice for printers to use on these type of mediums, easily scaled, readable, and uniformed. All of the fonts are variations under the Helvetica title.

The one major snag with this project was entirely on my end. Being am engineer the ruler in my desk is a triangle scale, with several units on it. I made the mistake of using the wrong side of the scale for the measurements, so as a result the cards, and everything on them are slightly larger than the actual BiBi card I was mimicking. Unfortunately this error went unnoticed to me until I was to far into the project to restart, so after some math conversion I was able to keep all the elements proportionate to the original, and then when I printed the card, I scaled it down to be as close as possible.

In the end, despite being a heavy Abode user (lightroom, bridge, photoshop, etc) for these types of projects I tend to gravitate to Quark over InDesign. This may be a result of my days working as the Photo Editor for the Hawks’ Herald (RWU’s student newspaper), but it seems more natural.

Getty Images PowerPoint

Getty

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Webpage

Brochure

My father and I share a very strong skiing relationship which every winter inundates the living room table much to my mother’s dismay. Whether we are looking at skis, bindings, jackets, or any other paraphernalia they all have one thing in common, brochures. So naturally when asked to create a brochure of my own I immediately thought SKIING! I decided to go with the American ski company K2 because they have a strong youthful style to the company but have been around long enough to matter. The attitude of the company also afforded me several design options.

I wanted my brochure to reflect the feeling of skiing and the equipment showcased in the brochure. The inside fold of the brochure informs the reader briefly about the all mountain skis K2 offers for men and women and has each item and title shown. This same theme appears on the back panel as well. My aim was to be able to show all the skis together so the reader can visually compared and know which ski is which, without creating too much clutter on the page. Each ski had to be edited, titled, and resized in Photoshop individually. It was a tedious process, but I feel the final result was well worth it because each ski is easily readable and the reader can still breathe when looking at the page. This task was one of the major challenges of the project.

The photos in the project were chosen because I felt they showed most of the many different ways people ski, be it in a park or hiking in the backcountry K2 can do it all.

Another visual consideration to the brochure was finding a way to let people know it was a K2 brochure without slapping a logo everywhere. I tried to place some sort of logo on each page, but managed to keep it subtle enough that so that it wasn’t the only thing the reader remembered.

I am very proud that I was able to create a brochure that properly showcases what the company is trying to sell, while not straying to far from the essence of the sport itself.

This project was unique for me because until InDesign, I already had a background with every program this class has used. Because of this I had to change my approach entirely so I could strive to achieve both a good final result and get a good feel for a program that was completely foreign to me. I enjoyed the experience of learning InDesign and always enjoy something when skiing is involved. If I had had more time I might have played around in the program a bit more just to learn about all the different effects and capabilities, but overall I would not edit the final brochure in any way.

Concert Poster

The object for this assignment was using Quark we had to create a concert poster in order to practice both the program and creating something that would be bare essential information while still being informative.

This was a challenge by its self because you had to be able to decipher what people need to know at a glance and where to go to get more information.

For my assignment I choose the band Aerosmith. Being a fan of the band I knew I had to create something that was classic rock looking and edgy while still being modern since they are the longest producing rack band of their era.

My first objective was to find a workable picture of the band and knew because of their normally wild dress I could base the color scheme off of that. The font also had to reflect the band so I used many different ones. Rosewood showed off their old fashioned American rock vibe, while the lower poster used Harrington to play off of their flashy hippy personas and seems to match the purple and cyan backdrop.

Quark was relatively easy to learn, especially having seen it used before while working for the Hawk’s Herald. However, I found the way the layers interacted to be a bit of a pain because the only way to move them around seemed to be to recreate them in the right order.

I am very proud of the way the poster came out because I feel that in properly advertises the band and stays true to their attitude both on and off the stage. These last to assignments I found to be very rewarding because I love working with visual media and music is a strong passion of mine.

However, if I had more time I would take the bands photo back into photoshop and try to clean the white background off of them a little more. They have a strange outline and there are a few random pixels that the magic eraser missed.

Rage Against the Machine

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Rage Against the Machine

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For the PowerPoint assignment I was asked to make a short slideshow illustrating a band. I had The Ghost of Tom Joad stuck in my head that day so I decided to create a slideshow on Rage Against the Machine.

Going into the project I knew the slides had to reflect the attitude of the band so I selected two fonts, Prestige Elite Standard (headers) and American Typewriter (body text), which very closely resembled that font on their albums. Both fonts are very clear and hard, like their music, but vary enough from each other to not be bland to the reader.

Color scheme also had to reflect the band so I decided to go with a black background with white text, which is the inverse of the colors found on their first album cover. However, after the slide show was completed, the background was changed to a black with a grey center gradient which both livened up the appearance of the slides but also made the body text easier to read and less harsh on the eyes.

The music mix I created using Audacity uses to of Rage’s more famous songs, Killing in the Name of and Renegades of Funk. I chose the two songs because they are different enough to show the many varied sounds of the band, but are similar enough that they do not clash when played together.

I hit a snag in the project when I discovered I could not animate a table unless it was affect as a whole. So, I had to go back and redesign it. I accomplished this by creating all of the cubes individually, it was tedious but the result was worth the effort.

With the use of a stopwatch I was able to sync most the cubes in the table on slide 4 with the drumbeats in the song. I was also able to create text in all slides that entered on cue. If I had more time for the project, I would try to sync more of the elements with the music, but I am very proud of how close I was able to get everything to the music.

The single cubes of the table did make the PowerPoint a bit longer than most, but it allowed me to showcase the band more in the final element’s slideshow.

Photoshop was also used for minor adjustments to the images, but was not a major player in this project. The musical elements of this assignment I found to be what kept it from being humdrum, and I honestly never knew the animation side of PowerPoint.