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.

Animated GIF

When animating the font poem it was tricky to decide how to display the words in both an aesthetically pleasing and a meaningful way. After some tinkering with the timing of the slides, I decided that I wanted to have all the words come in after the same interval, 0.5 seconds. I also decided to have the words the appeared stay on the scene to allow the reader to focus on the phrase as a whole, not just certain words. One change I did make after the animation stage was I increased the pause from 0.5 seconds to 1 second before the word ”but” directly following “life”. This pause allows the reader to reflect on the beginning part of the poem (what not to do) and encourages them to try to estimate what it is they should do. However, I felt the pause should not be too long to prevent the reader’s mind form drifting off topic. The whole animation ends with a 10 second pause before restarting so the reader can truly take in the collage at the end and reflect on the words in the font poem. There is also an added slide where both the front poem and an opaque version of the collage are visible. This effect encourages the viewer to take in both the collage and the poem together before seeing the collage itself.

For the collage portion I tried to use images of people and things associated with the enjoyment of life and the world at large. As a result I tried to create something humorous and happy. All the images were tweaked for opacity in order to help them blend together before I merged all the layers into one. Since they were all taken from Google image searches most of them went through the transformation tool so I could align them in order of importance and resize them to fit the appropriate canvas size. The average opacity for the images was around 75%. After aligning the photos correctly and setting the layers in the right order I used the “smudge” tool to eliminate most of the hard edges between images to help them all appear as one. The nun photo needed extra attention because I had to cut a title off the top of the image. For this I simply lassoed the part I disliked and cut it off the original before importing it into the collage file

The only image that went untouched was the image of the family at the bottom of the family. Family I felt was the most important image in the collage and an important element to enjoying life. Because of this I decided to help the image stand out a bit against the others by keeping it solid (100% opacity) and leaving the edges around it hard and distinguished from the others.

If I had more time to work on the project, I would add an extra slide to the beginning of the animation; particularly a slide that had only the background of the font poem sans the words. This would serve as a cleaner intro to the phrase when watching it more than once. After posting the animation and watching it repeat a few times I felt I needed a better transition from the end collage to the beginning slide, which was something I over looked when I put the animation together.

Hand Double Exposure and The Exquisite Corpse

Contact Sheet

The contact sheet assignment was a simple run through of all the basic photo manipulations you can do in photoshop.

The focus of the first row was on resolution. As the image progresses from left to right the resolution increases, meaning the image has more pixels (dots) per square inch (ppi), the more pixels the image has the more clear it will appear.

The second row deals with color modes. the original image of the hearts appears in the RBG column. this picture remains unchanged from the original because the web displays in the RGB color mode already. The 1st image is a desaturated version or black and white. second is a dual-chrome or in this case sepia toned image and the final is displayed using the printing color mode called CMYK

Orientation refers to cropping f the same image. The original is the landscape version, wider than it is tall which involved no cropping. the mountains were then cropped in two ways, the middle show a square version where all sides are equal in length, and the portrait version in column 1 is taller than it is wide.

Row 4 was done with the same crop tool, but this time the image size was unchanged. This created a zoom effect on the woman's face. the image went from the original one the far right, wide angle, to a close up.

Row 5 was exactly the same as row 4 except the zoom in was less representational and more abstract. The goal was to do the same zoom effect but to a place that was more obscure. Essentially, the image went from representational to indecipherable.

The final row dealt with different filters that were placed over an image of myself. The first one up close has strokes to make it appear like a charcoal and chalk drawing instead of being a photograph. The next two are both neon glows however, one highlights the edges and outlines in the image and the following one glows the light tone in the actual image. The final image is the actual portrait.

Font Poem

The Quote I used for the font poem assignment was not one that I was familiar with prior to the class. When asked to find a quote I almost immediately started scouring my favorite tunes. I found a few I liked meaning wise but none that I could really convey there meanings through appearance. A quick Google search came up with countless quotation websites and Emerson was one of the few authors I recognized. The quote itself worked out perfectly, when I read it I could already see an idea of how to manipulate the words in order to illustrate their meanings.

The words themselves are arranged in no special order to me. When I made the separate layers typing the words into Photoshop I like how they wound up slightly staggered. Obviously I neatened them up a bit from the rough draft to try to make the quote more readable and eat up some of the white space around the phrase.

Also instead of the simple a slightly boring black background I went to a 2-color gradient. Yellow and blue are both lively and vibrant colors, which reflect the subject of the sentence, life. Yellow convey feelings of joy and happiness while blue shows a sense of depth and stability.

The other two colors in the image are red and green. The red was used to highlight the keywords that were noted as incorrect or wrong while the green colors draw attention to the positive words. The strike emphasizes the wrongness of length and not and ties them together at the same time.

The two key words that jumped at me were “length” and “depth”. I wanted to draw special attention to them by making them a little larger than any of the other words. Also length was created using Blackoak standard, which is a short and long font to try to illustrate length. “It is not the” uses a more simple font, Alexa Std, to just get the words across but keep them plain at the some time. They exist but there isn’t much else to them. “of”, “but”, and “the” in the second phrase utilize a font called Banshee, which is more a more full and cultured looking font illustrating a more desirable mood to the positive part of the phrase. “Life” is made with the cutout font namely for the people figures, and depth uses another full and educated appearing font called Lucinda handwriting. Depth, another of the key words, was given a shadow to make it look beveled into the image for a depthier appearance; giving the word a downward arc effect emphasized this.

I’m proud of how the image keeps the tone of the quote without looking to cheesy color wise. However, if I had more time I would have played around with the background a little more. My main trouble with the project was playing around with the words enough so that I could better illustrate the sentence. The font selection was also a bit tricky. However, once I started tinkering the poem took shape.