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.