Final Project

For my final project, I've decided to do a menu with a User Interface that would make certain parts of the animated menu clickable, which would open up separate videos that I have edited. The menu is an animated Reno Arch, that is segmented by seasons, winter, spring, fall, summer. The seasonal sections have unique animations (a snowman comes in the winter scene, leaves fall in autumn etc) These are all clickable. Upon being clicked, a new window opens showing a short montage (around 1 minute each) of events taking place in downtown Reno during that season. These videos were compiled and edited by myself using preexisting footage, and acquired footage from the internet.

To put this together, I edited the videos using Final Cut, with the text coming in from fonts I edited in Photoshop. The menu was made in After Effects using segmented transitions (linear wipes) to make each segment different. The UI was created in Adobe Flash Catalyst with selected areas being made buttons, and then those buttons triggering actions on other slates, which upon completion, would transition back to the original state.

My original goal was to make it more about the events surrounding the people, and not simply a video that looks like a promotional piece for the city of Reno. It ended up being a little bit of both. In the end though, my main goal was just to be able to expand my knowledge of new programs (After Effects, Catalyst) and that was my favorite part about it, I got a lot of experience with new editing programs and I really enjoyed putting this together.

Music 409 Final With Video

For my final MUS 409 project, I made a 4 minute long song using both traditional recording techniques as well as synth and instrumental noises. This was unlike anything I had done before and I wasn't really sure how exactly to make the video to go along with it. I decided to simply get on after effects and start playing around with different animations and filter effects, and I ended up with what I think is a really cool representation of the piece.

I used a lot of pop culture images from film, comics, video games and more to make this feel like a lot of crazy things happening at once. I started to try to make it sync with the audio (and it still does in some places) however I found that when I just kinda let it go its own way, the piece became much more effective.

The piece was long, so I had to repeat some things, but I think you'll notice the first 2 minutes or so is what I dedicated most of my time and effort to. Hope you enjoy it,

Coachella (exhibit)

Coachella was an amazing experience, both visually as well as musically. It was a 3 day escape filled with good people, good food, amazing art, and unparalleled musical talent. I had a blast and came back with a lot of experiences and things to discuss. The art that was there came from all over the country and there were a few installations that were really awesome. One of my favorites was probably a small robotic neon shark that was remote controlled, roaming around the festival grounds chomping at people’s ankles.

The music was amazing, with a sound system that was definitely one of the best I had ever heard. Coachella showcases some of the largest musical acts in nearly every genre, and this is undoubtedly one of the largest shows they will play all year. Because of this the production on these performances are huge. Fireworks, flames, amazing light shows, backdrops on stage, and dancers make every performance worth seeing.

During Justice’s performance (a french electronic duo) the stage was full of lights, and images, including showing dancers on both sides of the stage. Eventually the lights lit up along the entire front of the output speakers, giving the stage a grid like appearance that went really well with the performance.

Oh yeah, and Tupac was there.

Kiel Johnson

Kiel Johnson is an extremely interesting artist and much different than things we had seen before in this or any other art classes. He is a real grass roots artist who loves to create things traditionally with his hands, and his work comes off as having a lot of hard work and himself in each piece.
Johnson has an ability to use a lot of different mediums as well as materials to make something completely original. His illustrative ability was impressive enough, but the work he's done with cardboard and paper (specifically his reflex camera project) was really interesting and I love to see artists who can utilize their skills in so many different ways.

His lecture was really informative, and as a digital media student, it was interesting to see a viewpoint on art from someone who is involved in so many different aspects of the art world. I went with Dan Conroy, who was talking later about how he wanted to try a time lapse of making something (which would later become his project) so this goes to show the type of affect these lectures and these guest artists can have on us as working students and artists

Exhibition Review: Kevin Kremler

Postcards From the Grey Area was an exhibit we saw by Kevin Kremler in the Shepard Gallery in the Church Fine Arts building in early April. The exhibition had 4 pieces that were all somewhat connected, yet very different from one another. This made the exhibit really interesting. Kremler's work is largely interactive, which I loved because it definitely gave a new aspect to going to a gallery instead of just standing around looking, you actually got to be involved with how the piece worked. The first piece was a photobooth that was set to mimic a Norman Rockwell painting. This was really cool and our class definitely enjoyed playing around with this one. Next were the tvs set to brain scans on the floor, this wasn't interactive, but really fun to watch and walk around. Third, was a large postcard he had drawn of Van Gough in crayon. This was really original and Kremler said he uses these to mail out to friends and family which definitely made me look at it a bit more in a different way. Finally he had a cross of planks with buckets on the end suspended over the floor, each corner had a box of colored sand, and a small shovel. Putting the sand in the buckets would alter the angles of the beams, while dropping colored sand on the floor in a random pattern.

I enjoyed this work, the scale and interactivity of it was definitely impressive, and I'm interested to see his other work since I was impressed at his ability to do so many different types of pieces using different materials.

Music 409 Video

This is a video representation of my midterm piece for my Music 409 class.

The piece is titled hallway, a title which came after I have finished production on it, due to the echo noise constant throughout the piece and the ambient noise that I felt gave the listener a feeling of walking down an ominous hallway.

For the visual representation of the piece, I went with the film geek side of me and scoured some of my favorite films and other media to find the most memorable film uses of Hallways.

In the end the sound works great with the fast editing and the films I chose, giving it a very distinct and somewhat unique look at such a normal everyday thing such as a corridor connecting two rooms.

Media Used:

The Legend Of Zelda
The Shining
Star Wars: A New Hope
Fight Club (extra film nerd tidbit, I used this as a rapid subliminal shot of the Tyler Durden character in the hallway as a nod to director David Fincher, who put flashes of the Tyler Durden character within the film Fight Club)
The Princess Bride
Inception
Se7en
Charlie and The Chocolate Factory
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Progress 4/24

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF70NkDy2IQ&context=C40f9b55ADvjVQa1PpcFO9voxB_c1LAdhoRgNdH9NS6IoajXsPMBk=


Over the past couple weeks I've continued to amass my video footage which is nearly all complete and in the editing stages.

Meanwhile I've been working on the front menu which is almost done. I'm still looking at ways to change the seasons to make them a bit more seamless, however I think for now its starting to come together nicely.

Upon completion of this menu I will bring it into Flash Catalyst where I will make it clickable with rigging the separate videos to play upon being clicked, with each quadrant representing a different seasonal video themes.

Progress

For this week I got a first draft of the menu screen for my project in photoshop. I'm planning on working on it more to make it blend a bit more and look a bit more cohesive, but the general idea is there.

Also I continued getting more footage for the videos that will play for each season, here is some of the winter footage I've compiled

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKMmZTOLkGE&feature=youtu.be



So I still have more footage I'm working with but overall it's coming together nicely.

Project Timeline

My video will consist of footage of the citizens of Reno and how they interact, showing that the city has more than just a general population, but that the citizens continuously get together in artistic ways to express themselves.

The focus will be on how artistic the community is by showing people in various costumes at themed events, races, art events, etc, throughout the year, edited together in a artistic style to show the variety we as a community experience. 

4/03            Progress Critique #1 : continue gathering footage from outside sources, present to class final proposal
4/10            Progress Critique #2 : Finish compiling footage
4/17            Work/Demo Day : Work on editing footage
4/24            Progress Critique #3 : Finish editing footage
5/01            Work Day: Finalize editing and complete project
5/08            Final CRITIQUE/PROJECT #2 Due : done

Final Project: Video

For my final video project I would like to do something with downtown Reno, seeing as I am moving away from Reno soon and would like to do one more project involving the city. I have a couple ideas that I haven't solidified yet. But one is to take a collection of videos taken downtown from myself, friends, and youtube to show the different activities that go on in our city.

This includes the various bar crawls that involve thousands of people dressing in costumes and wandering downtown (santa crawl, pirate crawl, zombie crawl etc). As well as wine walks, ARTown, river festival and other events, and turning it into a kind of year round calendar of events showing all seasons.

My other idea would be a time-lapse of the Reno Arch, preferably once the weather gets better and there is more going on. 

I think it would be really cool to see all the different things that go on around and under the arch in one day. Especially once the weather warms up and people are walking around. It would be cool to capture the locals, tourists, and various street performers and homeless going about their day. For this i would need to find a place with a good vantage point of the arch where I would be able to leave the camera for an extended period of time.

Progress 3/6

This week we finalized our animated images to be used on each wall of the screen for each installation. We animated these in final cut using keyframes and wanted to make it look like you were zooming into one section of the image and being zoomed out of a similar matching section of a different image.

Aside from this we're finalizing securing our installation space at the JCSU and have begun construction on the installation itself.

 
We have each included a sample animation

Progress 2/21

We've begun to work on animating images in order to start making moving pictures to use as our projections, but are having some trouble getting the animations working perfectly in photoshop. So we've decided to switch over to Final Cut to utilize those animation opportunities in a better way.

We've figured out the general idea of how we want the animations to go. We want to start with star fields and use zooms in and out to transition into more colorful images of nebulae and planets etc.

So we found more images that could be linked together with star fields.

2nd Progress Report.

The room we were hoping to use was unavailable, so we need to go back to square one and look into other venues that will fit our goal. We're contacting the Planetarium to see what resources they have available, we may need to refocus our goal, as a full room projection installation is looking more difficult than we anticipated.

http://graphicdefiner.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/type-as-art/

http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/space-audio/

We may need to focus more on a single aspect of the installation, such as more sound and animation, and using a space such as the planetarium to create something.

Maybe using planetarium resources to show animation like this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74mhQyuyELQ

After realizing the obstacles we have, we still want to try to stick around to our original idea, but we'll definitely need to figure out some logistics to make sure we can execute the idea.

1st Progress Report

Myself and Nicole Oshan have decided to attempt a projection installation that would mimic outer space. We plan to figure out a way to project on (hopefully) 3 walls and a ceiling, making it as immersion as possible including other aspects such as sound and animation.

At this point we are still researching everything, obviously the largest challenge will be figuring out the logistics of how to project in a room without blocking the projection and making sure it is all sized correctly.