Category Archives: School

MATC Chicago Trip ’08

Group of Visual Communications Students in front of the metal bean in Chicago

This past thursday was the annual MATC Art Club trip to Chicago. In general the Graphic Design students go, but these past 2 years Emmalee has gotten a group of Visual Communications students to come along.

ViComm students crossing a street - sam looks the most bad ass

This is my third year going on this trip, my first was while I was still in the Graphic Design program, and must have been in Fall ’03. And now ’07, and ’08. This year ended up being the least time spent in The Art Institute of Chicago Museum. At one point while walking around we saw a poster advertising the Field Museum and an exhibit of mythical creatures. When Emmalee saw that she went nuts and decided we should check it out. The day was half over at this point, so most of the rest was used there. Partly looking for Issac, but I won’t get into that.

Bryan Emmalee and Sam

Speaking of looking for someone, I was the doofus who made the busses late to leave this year. The past 2 years they loaded and unloaded in the same spot, this year they had to load in a different spot and I did not catch the notice. I went to where the map said and previous years had gone. I felt so stupid.

vicomm students spelling out vicomm with their bodies

All in all it was a good trip though!

Photo Credits: 1 & 2 – Lucinda, 3 & 4: Emmalee

Being Sick is Weird.

Being sick is weird. Weird in the way you forget how normal you feel when not sick. Stuff like breathing becomes annoying when it irritates your throat and sinuses. And drinking stuff is hard. It is amazing how un-appetizing something like soda becomes. Even water can taste horrible.

But, thankfully I am feeling better. I started with a cough on Wednesday, it became nasty on thursday. I was up all night throwing up from an irritated queazy stomach from all the mucus I was swallowing (Ewwww). Started feeling a tiny bit better on Friday and my stomach was no longer irritated. And now today I am almost all better. My chest is still real sore from all the coughing etc. So if I find something amusing it causes a small laugh then a few coughs.

Now that I am feeling better, I have to get my video finished. Being sick caused me to miss 3 or so days of time I could use to edit. I think I will be able to get it done, but I won’t have the extra time I expected to refine it. It should all come out acceptable though. I am still confused on why Doug wants to show it in class. It is going to be quite long (already over 1 hour in a rough unfinished cut missing the last weekend of shooting).

Burger, Burger, Burger, Burger, pickle! pickle!

Today MATC had an event where the different progams show what they are about to students from highschool who are learning about their options for college. I helped out at the ViComm booth, and sat and drew in Illustrator with a monitor mirroring what I was doing faceing the people coming around to check out the booths. I drew these live in front of people:

BURGER LEARNER

duck in landscape

I got quite a few watchers at times. It was cool.

What an Unexpected Surprise

This weekend I was helping film videos of school down in Madison. Michael Sweet’s being was the biggest, and main one. We shot all of his stuff in the library. It was fun, but also long. We filmed from 4:30 into the night on Friday in the Library, and then more on Saturday for Sam at Ryan’s apartment. And since filming was happening on sunday too, and early in the mourning. I decided it would be helpful to stay in Madison to save time and gas money. So I stayed over at Sam and Kyle’s place. We finished up this weekend’s filming today (Sunday).

The original reason I was around was because I was supposed to be in all 3 movies in some way or another. And I thought my parts were going to be filmed. It turns out we did do some of my stuff for Sam’s video on Saturday. But that was it.

On friday I decided I would film the production of these films, Sam’s, Kyle’s, and mostly Michael’s. And they thought that was a cool idea, and over the weekend they became even more happy with the idea. So this means I have a video for class now: A documentary about the production of some of my classmates videos. I am not sure how much of a cohesive and interesting product I will be able to make out of it, but I will try my best. So far I have about 4 hours of footage from the 3 days. And will be getting at least 2 more hours, if not 4, from the rest of the shoots.

Oh Yeah, the Surprise…

I knew my parents had gotten me something. I knew this from talking to my mom on saturday about staying down in Madison. She mentioned they had gotten me something. I had no clue what it could be, and expected something like a new button-down shirt, or other clothing.

When I got home today from the 3rd day of shooting, I found a new Mattress in my bed with Kadie atop sleeping. Sweet, a new mattress. I can’t remember the last time I got a new one, and this one is soooo much nicer. I think I shall take a nap now. I did not sleep too well on Sam’s couch, twas too tall for it.

Attack of the 30 Foot Salsa Jar

Here is another new video I made for Video Production today.

This time the objective was to create “an exciting movie trailer from very boring video footage.” And very boring it was. I think it turned out kind of ok. There are still things I wish I could have done to it, but due to time, and the fact I was using iMovie HD 6 I did not get to them.

The video was edited in iMovie HD 6. The music was made in Grageband, and the sound effects came from a website that escapes my memory right now. The title slides were made in Photoshop. All done between 4:30am and 7:30am. It is also a bit short too. It was sposto be at least 1 min long.

IE Sucks.

The Horror banner For Vicomm.org
I just spent an hour playing with CSS to fix the layout on Vicomm.org to look right in IE 5.5 and 6.0. It don’t even look like it does in Firefox and Safari. It is just slightly off, and now useable. Designing for multiple browsers should not be an issue too, since there are strict standards.

Browsers like Safari, and Firefox strive to follow them to the letter. While Microsoft seems to care less when it comes to IE. Internet Explorer 7 seems to getting things better though. At least is does transparent PNG files properly. Now if only it was easy to get everyone to upgrade to it.

I started working on this because I popped onto the forums and saw that there were some crazy errors and layout issues regarding the theme. Turns out the host Emmalee is using finally got around to moving us to a new server like he said he would about 2 months ago. Seems it does what he promised though, finally have access to write privileges on the server and it seems a bit faster. And the fix to the theme was just telling it where things were on the new server. It Coulda been worse. He could have nuked our databases.

Once I fixed the issues I decided it was time to fix the errors I saw when the site was used in IE 6. I saw these for the first time when Emmalee was showing the site to some people telling them I made it etc. It was rather frustrating to find out since I had the site looking fine in both Firefox and Safari, and people had told me it looked fine in Internet Explorer.

Well, enough of this rant, I should go to sleep. Seems most of my blog posts are always made at night, when I should be sleeping.

Phishing PSA

Here is a PSA I made for Video Production. The goal of the project was to make a 60 second spot that was a PSA advocating a call to action on a chosen subject. I picked phishing because I thought it was a new and fresh topic that would be unique, and I knew pretty much how to explain it. This also gave me a chance to work with Motion for the first time. Let me know if you learned anything from it in the comments of this post, or the video’s YouTube page.

Fluffyfur’s Voyage

This is an animation I made for 3D class. Our goal was to create an animation with a character as the focus. Along with use multiple angles to be edited together in another program, such as Final Cut Pro. The sounds were not a requirement, but added a lot to the video, and make it more effective.

This was created in Strata 3D. Though I do not, at all, recomend anyone use it.

Ambulance – For School/Work

Illustration for Ceedle Ambu lance.

I am working on an interactive teaching tool for Medical Rescue students at MATC with Sam. This is the first thing I have done for it, and it took about 2 hours. This project will involve all kinds of such Illustrations and I think we might have to sacrifice quality for time (and sanity).

Time, Money, and Quality. Always fighting each other.