Connecting Points

Taxes Are Important

2012-03-15T21:35:00.001-07:00

I had spring break last week so I didn’t go to my internship at Fox 56. I bet they missed my cheerful demeanor alongside my tactfully outspoken nature on the job site. My springbreak consisted of Call of Duty and a trip to the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Scranton… these really weren’t the best skill building exercises but I thought I should live it up while I was young, healthy and moderately attractive.

When I arrived back in the production department in Plains, PA., I was given the task of creating a 10 second promotional video for their website in regards to the upcoming tax deadline. I seem to always get these small projects because they are neat little task with a lot of freedom. I get to exercise my somewhat creative brain.

I previously worked on this project on week one because it was one of the available projects for me to do, but it was terrible and I hated it. I decided it was time to do redo it so I would feel better about myself and my advisor wouldn’t secretly make fun of me with his coworkers. “Look at this 10 second tax web promo Bryan Calabro made,” te he te he… those te he’s are what I would do if I was watching the original one I made.

My first task was to hit the delete button on my original version, I hit delete.

My next task consisted of building a sticky note to go on the bulletin board stock photo I got off the internet. The building of the sticky note took me around 25 hours to make, considering it was a square with a simple linear gradient. I used a stock push pin button because I didn’t want to make one. Then, I turned the opacity down to 77% on my bulletin board so my animation wouldn’t be clouded by the background. I want people to be able to see my animation obviously, I am not dumb. I was kidding about the sticky note, it took me 30 seconds.

Next, I added text to my sticky note using the text tool in Adobe After Effects. I made an entrance animation with the cover of a tax guide on a 360° rotation. This rotation revealed my universally recognized little yellow sticky note; maybe not universally but definitely in our world. Aliens might use bananas for sticky notes for all I know.

I had my push pin on a motion track so that it would bounce up and down dropping sticky notes in the process with little messages to go with the announcer’s voice. The sticky notes were on a simple straight motion track, very easy to keyframe. And I made “myfoxnepa” do a simple opacity fade because I honestly didn’t know how else to make it enter. Sometimes, simple is better and sometimes, “simple is better” is an excuse people like me use to cover up a fact that I could have pondered a lot harder and came up with a better alternative to a simple opacity fade. I had an immaculate cursor come in and click on myfoxnepa.com to make sure everyone knew they could click on the video if they wanted to go to the page; the href would be embedded in the video and go to the tax page.

My music was from an artist on Newgrounds.com.

I was happy with my finished product. Check it out!

Atlantic City, A Picturesque Destination

2012-03-09T19:35:00.001-08:00

This past November, I made it to the big boy age of 21. My trip to Atlantic City cemented my big debut into the "real world" with all vices available to me: alcohol, cigarettes, sex and gambling.

The trip began in a bronze Toyota Venza en route to Atlantic City, New Jersey. My quest and self-proclaimed goal to other members (in my family) was to win $1,000,000,000 solely from slot machines. This was all from the two dollars I had from left over from birthday cash. I didn't win.

I took a lot of wonderful (sure...) pictures on my journey throughout my trip. I will talk about each of my favorite pictures so you can put yourself in the moment and catch a glimpse of my life at a wrinkle in time <-- Great book about wormholes. The book took me on a journey, just as I am about to take you on (without Mrs Whatsitt, Mrs Who and Mrs Which).

Atlantic City was dismal for most of my vacation. It was overcast throughout our whole stay at the Casear's hotel. Talk about lame weather... God basically farted on Atlantic City while I was there.

Irate teenagers actually drew a penis in the sand on the beach outside this window right after the picture was taken. They were basically telling "the man" to **** off.

A man (not "the man") was on a surf board also when this picture was taken; he wasn't good at surfing. He was never actually even able to stand up on the board when I saw him trying to "catch a wave." (Mind you, the water was around 46 degrees.)

This was what I looked like throughout my trip (not acid), I was a bit hunched over with a knack for a perfect photo. I was in my "shooter's pose," a pose many photographers around the world could relate to.

This was also the inside the hotel room I was lucky to stay in during my furlough in Atlantic City. I am wearing button down Lacoste Shirt in this picture (I had to say that for my sponsors). I thought I looked like an oil tycoon's son without a gold plated belt buckle and or a gold Rolex. I am a carpenter's son.

This is my sister, Olivia. She is texting on her iPhone like she always is. I hate the kissy face.

I was put on earth by these two people. These are my parents: Brian and Julie Calabro.

Julius Caesar himself greeted me at the entrance to his casino. He told me "Experience is the teacher of all things" and then I asked him how he could talk, being that he was made out of marble. It was time to go into the casino. Sadly, I wasn't allowed to take pictures of the blinking slot machines all coupled with ding boop be bop ting ding noises. I also didn't even want to attempt to take pictures because I didn't have a tripod and I knew all my pictures would come out blurry because my shutter speed would have to be slow.

This "R" was all over the Julius Caesar's casino. It represented his reward's program dedicated to the hardcore gamblers there. The more "credits" you racked up and spent, the more "prizes" you could earn. No one won anything in my family; we lost around $120. We weren't really big spenders. Julius was probably disgruntled.

Check out this wonderfully constructed (but a bit cheesy) hallway in the Pier Shops connected to Julius Caesar's house. All my favorite high end stores with consumer goods I couldn't afford were along these hallways.

My favorite store by far, was Lous Vuitton. Talk about elegance. And, Unisex.

Louis Vuitton is well-known for his established reputation in the field of making luggage. In 1854, Mr. Vuitton was appointed as a trunk-maker to EmpressEugénie de Montijo, wife of Napoleon III. To this day, you'll still need to be royalty or have a grande job to afford his extravagant collection of handbags and other muses.

Coach was my second favorite store because of their marketing strategy toward women. Look at that pink emitting from their store! The place looks like a little treasure cove.

While I was waiting for my mother to finish her shopping, I took a picture of this little fake water fountain out in the atrium of the Pier Shops. The water was bubbling, bu bu bu ub ub wub bu bu. Yeah, that noise.

Look at this spiral staircase topped by a couple radiant bursts. This was how you went to the three different floors of the mall, if you didn't want to take the elevator of course. The elevator is in the background of this picture, look... ah yes, there it is.

Outside the pier shops we traveled in search of the candy store along the boardwalk called It's Sugar. Leaving the Pier Shops was sad; all the fun experiences I had there were now gone and forever a fleeting memory.

The candy shop was filled with an abundance of sweet treats from all different times throughout history. Yum, these candy cigarettes I saw were perfect to prepare children for real smoking! Smoking is like candy children.

The next part of my excursion, consisted of my family and I taking a brisk stroll on the Atlantic City Boardwalk. It was a bit cold, but we are a strong family that can handle it.

Look at this crew of people hanging around trying to sell rental scooters (Jazzies) for the handicapped, this was a very shotty business practice, one that I would definitely not trust at all. Thank God I don't need a scooter...

My grandfather fought in the Vietnam War so these statues hold some significance to me. These statues pay homage to all the people who died in the war from New Jersey. The soldier on the right looks as if he was flexing his muscle. He is strong.

On my way back to my hotel, I snapped this bright picture of the Trump Plaza's entrance. Now, it was time to get ready for supper...

The climax of my stay in Atlantic City was at the Knife & Fork Inn. It is one of the oldest, and most historically charged restaurants in Atlantic city offering a relaxing and ideal atmosphere to dine. Eating here, was the best part of my whole trip. The food was perfection on a plate. I ate a 12 oz filet mignon steak drizzled with their house sauce.

I drank two grande glasses of Chimay Beer with my perfected steak. This beer on draught compounded my delightful experience in Atlantic City.

This custom cake was made just for my dad's birthday. It was a very moist red velvet cake, no need for ice cream. This cake was the best cake I ate in my life.

The good looking waitress took this picture of our family. We were happy that day. Everyone put on their fake smiles to have this moment trapped in time.

10 Seconds of Motion Tracking

2012-02-29T21:26:00.002-08:00

I made it to another eventful (not really) week at my internship. I am learning that life in the production sect of a company (this company) is less restrictive than many of the other companies I worked for. Instead of the old fashioned cross-stiched synthetic walled egg colored cubicle to work in, I work in an open environment with a farm of computers and a variety of digital forms of media (SD Cards, Cameras, Video Cameras, DVDs, & Vector Graphics).

This week, I spent all my intern time on a viral video to promote the newly created viral video section of Fox56's website (irony). Because I couldn’t find SnapzPro software anywhere for free for video screen capture, I was forced to take screenshots of my MacBook Pro’s screen. Now instead of pushing a button to record mouse movement, I had to motion track a rather large mouse cursor across the screenshots to simulate actual mouse movement.

First, I created the pointer most people in the world can relate to: the mouse cursor, then I added a slight white glow, then started keying. Motion keying is such a tedious process but when mastered can easily transform a simple message into a complex simple message attracting way more attention…to me.

Most people don’t notice any form of digital creativity at all. There is a dude or dudette that creates litterally everything you have ever seen on the boob tube, the world wide web or print. Someone even created this font you are reading, which is Arial by the way, created in 1982 by a ten person team, led by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders. It is the closest knock off to Helvetica (our nation’s most widely used font) and is available on both PC and MAC platforms so it has become a standard for sans serif web font faces.

But anyway… I tracked the movement of my giant mouse cursor throughout my composition and placed my whole animation on a vector graphic of a monitor screen to make up for the lack of size of my screenshots.

A couple simple effects were added to spice up the animation once I finished my motion tracking. I added the CC Light Sweep effect for the MyFoxNepa button when the mouse hovered over it to simulate a hover and the Gaussian Blur effect to take emphasis off the webpage and onto the button.

The animation lasted around 10 seconds, had a free background song from Newgrounds.com called “Good Morning” by Epickk, a promo reel provided by Fox 56 and a stock mouse click sound effect.

Watch my finished video:

Writing to live...

2012-02-28T23:22:00.003-08:00

My life is filled with the need to constantly update the world on what I am doing and it's not because I love attention or myself. It's simply because I love to write.

For me, writing has always been a rewarding experience only when I was able to creatively dole out an endless amount of words without a worry to page requirements, news holes or word counts. This endless barrage of structured bullshit has always stifled my creative prowess.

The first task I had this week came a bit unexpectedly and at a moment's notice; I had a powerpoint presentation on my Relay for Life American Cancer Society campaign. I had no idea it was our team's duty to go today. The teacher called us to go I said "Yes, Mrs. Teacher. It is our turn." No worries though considering I made the powerpoint in advance to finish it early and I cued each person as to when they were to go. We sounded smart, the powerpoint looked kind of "rad" and I think my teacher thought we actually made an effort to make the powerpoint together but we didn't. Only two people contributed. Myself and my body copy dude, Mikel Hartsough. Mikel Hartsough wrote an amazing campaign proposal. It went above and beyond the call of duty and I was able to base my whole powerpoint off this singular document. I applaud Mikel on his ability to actually contribute to group work. Smart people do exist.

Also this week, I wrote a news article about Marcellus Shale and the effect it is currently having on Pennsylvania's economic climate. And from what I have found, Pennsylvania is making out pretty damn well considering all the nonsense going on throughout the United States with the dier economic travesty. Pretty soon buildings will ignite and people will be in the streets because riots solve everything. Here is my favorite line of the article I wrote: "Technological innovation has superseded the out-of-date methods of humans garnering coal." This sentence embodies almost every ounce of "smart talk" I wanted to portray throughout the whole article.

My final project this week, was a grandiose poster made (as a favor) for our rival PR Team: Embrace a Child From Tanzania Campaign. I was a traitor.
My PR Team is Relay for Life.

Before I started the development of their event poster, I needed some information regarding their actual campaign strategy and what it was all about. I learned their main goal was to raise money to support three orphaned children in Tanzania to provide food, clothing, shelter and schooling. Funds are so needed in Tanzania because many of these children have lost their family members to the AIDS virus.

I was on task. I created a large 11" x 17" poster so they could look the part and hopefully get more donors.

I stuck with the red color associated with aids awareness and used the popular AIDS ribbon througout the design of the poster. A good design has consistency and I think I have achieved a form of consistency in the poster itself. I tried to evenly space out all the text considering my project manager (a 21 year old student) insisted I keep filling the poster with more and more text describing the event.

According to Bryan Calabro, visual design is all about conveying the most information with the least amount of words (if any at all). Her constant suggestion to add paragraphs of words was taken with a grain of salt, but I managed it quite well.

It was a challenge but I think the finished product turned out rather well considering I made this with a 2 hour time contraint and only 2 revisions.

A White Page

2012-02-26T22:29:00.001-08:00

There is nothing more discerning than a bleak and utterly blank white page/monitor/canvas confronting you right before the start of a project; a project which requires the need for that white blank blob of nothingness to be filled.

This will probably be one of the most feared moments at any point in my future career (if I have one). My future job will always revolve around filling this empty hole with some form of digital (or holographic) piece of artwork.

This week I was forced to create a flat (uncoded) website for a mock nightclub I created from scratch, a task kind of rough without adequate materials (ex. photos, hot women, alcohol, shirtless muscular DJ's.).

You really can't do anything productive without a mickle amount of super hi-resolution photos at visually appealing angles (unless you are an amazing illustrator, something I am not). I can't draw, I never have been able to draw in my life. I can draw stick figures, and inappropriate private parts. It's sad to come to the realization that me, as a graphic "designer" can not draw. Sometimes I think I can draw, but then I look at massive stock photo websites featuring professional artists that put any apple, cereal box, or bug I have ever created to shame... for now.

Surprisingly, I used an uncouth method of preparing this web mock: Adobe Illustrator. A lot of designers are probably like "Oh shit Bryan, you are an amateur" but I ask them what Illustrator specializes in? And they say "the creation of graphics." A website is basically a big navigate-able graphic; a graphic that needs to be perfect. And why not start the website in Illustrator and export it as a .psd to open it in photoshop, if you are in such a dire need to get in there?

I created my whole website mock in Adobe Illustrator (not to say I couldn't create it in Adobe Photoshop or even Adobe InDesign).

Before I started laying out my website, I created the pieces to make up my website. I made a brushed gradient black aluminum graphic then a glowy bar in Photoshop to look like fluorescent light.

I cut out the rest of the shapes I needed, extended this original brushed gradient and started laying out the rest of my website. I finished laying it out.

It took me around two hours to layout and another hour to tweak it. If I was coding it, I would create the misshapen curvatures I cut (see below) in Adobe flash and have them do an entrance and exit animation. But alas, it was a mock. I also did some slight color adjustments to the pictures I found.

Header picture courtesy of Liv Nightclub

Artist page background picture courtesy of Just Beat It Discos Nightclub

Lil' Wayne picture courtesy of ArtInBase.com

Skrillex picture courtesy of Billboard.com

Background homepage picture courtesy of JonZombie

A Caveman’s Best Friend: Fire

2012-02-24T13:04:00.003-08:00

The sixth week has ended and I am a bit fatigued from the amount of work I did this week at my internship combined with all my other work going on in school. From the moment I woke up until 2 a.m., I worked on various projects (I have such a tough life). I am a bit downtrodden; my eyes are bloodshot and when I dream at night, I dream of key frames and burning fire.

At my internship this week, my primary task was to create fire (like a caveman). Fire was so necessary to my survival because I needed to char food for my family and the CW Network, a Fox 56 affiliate. They needed a motion bug made for a contest revolving around the Kindle Fire so I knew actual fire would be applicable.

Before I started this daunting task, I tried to get a real clip of fire burning on a black background so I could just have fire be the backdrop my CW animation. Sadly, when I used Keylight to take out the background, it came out all distorted and not up to my standards (I can’t imagine what my advisor would think if his saw how shitty this looked).

Then it occurred to me that I would need to create “burning fire” from scratch in the Adobe After Effects, something I was reluctant to do at all because I knew how hard it would be to make the fire look realistic. Before I tackled this daunting task, I decided I would create all the supplementary materials to go with my fire animation.

First, I created the white banner to be the backdrop in Adobe Illustrator for my 15-second animation with a 90-degree gradient placed on it for slight depth. Then, I vertically distribute centered the CW logo so it had equal balance on the top and bottom of the logo in relation to the banner. I saved the file out of AI as an .eps file.

After my backdrop was created, I procured a hi-resolution Kindle Fire and used the magnetic lasso tool in Adobe Photoshop to cut out the Kindle Fire, making sure before the fact to double click on the layer to unlock it so I would have a transparent background when I proceeded in cutting it out. I cut it out, used the refine edge tool on my selection and saved the file with a transparent alpha channel as a .tif file.

I was now ready to set up my 15-second composition in Adobe After Effects.

I created a new composition in After Effects and configured the resolution settings to run in 60 frames per second at 1920x1080 (1080p) resolution because I wanted the fire to have hi-resolution, a higher refresh rate, and an overall smooth animation.

I created a shape, then added the CC Particle Systems II effect to the shape to turn the shape into particles that could be manipulated. But why did I use CC Particle Systems II?

“CC Particle Systems II is a collection of particles that evolves over time and can be controlled to create a virtually infinite number of different animations. These animations might range from simple explosions to sparkling fountains and massive smoke screens.” - Cycore FX Manual

I configured many settings within this CC Particle System. I set the birthrate to 1.7, longevity to .3 and a bunch of other settings involving the production, position, animation type, physics, and color relating to these particles. I used a bright yellow and dark red color for two particle colors then added the effects: CC Vector Blur to blur the colors together, Turbulent Displacement which displaced the layer using fractal noise and Glow which added any type of glow based on alpha or color channels with a two color (a&b) system. So now, I created fire (fire that looked good enough for this project anyway, I could have spent literally 100+ hours making the fire even better.) Hooray.

I made three iterations of my fire:

One for the background, one for the ground and one for in front of the Kindle so it looked as if it was engulfed in flames.

Now, I had to create some transparency mats to ensure that I would have adequate transparency in the right locations.

The first one I created was under the Kindle because I needed to create an entry point for my animation. I keyed the entrance of the Kindle along with the birthrate of the fire to look as if the fire was rising with the kindle from behind the mask I created.

My second and third masks were created to ensure that none of my fire went “out of bounds” and my third mask was primarily for the movement in the streak of fire.

All of these tasks required an extensive amount of “keying”, layering and motion tracking in regards to the Kindle, the fire and masks. If there was anything I could ever take away from my 15 hour for 15 second experience, it would be that I was proud of what I created: FIRE.

See this tutorial for more information regarding the step

by step process of: "Forging Fire," in Adobe After Effects.

I am a Cable Puller?

2012-02-18T20:42:00.000-08:00

On Monday, I went to my internship and people there were holding a bake sale for unfortunate dogs that were abused by their owners. I felt a twinge of sadness for all the helpless dogs (and other pets) in the world that couldn't protect themselves as their owners beat/mistreated them. There was a picture of an abused dog sitting in a frame on the table; it looked as if he/she was starving to death. The receptionist insisted I make a dollar donation to the cause by buying a cookie, cupcake or any of the other edible treats. I caved and bought a cupcake. The cupcake tasted good.

My fifth week consisted of ongoing correction and revision to my previous week’s task which was to build a News motion graphic for a free HDTV.

My advisor told me to make the text in my original graphic come out from behind the graphic and go back inside the graphic on a motion path. So, I made a motion path with the pen tool in After Effects and keyed the movement from behind the graphic to the far right side of the graphic centered, then made the text go back behind the graphic. The text came out on a path from behind the graphic then went back on the same path behind the graphic.

Then he told me to double the length of my original animation because the chyron software drops a frame for every two frames in the animation. He didn’t give me a logical explanation in relation to the software but I thought it would be a good idea to listen to him considering he was my advisor and I want a good grade. It also didn’t matter at all, even though it was a rather tedious process. I had to individually lengthen each layer of my animation, which took around an hour.

After my revisions were finally done, I exported the animation as a .targa sequence as I had with my last animation so that the chyron could read it. Instead of 300 frames, it ended up being 600 frames because I needed to make it twice as long; sadly it was a whopping 1.12 gigs big.

Friday was my next “big day” working at my internship as a cable puller for a cameraman at a basketball game championship in Pottsville, PA. After the hour drive to Pottsville and unpacking all the equipment from the Fox 56 trailer, I was taken into the video trailer to learn more about their live graphic overlay editing system: Newtek’s Livetext. They have a switchboard that is used in combination with this graphic overlay software to live edit the basketball game I was going to be “cable pulling” at (and any other sports game).

The LiveText software seemes to be a hybrid between Adobe After Effects and Sony Vegas Editing Software with the way it was set up. Livetext accepts the file formats .png, .eps and any other flat file formats (It can not accept .mov file format or any other type of moving file format). A person creates .png/.tiff/.jpg shapes to be loaded into the Livetext software then makes editable text on top of the shapes so they could be continually swapped over multiple live sports games.

The rest of my night consisted of me lugging around a 100’ cable behind a cameraman filming the basketball game. At least the basketball game was fun to watch and the audience was immense (around 4,000 people).

The Spicy Pulled Pork Pig Out

2012-02-15T23:51:00.000-08:00

Today was the day that my PR Group and I decided to participate in the "Spicy Pulled Pork Pig Out" a weeklong event we created to promote our Relay for Life campaign.

The fundraiser took place at a local up and coming barbecue style restaurant in downtown Wilkes-Barre. If you have read my earlier blog, you would see the "flyer" I designed for it. It was purple. Purple is a color.

It was a momentous event; all our PR Members came from across town to participate... all two of us: Mike and Sarah. These are two of the most dedicated and strong willed organizers/promoters in my PR Group. We each bring separate skills to the table when it comes to "making shit happen." Considering we put together the event/promoted it, all three of us made it our duty to go out and celebrate for the good cause of raising money for research to cure cancer and to test how hot the Spicy Pulled Pork Pig Out Sandwich really was. My two PR mates gave me high fives the moment they saw me. They were extremely emphatic (showing or giving emphasis; expressing something forcibly and clearly). "Come on man, let's do this!" they said. I looked at them with a wily grin and said "okay."

That is when we started walking down to the event. The event wasn't that crowded, actually it was only us. Sadface.

We opened the door at the restaurant, then we were led into the dining area where-in we saw an old man eating a pulled pork sandwich, he gave us a little nod and winked at Sarah; this didn't excite Sarah but it made me laugh.

Next, we ordered what we came for: the sandwiches. I knew what I was getting the moment I sat down on the painted black brushed aluminum seat and said in an eager tone, "I want to participate in the Spicy Pulled Pork Pig Out Challenge", they said "sure" and Mike said the same thing and they said "sure." They brought out the health waiver forms; we had to sign them to eat the sandwich.

*Sarah doesn't like hot food
so she didn't participate .

"Psh..." I told Mike, "This is the real deal, we have to sign waiver forms in case we get sick and die from the hotness." He said "Yeah."

The competition began, the waitress took my drink and said "You can't drink anything, that's the rules." I said "..." then Michael quit. "This is hot." he said. I said "I know, it tastes like I am eating habanero seeds, chilean extract, jalapeños, and wasabi."

The cook popped out from behind my shoulder and said, "You are absolutely correct, Bryan."

I finished one sandwich and I was the only person to do so. Are you proud of me?

The Purple Pig Bullets

2012-02-13T19:51:00.000-08:00

Hello.

My week has already begun and so has yours. You are alive, living and able to read this and pretty soon, this will be a run on sentence. I already started working on two projects due near the end of the week. One being a newspaper article on "Business" in Wilkes-Barre and the other being a page design for my school's newspaper due Sunday. My creative mind is stifled with the bland format of .25 weighted lines surrounding piss poor pictures and large amounts of AP approved text. On the upside, I learn a lot about InDesign and I learn how to talk to people.

Talking to people is extremely important when it comes to living a successful lifestyle. Humans are social beings, we need to talk to get things done. But there are some... that are mouse people. These mouse people do not contribute a lick of conversation around the watercooler. I always try to include them and/or engage their attention. They look at me and their whiskers flair up.

So... last week I designed a flyer for my Relay for Life campaign and I think it came out rather well (only because I made it). Of course it could have been exponentially better, there are so many flaws with the design, most of which derive from the massive amount of text packed into the design. Too much text is overwhelming to the onlooker...so I broke it up with purple pig bullets.

My first task as design leader (joke) was mundane and boring as hell: remaking a logo. It seems like this is the trendy thing to do as a budding designer because no one seems to have an .eps file or .ai file to share with me. They look at me and go "Whaaattt, I gave you a logo." "Yeah, a logo that is 120x120 and consists of jagged pixelated edges." Yuck. What can ruin a logo more than pixelated edges? Making it in Adobe Photoshop.

Times New Roman

Task number two was to design Zebra Communication's (The PR Firm, I work for) a new logo to place on this flyer so we are accredited for promoting this fundraiser. I only put the zebra and rounded arial text in this, it is based on our school logo.

Optima/Arial Rounded

My third and final task was to build our flyer based off the client's flyer he created (and hopefully improve on it...)

I tried to fit every important detail into this 8.5" x 11" piece of paper. I laid out with my favorite text (Helvetica Neue Regular) and tried to maintain order amidst all that clutter in the original flyer layout. I used a stock purple pig for my bullet points.

Thank you for reading. You are cool and my friend.

Changing Up the Workplace: Diversity

2012-02-12T21:52:00.000-08:00

Diversity is by far one of the most important facets associated with a successful business and an ideal workplace. Because everyone is born into his or her preset socio-economic environment, at times we get a slanted view of the world around us. When people are around a select number of people or even a certain culture, they are only exposed to a filtered number of ideas. They see the world from their own perspective, their own cultural lens. Diversity is so important to not only our well being but also to the success of our society as a whole.

Diversity is necessary because it provides consumers with products that have each individual taken into account and it forces people in the workplace to encompass every human in the grand design of their product. Whether it is the curvature of a toothbrush or the colors of the packaging surrounding the toothbrush, every minute detail must be taken into account by a mixed set of eyes. No matter what ethnicity, economic background, or environment your consumer has grown up in, they must be accounted for.

Diversity benefits both the company and the employees because it brings a well-rounded view of opinions on a variety of topics. It leads to better decision making from a curve of people that think and react differently to each problem at hand. These differentiating opinions enhance our product innovation through greater problem solving, greater creativity and design.

Diversity provides organizations with the ability to compete and associate with global markets to make sure their product is being consumed in the way it was intended. Recognizing diversity also helps employees work together to link their strengths and weaknesses thus furthering the development and mindset of each individual.

Transformational leaders are major players when it comes to the possibility for diversity to really work. These leaders encourage contrasting opinions along with ongoing discussion to preempt conflicts. Conflict challenges the way things have always been done and problems that wall growth and innovation. Problems are often tackled with multiple viewpoints resulting in a much larger rate of success.

Unique and varying standpoints help extinguish the enemy to any workplace: groupthink. Groupthink is negative because it consists of generalizations. These generalizations promote the same and non-differing opinions. You can compare this concept to Republican and Democratic ideals; disagreeing fully with one side versus the other causes a certain percentage of blindness to the real issues at hand. A constant contrasting discussion among many people promotes the ability of a balanced ideology.

And the best part of diversity is forcing teamwork in the workplace. Playing as a team is what having a “real” job is all about. Life would be so much easier if everyone just worked together to succeed instead of competing to be number one at everything. On a larger scale, one would consider the people in our country as individualistic and self-fulfilling. We put ourselves before others. Instead of doing this, we should work for the greater good and try to work together. But that won't happen and you know that...

All research derived from Wikipedia.

Sick but Still Working

2012-02-12T20:26:00.001-08:00

It is the fourth week and my internship is flying by… sadly I was very sick over the past week and unable to go to my internship for all the days I originally planned. But on Monday, I worked all day with a program called “Cleaner.” Cleaner is mainly used for converting videos from their raw lossless format to many other formats. Some formats include GIF, ASF, AVI, DivX, DV, DVD (VOB), Flash Video, MKV, QuickTime MOV, MPEG-1/2, MPEG-4, OGM, RealMedia, VCD/SVCD, WMV and XVID. That day, I converted multiple files from .avi and lossless to the .WMV format so that the client would be able to watch the video on their PC OS without any trouble.

Throughout the rest of the week, I worked mainly on the development of a motion graphic (bug) to be placed at the bottom of live broadcasts throughout the upcoming months. The bug was for a contest to win an HDTV during a Sports Broadcast. Considering I was sick most of the week, my advisor gave me the website I needed to get an adequate amount of information and the Fox News Graphic. I saved the graphic from the website, then converted the graphic to a .tif file to ensure transparency when I placed it on the alpha channel in Adobe After Effects.

First, I built the needed graphics to create my news bug in Adobe Illustrator. I set the gradient backgrounds at 90 degrees and added varying shades of color to create the illusion of a brushed metal surface. Then I made sure to save the files out with a transparent background in .png format. I also took a picture of an HDTV and cut out the background to place alongside my banner.

Once I created a project file in After Effects, I created a beam shape layer effect to a rectangle shape to simulate the opening of a TV and keyframed the length of the beam emanating from the middle in around 15 frames. Then, I added noise and a static weak signal motion to the Fox News Graphic to make it appeal as if it had a distorted grainy signal. After I did this, I keyframed the unfurling of the graphics I created in Adobe Illustrator so they came from behind the graphic to set a stage for my text.

After I created my stage and unfurled my banner with the HDTV, I had the TV turn on in the middle of my text animation. I did the same light beam animation to turn on the TV but I had to tilt it to match the angle of the TV. After I did the beam animation, I had to composite a video of a FOX News cast on top of the TV to simulate an actual TV. To get the video, I went to YouTube, did a simple search of the Fox56 News Cast and found the URL. I used KeepVid.com to hijack the video off YouTube (haha), and then I used a Bezier Warp on the video to match the ideal dimensions of the TV.

And finally when the animation was over, I closed it out by scaling everything to the middle then doing another beam animation.

Interning for the Greater Good

2012-02-12T20:22:00.000-08:00

In my 3rd week, I had the opportunity to go out in the field to shoot a live double-header basketball game for the Coaches Versus Cancer event at Marywood University in Scranton. We spent two hours setting up the massive amount of cords making sure at the same time not to cross the power supply at anything other than 90o or 00. For some reason when you messed up the alignment of cords, there was an audible hum present in the broadcast. Also, we had to make sure not to overpower the wattage on each individual outlet (no more than 2000 watts) or they would be a electrical fire hazard. Even worse, a plug could kick the breaker and the live event could be taken off air.

After we set up, I was shown the switchboard that controlled all eight cameras we were about to shoot from and then I was set up on camera #4 to shoot the game. During the game, my objective was to shoot the visiting teams coach and the fans of his team behind him, I making sure to maintain the all-important rule of thirds throughout the shoot. The manager notified each of us when we were on the air and did a live broadcast edit of the game.

Ex. “Ready 4…Live, 7, 9, 3, 1.”

At the end of the shoot, my only grievance was a minor headache from looking through the viewfinder for both games straight. The staff applauded me on my ability to shoot the game without any hitch and just as good as anyone else broadcasting the game.

My other larger project involved the creation of an animated chyron banner for a Fox56 contest to be broadcasted on TV for the next month. I made the dollar sign ($) part in Cinema 4D and used Adobe After Effects for the motion and unveiling of the video “bug” (as they called it). I used a 3D perspective key along with an opacity key on the fox logo to the far left to have it appear out of nothingness then did a simple moving opacity mask for the rest of the banner to have it unfurl on screen. I reversed the animation sequence to have it disappear then rendered my sequence to the .targa format, so my advisor could place it in his chyron software.

Comforting Feeling

2012-02-04T22:23:00.000-08:00

Throughout my second week working at Fox 56, I felt way more comfortable in my workplace. I felt like ancient 200 year old tortoise peeking out of his shell into the lush and fertile jungle surrounding him. I spoke to people around me and smiled as they welcomed me into their quaint digital environment. Digital environments (electronic equipment and thousands of dollars worth of software), are the best type of environments for me to work in. Screw that boring timesheet shit, who wants to work in Excel for 8 hours a day? Blah, blah, blah, boring...

I even had a chance to record my own voice in a sound booth to put on a local PSA about a recent station outage. I spent a while in the sound booth recording...like a long while and the crew immediately nicknamed me "booth." Now, this is what they call me everyday. It's not bad, I kind of enjoy it; it makes me feel like I am one of the "in" crowd at Fox 56. I told my grandma that they gave me a nickname then she told me that her husband gave her a nickname too when they were in their teen years. I asked her what it was but she told me it was much too sexual for my own good...sigh. I was kind of disgusted and it gave me distasteful visions in my head.

As I mentioned before, my duty at work this week was to record my voice and edit it using software that reminded me a lot of Audacity. Sound modulation/editing was quite a breeze but the actual recording was kind of belaboring to me. Nothing was ever good enough, I judged myself so sharply. Your voice always sounds so weird when you hear it out loud, you sound like a freak. Luckily, my second task this week was to cut audio out of certain parts of promo reels for the Big Bang Theory. I did this for around 30 episodes. Audio was taken from their server’s hard drive and placed in the work bin in Adobe After Affects; I drug the video after it was copied to the hard drive into a new work file for Adobe After Effects. The challenge using this software was that it was only After Effects CS3 (an older version); Sadly, they couldn’t afford to buy me a license for the most current version (the one I was trained in) so I was forced to learn the many nuances of change within the program... luckily the core difference came mainly from CS3’s inability to automatically determine the video’s settings and convert the composition to the right encoding environment.

My trustful camera buddy from the week before helped me out once again instructing me to hit Command-K to open up the composition settings and quickly show me the differentiating audio/video settings that were needed to compress the video properly. Just as I expected, it was lossless video meaning the video I was editing was straight from the camera and in a raw (native) format. At the end of my second day not only did I complete my second audio cutting task, I produced a 10 second motion graphic promo for their online website about upcoming tax forms. This task involved a lot of typographical and balance theory using Helvetica Neue regular and a lot of motion “keying.”

The New Kid in the Office

2012-01-23T20:46:00.000-08:00

After getting a week full of assignments and multiple projects thrown at me by my collegiate professors, I was lucky enough to start my internship at Fox 56 Wolf TV, a Fox News Corporation Subsidiary. To most people, they would dread having to face a new situation with strange alien people. What if they yelled at me? What if they laughed at me if I tripped? I love Fox in general (being a staunch republican) so working in any shape or form with the organization to me was a great accomplishment. I even told my family so they were proud of me. My grandma gave me a kiss on the cheek and I smiled at her.

Day 1, I discovered what a news station felt and looked like. Originally, I thought I was going to see an uptight stress filled atmosphere but my view dramatically shifted the moment I walked in... Simon Cowell was staring at me in the face. I went to shake his hand but then I realized he was a cardboard cut out. I was a bit angry... after Simon, I noticed a bunch of other cardboard cutouts of all famous Fox characters.

During the week I was introduced to the software I would be working with during my stay at Fox 56. They said that I would use a number of Adobe Programs to create graphics, including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects and Adobe Illustrator. These were mainly to create everything that I have ever seen on TV. Their main video editing software was Final Cut Pro (much better than the Windows Movie Maker I used as a child to produce short length shitty films).

Being a double major in both Integrative Media and Communication Studies, I was pleased to find out Fox used all the same softwares I have trained on. I have had hours and hours of experience in each one of them. After I relished in this though, I shadowed one of their lead motion graphics/film editors as he cut a commercial for a local hardwood flooring company. I was sad because he was definitely much more trained in motion than me, I tend to stick to 2D flat designs. People call this "print work." Although, this blog is 2D and I designed it. It's kind of boring though, a lot of white space but I love white space and sans-serif fonts like Helvetica and Arial.

In the middle of the week, I was blessed with the opportunity to experience a day in the field as a camera assistant at the Kingston Armory for an Outdoor show with local celebrity Bob Ide. The camera crew (one person…) took time to teach me about every single part of the video camera he was using; the need to white balance every scene, focus, and use the iris to control the amount of light coming into the lens. Then I ate venison for the first time.