Month: January 2023

So I have been thinking about this a lot before Andrew came and spoke to us. Its something I have been roughly working on here and there but never really put any meaningful time into. But I guess now is as good of time than any.

1. Please describe the project and what you hope to gain from it.
   I want to start a comic/trade book. Maybe not with so much written content. But visually driven to tell the story. Already have written a spec sheet for one concept. And I have another one roughly written out. I think it will help me gain more skill to story tell within single images, which is something i think I am lacking in my compositions.
2. Produce a rough timeline of what you think it would take to do the project.
   I think by the end of the program it would be cool to be done with the project. and shop it around to publishers or release it on my own.
3. What would you need to execute the project (other than time)
   The discipline and will to do so.
4. How much would this project cost to produce
   Roughly nothing but time and effort to start. eventually we are talking production costs when i complete it to have it published.

I can’t you why or how my brain processes things. But when you gave the initial walk through on how to use Aero and I saw the box in the example, my mind went directly to this scene. I believe we talked about it already.

The reference of my AR card is to the movie Se7en with Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, and in the movie, the late Gwyneth Paltrow. The scene takes place in the last act of the film when the killer (Kevin Spacey) takes the two detectives to a remote part in the high desert area to reveal the last in his seven murders. As they approach the location, a delivery drunk is pummeling towards them. Delivery driver pulls out a box when he stops in front of them, tells them he was pay $500 to deliver this package here at this time by a unknown source.

As Morgan Freeman’s character is approaching the package with hesitancy, Spacey’s character is rambling about wanting to imitate what it was like to live a normal life, but turns out what hes talking about is Brad Pitts wife he was simulating this with. The story ends with him saying she was “unwilling to go along with his simulation and had to well..” It was all a plan to get Pitt to resign to his initial reaction, and kill him. Making him the seventh victim. Needless to say it worked. His wife’s head was in the box, shoring up the reaction spacey wanted from pitt to commit the final act.

The movie is perfect.

Problem I had with this project, as you well know by now. Is that I couldn’t put the sound to it like I had planned. I wanted to put audio from that scene on the card. Maybe starting as soon as it loads or when the viewer comes into proximity to the AR assets. Even after me and you tried to work on the file, and make a new file. The sound would not stick to the file. Maybe cause its still beta. No idea.

I still have tap action on it, as well as some movie to the assets like the box, the severed head and whatnot. I hope that was enough actions to make grade.

Overview

Snapchat is a face filter application for desktop iOS and PC. Its a extension app from the well known social media app SnapChat. Reduced down to the sum of its parts, its a camera extension to apply augmented face filters on yourself while filming on your desktop.

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Mainly how I see it used, and how I myself have used this app is as more or less a conduit for third party platforms like Zoom. You can apply the filters to your zoom meetings, or Skype meetings as long as you have the app open and switch some minor settings to the camera on the app you want it applied.

Usability

Using this application is pretty straight forward. Turn it on, search through the literal thousands of filters the app has stored up, throw one on and get to the shenanigans. I have found learning and using the app in general pretty easy or any varying degree of computer literacy out there among people. Its a pretty fun and straight forward to use if you’re wanting to add a fun AR element to yourself in a meeting or streaming session.

Improvements

I think a lot of the filters are contributed by the community. I have found when searching or even browsing through filters there is a LOT of redundancy in them. A lot of identical filters populate but under different names. Also there is a grip of filters that are pretty half-baked when it comes to design and don’t work all that well.

One other minor thing that I feel could be improved is how the application is mainly used. The biggest reason people use this app is simply for the filters to be applied to OTHER apps like Zoom. Yet in order to use the filters in another application you have to keep the Snap Camera window open. So a lot of memory is used to keep both camera apps like this one, and zoom running at the same time. Would be cool if it acted more like an extension to plug into Zoom and other apps.

So last quarter in our interactive class I was assigned into a group of three to create a concept for a app. The app had to do with travel, but of course we had to put a unique spin on the idea rather than making a run of the mill “travel app” that does the usual thing (best rates on hotels and flights, etc).

Well the concept was mainly done in Figma and in Dreamweaver. I quickly realized that my piers were much more proficient than me in those platforms and any “help” I was giving in those departments, would end up being more of a nuisance than anything.

So not wanting to feel like I was dead weight I pivot to being more of a project manager, making sure we were hitting our deadlines for each week in what Erik (instructor) wanted us to have done. As well as prepare our scripts for our weekly in class presentations on our progress.

It also freed me up to make some extra appendages for our final presentation. I ended up making a 1.5 min intro video where we did some small branding for the app, and I put it into a visual backdrop. Almost like a intro video to give our presentation more of a “wow factor” rather then just standing up there and giving a more or less boring walk through of the app everyone in class has pretty much seen throughout the past weeks. And that with the planned scripts we had. I felt we were one of the leading groups in the projects due to the level of professionalism we displayed in presenting the app.

Its not a role I particularly like, but i was complimented by my peers on the work I did since it kept us on track and delivering all our work on time.

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I made a set of these on different flavors for a friend’s company in Portland. They usually used photos for promotion of their desserts but wanted me to come up with a illustrated version of the flavors. Most of these were unfinished so i took one and finished it for this blog. Its based off a couple photos I can’t seem to find now, but there were just photos similar to this.

Some of the flavors weren’t perfected at the time so I was basing the depictions on concept photos they had of what the dessert sandwich COULD look like.

I mainly used Procreate to design the comps. All illustrated.