Month: November 2022

Well, I feel like I haven’t learned too much yet honestly. In my Friday class, we only have one visual media student, and the previous module and current one I’m in are definitely geared more towards the design track, so the exposure hasn’t really been there yet. That being said, there have definitely been some takeaways from their program.

 The one conversation I’ve had with the Visual student in our Friday class was about how they hate shooting people because people move, they’d much rather prefer shooting products which I thought was really funny. I think it’s really interesting the range of interests in that department. Also sidenote, I think I’d agree with that student. The certainty of nailing the lighting, placement of a product and just executing would be super satisfying. The execution of ideas is just completely different, it is a creation but it’s the preparation and planning for a single shot, and that shot is the culmination of the work (using phtography as an example)

One major takeaway/impression I have on the visual department is the level of knowledge and level of equipment required is really different. For the Design track, give us a Macbook and maybe like a Wacom tablet and it’s off to the races for us. For the Visual department it takes an intimate understanding of how a ton of different pieces of equipment work. Just reading in the slack channel Design students asking Visual students questions on equipment, without the Visual students even being there they can offer really sound advice and have a good knowledge of the equipment already. I’m honestly really curious to know what all their backgrounds are and the level of experience had prior to coming to SCCA.

I get the sense in the Design track that experience and backgrounds are incredibly varied, and while someone might have a high level of competency in one program (Adobe Illustrator for instance) the Visual track seems like maybe they have a better basic grasp on their craft going in. I could be completely wrong, and wouldn’t doubt if I am, but just having a camera in your hand or doing videos on the weekend and just constantly being able to work on your craft just out and about seems like it would be huge advantage. Maybe not if you were into videography you couldn’t take a huge camera everywhere and you can’t really experiment with lighting too much, but just the ability to practice out in the wild and not requiring you to sit down at a table with your laptop seems really cool/convenient to me.

I’m honestly very interested in the visual media course and would love to dive deeper into videography, photography and animation so I’m very much looking forward to the film narrative and After Effects modules. Animation is probably the career I wish I could do more then any other but for a variety of reasons I don’t think it’s very practical for me to pivot to that at this point. It would have been cool to experiment more with that as a kid or in hs figure out thats what I wanted to do. But maybe After Effects can reignite that passion, hopefully som eoft he other visual media students can help me out with that.

The most obvious example of any of these principles I can remember would be the one on having a backbone. I used to work a production graphics job, just setting up whatever art file our customers sent us on table throws, tents, etc. One day, the art I received for an order was about black-on-black crime, some made-up statistic that would be going on a flag. I knew this wasn’t going to be used for anything other then racist messaging. The flag itself wasn’t overtly racist so while our company agreed to print the order, I did not agree to work on it and passed it off to my boss to do.

Invent and Simplify is also something I did several times at my previous job. We had these really long SOPs on how we were supposed to do our work. They could get really complicated and for new hires, it was a lot to sift through. So one day I took it upon myself to re-write them all concisely and clearly, showing examples. I also formatted several of our file types to be more of a template in nature, allowing other graphic artists to increase their speed and time spent on each order.

For thinking big, that reminds me of our mural class in college. The class was just about potentially designing something by taking a look at places on campus it could go and photoshopping our design onto our chosen spot. I went really wild with mine, and I spent a lot of time on it, more than any of my friends in class. In the end, I had this really cool geometric bluejay, made only out of triangles. I was really proud of it and my teacher and classmates liked it a lot also, and they petitioned the school president to put it up. Ultimately he didn’t because he was extremely conservative in terms of public art but it was very cool to see a big idea almost pay off.

As far as one’s I could stand to work on, I’d say most of the principles listed require some level of authority. I’ve really only ever had entry-level positions. I’ve never had enough power to voice my opinion and have any real expectation of enacting change. I think Frugality, Customer Obsession, and Are Right A Lot are things I could stand to work on when I find a job that I’m invested in and take the time to grow into a more senior role.