Month: January 2023

Last week Andrew Nedimyer came and talked to us about how personal projects can impact our professional lives. Personal projects are important for a multitude of reasons ranging from sharpening our skills to having something new and fresh to add to our portfolio.

I have had the idea for a while now to create a zine that would explore the ideas of masculinity, sexuality, and what it means to be a man in the modern age. It would include photos, personal entries, and interviews with people who break the norms of the traditional narrative.I think this would be a great project to improve all of my skills and hone in on what i’m learning now. It would definitely take a lot of creative writing, interesting imagery, and know-how with Indesign.

I’ve never been great with creating timelines and adhering to them for projects. Usually I obsess over a project for a month and once the momentum leaves me, the project is scrapped. Ideally though, if I were to create a stricter timeline, like one we would use for a class project, I could get it done. I could see the project going through 4 distinct phases, planning content, gathering content, assembling content, then finalizing the package. The first two could easily be done within a month. Because my knowledge of Indesign is limited I feel as though the third phase may be the hardest and inturn, the most time consuming so I would give myself a month to complete that. For finalizing the project I would need to choose materials such as book binding, paper weight, printers, things like that. I have no experience in actually publishing a physical copy of my work so I can see it being 2-3 weeks of talking with people to figure out how I would want the look and feel to be.

Technically I have everything I need to complete phases 1-3. I have my trusty cameras, word processor and notepads, and adobe products. The only thing I would need would be content and people to speak to. This would be easy though as part of the experience is listening to people’s stories and I consider myself a social butterfly. I would just need time and people to complete these phases. For the final phase of the project, I would need to work with a printer to get the finalized feel and look of the package together.

Like I said before, I have never made a zine physically and I know the project can range from something super cheap, to something very pricey. Ideally I would want to go medium-low for my first physical project. I would have to get a quote from local print shops and test out the feel from a few locations. Then with packaging, I have a few ideas for some low key solutions such as translucent bubble wrap to saran wrapping and adding heat. I would want this last part to be something I could do myself to cut costs and have the product feel like this is a personal project. Depending on how well the design looks I would probably be willing to shell out around $250 dollars for a limited print.

This week we had Abdul Kassamali come and talk to us about his media production team. It was really interesting seeing how he went from a completely different career field, to entering another with little to no experience. That being said, his work is super clean and professional which only goes to say that if you are willing to put in the work, you can achieve anything.

Abdul talked a lot about how flexible you need to be when filming. Although you can plan everything down to each minute, there will always be some unexpected variable to overcome. An example he gave was when shooting for a REI promotion. The team planned extensively but had no idea what was to come. From lost luggage to the cast getting Covid, they had a myriad of issues to overcome.

His presentation was reminiscent of a similar experience I had here while in the Creative Academy. Funny enough, I also ran into issues when trying to film a video for a project. 

The project was supposed to be a 15 minute video detailing the history of Ukiyo-e and its implications to western art and graphic design. The first three weeks were spent researching the subject. We wanted to be as thorough as possible just to make sure when we go to film, we would not have any hiccups.

The last week we spent filming and editing. We decided to film at the Seattle Art Museum. We had seen online that they had many Ukiyo-e prints and it would perfectly fit the theme of the project. We decided to get there right as they opened just to be sure to not run into crowds. 

The first issue we ran into was the fact no Ukiyo-e prints were on display. After talking to one of the museum members, we found out that they were all at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. This was a big let down and fumble. Luckily though we all had experience with Adobe Aftereffects so we could go in and add whatever image we chose in post production.

The second issue we ran into was how busy it turned out to be, even in the morning. The crowds were not so much the issue but more so the audio quality of people talking. To Overcome this I used a trick I learned from Tik-Tok where an interviewer uses their iPhone as a microphone while another records. 

Overall, the project went really well. I am happy with how it turned out and I learned a valuable lesson on how to be flexible with my projects.