Assassin's Creed 3: Lectured

Hey y'all, sorry this is getting out of my head WAY in the late, but here it is...

Corey May & AC3

Corey May is the President and co-founder of the company Sekretagent Productions and the main writer of the very popular video game series Assassin's Creed.  Graduating from Harvard University in 1999, May and a friend founded this company immediately after graduating from University of Southern California's Peter Stark Producing Program in 2001.  May has participated as lead writer for the first three Assassin's Creed games and has helped to write the other games (e.g. Brotherhood and Revelations). He has also co-written two Prince of Persia games and several other works, and has been a Producer or Executive Producer on two films.  (assassinscreed.wikia.com/wiki/Corey_May)

Earlier this April, the students of SMCM were privileged to hold an audience with May, via Skype, after a brief walkthrough of the game Assassin's Creed 3 by a faculty member.   The majority of the story (though I have not played the game) is centered around the main character, Connor, who is a Native American boy that joins the Assassins during the period of the American Revolution (http://assassinscreed.ubi.com).  In discussing the historical accuracy of the game and the subject matter, May came out on top.  He mentioned that in order to be as realistic as possible in writing the game, he completed a full year worth of research to ensure adequate accuracy and content.  One piece that stood out to me was the role of Benjamin Franklin in the plot.  May mentioned that because Franklin was away in Europe negotiating terms with the French, his role in the plot of the Revolution was distant and so he was not very involved with homefront activities presented in the game. the game, he stated, was made for a general audience, that "followed the 30-seconds rule of Google," which is essentially that if one can find the information within 30-seconds of using Google search, the people looking at that information become the receiving audience.  Also to gain a better understanding of the times, coordinators worked with Native American tribes to portray a realistic and accurate character and environment.  May continued that the purpose of the game was to excite the players about he narrative and not necessarily be a history lesson.  This concept is also exhibited by a, hopefully, unbiased view of the Revolution by all parties involved.

Overall, I felt that the script for this game, from what I have been shown is both quality work and, for the most part, historically accurate.  I have played the AC series up to this game, and all of the games have been fantastic!  I just need to get around to playing this one.  Aesthetically, these games have very high quality graphics.  They push some limits with realism in the abilities of the characters but I don't hold it against them.  I think this is a great series that has a lot of potential and that the screenplay is of the best quality.  I look forward to seeing the games written by May and his colleagues in the future, as I believe AC 4 is about to be released!!!!!!!!!

Project 3: Basic Animal Biology Site

Opisthokonts UNITE!

Hey all!  Are you interested in biology? ...no... understanding the world around you? ...no... looking at pictures of animals? ...depends... WELL, this is not the site for you.  Click the link below to explore an overview of the general relationships of the animals we see (or don't see) in the world around us.  In lieu of finals, this may just jog your memory or entertain you on a break! Enjoy!

http://students.smcm.edu/jrpiegols/index.html

Here is a Chordate:

GET LOST!

Don't actually leave!

Here is a link for my experiences when I got lost in North Woods...at night... with other people. Holla Emmy-V and Kayla!

http://students.smcm.edu/jrpiegols/Get%20Lost/GetLost/GetLost_home.html

Ryder Ripps: Web and Art

Ryder Ripps

http://ryder-ripps.com/ryder-ripps.png

Ryder Ripps is a New York native web artist that comes from a family of artists (wikipedia.org).  He is the founder of sites that include Internet Archaeology and the surfing company Dump.fm and has a portfolio of miscellaneous GIFs that are sure to make you second guess your desire to visit his sites.  According to flavorwire.com, he also works in affiliation with OKFocus, working on a project titled Draw With Your Face.

http://www.internetarchaeology.org/mpets.htm

The piece above is a GIF from Internet Archaeology, a "tribute" to GeoCities from Yahoo! before it was closed.  A lot of the GIFs and other moving images that Ripps uses are very simple in design, often pixelated (or just low quality), and branch to a variety of themes and genres.  I liked this one in particular because cats are awesome!  This next one is kinda comical...

Ripps also, on his portfolio site, ryder-ripps.com, has links to experiential sites, some of which are very strange, in my opinion.  One of these I found fascinating, but only to a short end.  The site http://ryder-ripps.com/mars/ brings you to a Google Maps style image where the user can navigate a 3D image of a pharmacy, much like one can place the little walking man on certain streets and get the first-person perspective of the area.  This particular work was creative but lacked that extra dimension.  Navigating the store was limited to about 4 different spots within the store and two spots outside of the store by the street.  By clicking and dragging the image, the user could "look around" the storefront and see products in the store and buildings in the area.  I found this interesting to have as artwork, since Google Maps and Earth are the only places I have seen this style used.  

To say the least about Ripps' portfolio site, it is very simple and easy to maneuver within.  All headers for his works are to the left side and clicking on one of the headers takes you to the piece.  This makes navigation very easy; however, there is a very unappealing blank, white space to the right of the home page.  Adding a small list of images from a category or some productive use of this space, I feel, would make his work more respectable.  In terms of his other sites, like Internet Archaeology, the layout is slightly more complex, but just as easy to navigate. Each header on the side for works drops down to show categories, then each category has a quick navigation to any individual work either by clicking the viewed image or the image you want to look at at the bottom of the page.

Project 3 Flowchart

Website Map

Gettin' Lost

DONE! Project 2: Jack Nicholson

Vito Acconci Reaction: Electronic Relationships

An Electronic Relationship

In the text by Vito Acconci, specifically in paragraph 14 of his writing "Public Space, Private Time," the subject of relationships in regard to public space and technology surfaces.  I found this passage particularly interesting because I strongly agree with Acconci's view.  He writes,"There's no time to talk; there's no need for talk, since you already have all the information you need on the radio you carry with you.  There's no need for person-to-person relationship, since you already have multiple relationships with voices on your radio, with images of persons in store windows and on billboards."  As I get older and witness the changing mediums used for social interactions, I am heartily ashamed of what I see.  I see teens and young adults who when set in front of their peers cannot adequately express themselves. They use improper social cues and language and are, in general, boring to listen to.  Growing up without internet, without a cell phone, and without cable forced me to interact with others on a first-person basis, and I am comfortable having that five minute dialogue with my peers instead of a ten second chat.  Nowadays, one simply searches the number and quickly types their conversation with another, instead of calling the person or actually opening their mouth and using body language to communicate within three feet of the other person.  This lack of intimate and straight-forward communication leads to confusion in a dialogue, with misinterpretations from a lack of tonality or visual cues, and a void in the relationship formed when people spend a long amount of time conversing.  The time commitment and investment that each person of a dialogue is forced to donate forms a unique bond between speaker and audience.  Technology that is supposed to augment our social nature is the very thing causing us to lose our social intimacy and the thing that fulfills our social yearnings most efficiently: person-to-person interaction.

Almost, if not already there!

Project 2 Progress

Logo Remix!!!

Kasey Gifford: Vector Artist

Kasey Gifford!

http://killskerry.deviantart.com/

http://smashingpicture.com/cool-illustrations-by-kasey-gifford/

Kasey Gifford, a graduate of the Art Institute of Portland, is an up-and-coming digital artists (smashingpicture.com).  After viewing some of her work, I began to notice several themes in her work.  There is a significant trend toward cartooning and an almost fantastical look at the natural world.  She has also illustrated for two children's books: "Spots and Stripes" and "Ollo the Zebra" (a book in progress).  She is a free-lance artist who is also skilled in animation, and known through works like "Get Muggsy!" by Flying Rhinoceros (http://kaseygifford.com/resume.html).  She also illustrated for the children's card game Xeko (http://kaseygifford.com/resume.html).  She has instructed at teen workshops and continues to make flash animations and characters used in promotional videos, such as the one for the Skelanimals clothing line (http://kaseygifford.com/resume.html).  Check out this video for a quick look at a short promotional animation lead by Gifford:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LoE1PKzg9c. In itself, it keeps the adorableness and precision of Gifford's work alive, just in an animation style.

What originally drew me to Gifford's work was the simplicity... and how inexplicably adorable it is.  I particularly enjoyed looking at images like the Valentine's Day dragon (above).  Thinking about how vector art is used, I feel that this is a very real use: greeting cards.  Although I am not sure that this image was actually used in a greeting card, I would hands down use it for one! Gifford, especially in her illustrations for the children's books, uses very simple shapes and designs to create her images.  In the above picture from "Ollo the Zebra," all of the shapes are simply overlapped and colored to create a realistic jungle environment.  I found the depth of this image to be particularly skilled.  Gifford uses dulled tones and modest shading to create shadows and depth in her illustrations, which remind me of the movie Madagascar.  The contrasts between the background forest greens and browns and the bright white zebra of the foreground help to make the zebra the focus of this scene.  With my own personal knowledge of Adobe Illustrator, I feel like I could make these images, lending to the simplicity of the images.  Crisp spots and lines of the giraffes and stripes of the zebra, as well as the plants in the midst of the scene, add a cartoon-y yet realistic feel to the context of the image.  The audience (children) that Gifford presents to, I would imagine, is very receptive to the presentation of the cute jungle animals, giving Gifford a very high effectiveness in reaching her viewers/audience.

I really like these images, partly because I am a sucker for children's books and cute animals, mostly for their realistic but cartoon feel of each image and their effectiveness in reaching children.  If I was a child (not just at heart), I would enjoy reading the adventures of Ollo the zebra, and find interest in the simple jungle creatures created by Gifford.  If the Valentine's dragon was used in a card, I believe it was well worth it.  The simplicity of her images are appropriate for her audience and she is able to play on the imaginary senses of her audience.  Gifford is a skilled artist in the diverse field of digital media and I look forward to seeing her work in the future.

Project 2 (Part 1)

Jack Nicholson: The Man!

Stock photo

Illustrator Trace

What does a song look like?

Here is an interpretation of how the song "Cloud Floatain (Ultra Living Remix)" by Joshua LaRue might look.  Illustrator proves to be pretty cool for swirling circles.

Portraits WOOHOO

Illustrator Traces

                            

Line Drawing of Corgi

Left: Original

Right: Illustrator Pen Tool Trace

       

Vera Molnar: Pioneer

Vera Molnar

Source: Google images

Vera Molnar, a Hungarian born French artist, began her life-long passion of creating art at a very early age (philipgalantar.com)  She began sketching landscapes of her uncle's cabin in the mountains at age twelve and is accredited with developing "systematic methods of creating art" (philipgalanter.com).  As noted on philipgalanter.com, she used only five colors to repeatedly draw this scene until she grew unhappy with her pieces, then she would switch colors adjacent to each other.  As her career progressed, she became a Professor of Art History and Aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest (philipgalanter.com).  As the article by Paul Hertz expresses, she was said to have 'programmed' her art before ever using what she referred to as the 'Machine Imaginaire" (philipgalanter.com).  A portion of her artwork is centered around repetitive shapes with a diverse set of variations for each, continuing her style of systematic "trial and error" with different forms of a singular image.  She continues to make art from her residence in Paris (philipgalanter.com).

http://www.dam.org/dox/2456.6Pkud.H.1.De.php

The above image is a part of her "Hypertransformation" series.  I took a liking to her artwork, after reading that her methods were algorithmic and systematic.  I wondered what type of art she created and these were the types of images I found.  At first, the two-dimensional image is just that: flat; however, after a second or so, I found my eyes interpreting the image as having a large amount of increasingly concentrated depth.  This particular image and style reminds me of a scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, starring Gene Wilder, in which the visitors to Wonka's factory enter a hallway that is continually getting smaller, but looks large from afar.  My intrigue in this art type is seated in its simplicity, yet complex nature.  The very systematic repetition of squares that decrease in size is hypnotic and is similar to hypnosis devices like the cliche spiraling coin:

Google Images

http://digitalartmuseum.org/gallery/image/8845

Molnar, 1990

The spacing between the squares adds the third dimension of perception to the piece and transforms the image significantly.  A similar image (below), from the series "Lettres de ma Mere," uses a different method of repetition while retaining a systematic chaos quality.  This piece reminded me of the style used by the author Johnathan Safran Foer in his novel "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close."  I never read this book, but was shown a page out of it by my sister, where the printing of a series of pages had been repeated to create an increasingly dense block of text:

Google Images

Overall, I found Molnar's works to be very interesting and simple.  There are just a lot of variations which would make it seem like her art is not very hard to imitate.  I feel that her art lacks in the complex nature that makes modern art visually challenging, but her skill in creating more complex images only using repetition or scaling, similar to the way a computer works, is noticeable and enticing.    I was drawn more to her pieces that involved bright colors, of mainly yellows, reds, and blues.  There are many examples of how similar ideas to her's have been applied to a variety of mediums and methods, though this seems to be commonplace among her style of taking a stock image and performing a multitude of transformations on it until distortion is limiting creativity.  

John Moberg: Photoshop Man!

           John Moberg

                               (www.modernclimate.com)

The artist that I have chosen to research is John Moberg.  I stumbled upon his work simply by typing "digital artists" in my Google search bar.  When I clicked on a link to one of the top results, I was met with some interesting images that reminded me of the project that we are undertaking for class and observed a variety of artwork that looked heavily layered and used a large palette of color and patterns.  As I searched for his history of works and sifted through the results of my search engine, I discovered that he is a Yale graduate and owns a business named Digital Ink, which can be found on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Digital-ink/404552436248308). One website (art-3000.com) states that his choice of medium is Photoshop and that he is based in L.A.  Aside from this information, his biography seems to be very quiet.

103a

http://www.digitalartistdaily.com/image/15437/103a

This piece, entitled "103a," stood out to me in my searches along with the image below, "137a."

137a

http://www.digitalartistdaily.com/image/15746/137a

I found these pieces to be particularly intriguing, mainly due to the aesthetic realism that they create.  The computer generated nature that is produced using overlapping images and highly contrasting colors combined with variable opacity, to me, is very unique.  In image "103a," the people that have been placed in the foreground as compared to the background, which is a mixture between a sunset in the mountains and a cataract that appears to just appear, simulates how most images of people actually are: people in foreground, nature in the background to show place.  The interesting, almost abstract, structure of the image collages poorly lit, somewhat monotone images with vibrant "happy colors."  The central focus of the image is generated by the ring that surrounds the "renaissance" violinist and the angel above the man in the American flag wheelbarrow.  I'm not sure what the meaning of this image is exactly, but I speculate that it is a symbol of patriotism, given the American flag and the helmet that says "No Faith" on it.  It may also suggest that mankind has imposed itself in all realms of nature, if one chooses the seemingly more cynical vantage point.  Image "137a," I believe, contrasts the meaning of the previous image, in that nature is what is being imposed.  In both images, Moberg uses very defined shapes and vibrant colors, at the same time as he uses lots of blending and fading between layers of images to create a cohesive space.  These images together are good examples for the project we are currently working on: using Photoshop to create a "believable" 3D digital space.

I found the aesthetic quality of Moberg's images to be very appealing and was entranced by the cohesiveness between images of the foreground and background.  Some more of his images continued to use nature and humans in overlays together, some of which were, in my mind, pretty cool looking!  I was suprised to see that Moberg doesn't have many pieces or that much information can be found about him or his work.  I really enjoy the challenge of observing his work and the uniqueness of his design in each image.

Here are some more that caught my eye, just to tease the senses:

Art 1

http://www.digitalartistdaily.com/image/15749/art_1

-- Pay attention to the sphere in the upper right corner.  Similar spheres are used in some of his other pieces and are used as magnifications that would utilize the "Transform" device of Photoshop.

180a

http://www.digitalartistdaily.com/image/15895/180a

Photo Enhancement

Before











After

Sunshine Beach Collage

A day at Sunshine Beach... then, I went to the Photoshop!

24 Hour Technology Use Log

This is just sad how much I'm on electronics stuff when my field of study is OUTSIDE!

Time Period: Midnight to Midnight 1/27/13

Wake up
Check digital clock                                                                              0600
Check cell phone                                                                                 0900
Play iPod games                                                                                  1000-1030
Car radio                                                                                            1045-1100
More iPod games                                                                                1130-1145
Cell phone (text/check)                                                                        1200
Check emails/ use computer and internet                                               1240-1800
Watch TV                                                                                          1600-1800
Text/check cell phone                                                                          1830
Use computer/printer/USB                                                                    1820-1830
More iPod games                                                                                 1830-1900
Computer/Internet                                                                                1840-2330
More iPod games                                                                                 2340-2350


That's my day.  I'm gonna get outside now and away from screens for another 6 hours before my day resets.

And Scans, And Scans, And Scans Times 10

'Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.' 

-Alexander Pope 

 (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alexanderp384916.html#mWHkRaitDUfDLKRo.99) 

High to low quality converted scans (res. 72 ppi).  Actually... pretty cool!

Clay Art

Coffee Perk

Cup On Edge

Joker's Wild

Dreamcatcher

"Ears"

Keys In Hand

Shave

Shells n' Rocks

Goggles