Archive for January, 2009

I forgot that this class is on Mondays and Wednesdays. Fridays are so boring!

Today’s assignment was due for the class today. They were assigned a storyboarding project, where they drew 8 keyframes of a short animation. To my surprise, the entire classed finished it. Way to go, guys! There was a lot of feedback thrown from both me and Prof. Camomile as well as coming from the students and it seemed like the students took my advice seriously (thank goodness; I wasn’t bullshitting them either).

We explained the idea of “in-between” frames, or “tweens” in class today, and handed out their next assignment: using the keyframes they presented in class, draw 5-6 tween frames on unlined 3×5 index cards and bind them with a binder clip. We’ll also be working on that on Wednesday.

My assignment is to come up with a streamlined way to present the Flash interface to the class, some of which haven’t used MS Paint, let alone Photoshop. After this assignment is finished, we’ll present the class with the next assignment: a Flash collaboration with the entire class, Rube Goldberg style. So, wish me luck!

As an aside, I’d like to digress and talk about a conversation I had with a graphic designer from New Haven. He and I were talking about coming down and speaking to our Undergraduate Seminar class. Unfortunately, he can’t make it, but it did spur an interesting discussion. In class today, the animations that most of the class drew centered around violence: a chef had his arm cut off, multiple car crashes, stick figures fighting. One student even cited his inspiration as StickFight.com (which isn’t going to get a link from me). “The total encouragement of wanton violence and blood and gore as ‘cool’ and homophobia as hilarious is just so, so low,” he says. I’d have to agree. A lot of these animations and games substitute violence as a plot or a punchline, and that is such a cheap way to move your story along. Of course, there’s middle ground, as with everything, but to encourage it? I think that’s silly. If any of the students in the class read this, if you can go the rest of the semester without one bit of violence in any of your work, I’ll push for extra points for you.

Today, I start a new experience.

In an attempt to finish college as a well-rounded individual, I’m starting up my second internship, as an intern for La Salle University’s Digital Art and Multimedia Design department. Specifically, I’ll be aiding Prof. Sandra Camomile with her Creating Multimedia class, which deals with Macromedia Flash, animation and interactivity.

One of my job prospects after college is shaping up to be instruction; I’m apparently pretty decent at explaining complicated procedures face-to-face (but who isn’t?) and a lot of people whom I’ve helped say that “you explained that better than the teacher.” Whether that shows I’m a good teacher or I understand how my friends work is a matter separate from this journal. What IS a matter for this journal is my duties and accomplishments in this class.

So far, me and Prof. Camomile (henceforth referred as Cammy) have scheduled our weekly meetings and have planned out her first three weeks of class. We’ve gone over the basics of animation and are now having the students storyboard ideas of something I’m calling “kinetic narrative,” or a story of motion, like a skateboarder ollieing some stairs or a skier running into a tree. Monday, we’ll talk about keyframes, tweening and then have the students create a flip book showing off their kinetic narrative.

There I go, already creating lingo that no one should ever use. (I’m not even sure if that’s what that should mean, but I don’t care. It’s my lingo.)

With that, I finish my first–albeit short–journal entry. I am looking forward to this internship immensly, not just for the gratification and verification that I know more than everyone else (that’s a joke) but that I’m bettering myself and training myself for anything I may come across in my design career. That’s, in my opinion, the whole purpose of the Digital Art program.