Upcoming Student Showcase

On April 5 the Interactive Multimedia, Graphic Design, Fundamental Arts and Video Game Programming courses will be presenting a Student Showcase at the Confederation Centre of the Arts.

Over the past few days, our class has been mulling over some installation ideas for our piece of the show. We have decided to put our television monitor in the body of a robot with a dummy of a little kid sitting in front of it. The little kid will have a mirror for his face. We're kind of going for a bit of a McLuhan message with the robot/mirror-face thing. I think it's going to look cool.

Here's my quickie conceptual for the installation:

We're going with something a bit different for the background -- incorporating some of my idea here with the stacks of televisions and some vinyl records that Daniel, one of my classmates, had for his background.

I can't wait! This will be my first art show in over five years! Yay! :)

You should come check us out! Be there, or be an equilateral parallelogram!

New Project! When I Grow Up....

Although we've only just started, this seems to be the semester of big projects. Over the next couple of weeks, the class will be shooting and editing a film project that will be submitted to the Third Annual Island Media Arts Festival.

Next week, we will be shooting in a variety of Charlottetown locations and asking passersby "When you grow up, what do/did you want to be?", "What are you doing now?", and the clincher "Are you happy?"

We're all pretty jazzed by this project. So far, we've set up a Facebook page & group, a Twitter account, logo, promotional video, business cards, signs and forms... and that was just yesterday. The Facebook account already has received a huge number of postings since its inception yesterday afternoon. This afternoon I'll be posting up on my Google+ account, so my pals there can keep track of what's going down.

We'll be posting our shooting locations daily before each team heads out, so if any of you out there would like to come and participate, you'll be able to find us. And, just so you don't feel like you're doing this for free, we're handing out a helium balloon to each participant! Hopefully our balloons will hold up in the cold weather... nobody likes shrinkage!

Our submission deadline for the Island Media Arts Festival is mid-February. The Festival itself runs from May 8-13 this year, so please come and check us out! After its launch, our project will "go live" online on my Youtube channel as well as our Facebook page and group.

Freedom of Speech Applies to Your Wall, Not Mine!

Today, I finally got a chance to check out the activity on my Youtube channel. Imagine my excitement when I discovered that somebody had posted a comment on one of my videos! Yay!

Then I read it.

Bubble burst, cheeks inflamed, I hastened to take down the comment section on the video.

If you'll remember from an earlier posting, I had produced a 30-second "call to action" spot on the Attawapiskat housing crisis. As it turns out, it seems that all you have to do to find a bigot in Canada is mention the word "Indian". Somebody from Alberta, who referred to me as "kiddo" took some time out of his very busy life to tell me that I should concentrate my efforts on worthwhile causes rather than Canadian natives "who do nothing but drink millions of government dollars away every year instead of feeding and sheltering their kids." He also, apparently, didn't appreciate being bombarded with my version of "white man's guilt".

Just prior to posting my video on Facebook, I had found and shared a petition to call on the government to step up for Attawapiskat. I ended up having to monitor/mediate that posting for almost two full days. Although none of my friends or family said anything that I thought was truly racist, some of them were definitely treading on thin ice, even for me.

I am not a political person. What I know about the Indian Act and the current status of our natives is appallingly little. I don't live near a reservation (although there are a couple of them in this province), I don't have any native friends, I don't even know anybody who deals with natives on a regular basis. The people who commented on my Facebook wall don't either, for all their posturing and ranting. I hold my actual opinions on this matter as I know I am not nearly informed enough to take a side in the debate.

Those of you who have met me in real life also know that I am in no way politically correct, but online it's different. Online, I'm professional. Online, I'm courteous. Online, I'm quiet.

In real life, my mouth doesn't have a backspace key or ctrl-z (undo), and sometimes that can cause a problem (as pretty much anybody who has a mouth of their own can agree). But people have bad memories generally -- if you give it long enough, people will eventually forget what you said, so very rarely, will my past spoken words affect my future relationships.

When you put something down on the internet, however, it's there forever. Etched into the stone of pixels and bytes is your flower of truth or your shit-bag of idiocy for all to see until the lights go off on humanity. I am particularly aware of this feature of the internet and thank the stars every day for the delete key.

What is not different about me in real life and online is I have always used my real name. If it's important enough for me to say, it's important enough for me to stand by. If I don't feel comfortable using my real name on a posting, it's probably not right to post it. I'm also not into anonymous fight-picking with strangers.

So to douchebag012 from Alberta, good luck in your job search and beer drinking... and I'm sure that rash will clear up down there once you get that cream on it.

Final Presentations for the Semester

I can't believe it's almost the end of the semester already... a couple of more projects and we can stick a fork in it, cuz it's done! :) One of my last projects is to give a one-hour presentation on two books I've read pertaining to the course over the past semester.

My first book is "Head First: HTML with CSS & XHTML" by Elizabeth & Eric Freeman. As far as tutorial books go, this one was almost painless. At first I arched my eyebrow at the word searches and crosswords at the end of each chapter, but, as the authors suggested, it is a great way to give your poor old brain a break after staring at code tutorials for page after page. The authors' writing style is nice and light, too which also helped quite a bit in getting through it. Out of 5, I rate this book at least a 4.5... which is really good for a tutorial book.

The second book I will be presenting is a more recent release titled "The Impulse Economy: Understanding Mobile Shoppers and What Makes Them Buy" by Gary Schwartz. I won't lie -- this book was about as dry as a popcorn fart. Even still, it had a few really good points to make regarding m-commerce and how it should be tackled by marketers and designers in the future... it just took the author over 220 pages to eventually make those few points.

The Impulse Economy is also chock-full of stats regarding m-commerce, the internet, phone usage, commerce trends, and shopping in general. I like statistics, so the book was great for that. The over-use of acronyms (which were not all covered in his mini-glossary of acronyms in the back of the book) was TORTUROUS however! It's as if the author wrote the book for computer technicians and huge marketing firms.

And, maybe I'm just being picky here, what is up with the typos, people?? The book was put out in 2011 and contains stats from the beginning of this year, so it was written, edited and published in less than 11 months. Do you think that maybe next time somebody could actually proof the thing before it gets printed? I don't mind the odd little typo here and there as long as you can figure out what the word was supposed to be, but some of the typos I found could not be resolved contextually at all... I hate having to just skip something I'm reading because I always think that it may have been important.

Truthfully, the only reason why I stuck with this book to do my presentation on was because I didn't have anything else I thought I could read end-to-end in less than a week.

30 Second "Call to Action" Video

It's been a very busy couple of weeks over here in the Interactive Multimedia program at Holland College. The class is almost done for the semester... it's pretty much all over but the cryin'! :)

We still had a couple of projects to pass in even though there were no class sessions. Yesterday was the deadline for our 30 second "Call to Action" videos. Basically, they were supposed to be either public awareness/call to action spots or a commercial for a charitable organization. I chose to do mine on the Attawapiskat crisis up in Northern Ontario.

I must have read at least twenty articles related to this small, James Bay community before delving into the actual editing. When I posted my video and an Attawapiskat petition link up on my "wall" in Facebook, I inadvertently opened up a political can of worms amongst my peeps... not what I was going for at all, but oh well. I was just hoping for a little feedback on my video, not a re-write of the Canadian Indian Act!

Honestly, I don't like being controversial or political, but I guess I can't avoid it my entire life. That having been said, I may post a couple of dozen kitten photos and videos on my wall just to get the political rantings pushed down my Facebook wall so I don't have to see it anymore!

Anyway, here's the video I made (again, I was helped out with a great piece of music by Kevin Macleod).

Some Really Cool Portfolio Websites

This week, April asked us to research some other designers and check out their portfolio websites. Not surprisingly, there were a number of really cool sites. Below are my three faves:

John Zmuda

The reason I love this site is for its simplicity. I love the overview of the designer's work space and his interface is beautiful.

Jason Reed

This site for John Reed is also a nice clean site. What makes it different for me is his illustrated self-portrait. A great way to "give a face to the name".

John Wright

John Wright's Photography site is an excellent Flash site. Although waiting for Flash sites to load is a pain in the kiester, the end-result is almost always worth it!

I checked out a wide number and variety of sites for this research project and I have to say that for a bunch of people who call themselves designers, there's an awful lot of garbage out there! I started my search from an older blog by Design Mag called 101 Awesome Portfolio Sites. Some of the sites they listed were really cool... but then when you navigated to the actual website, it had been changed. I understand. My own corporate identity has changed many times over the past several years, too. What bothered me were the websites that started off really cool, but then got changed to something totally sucky. Why oh why would they do that? Another example of the adage "If it ain't broke don't fix it"!

Another Video Edited By Yours Truly

Hello from the trenches of Interactive Multimedia!

It's almost another week down in the program, and I've managed to get another video project edited for A/V class. In this exercise we had to take some footage the class shot around Charlottetown in September and do some "creative editing" to it. I set my footage to a piece of music I found by Kevin Macleod who allows free use of his work as long as you credit him (which I have done!).

Although I like my end-result, I do have to say that working with a sound track in video production is really hard on the head! I've been listening to the same one minute clip of music for over 10 hours. I'm glad I chose not to use a piece of music I really liked because this project would have totally killed it for me!

Anyway, here's the video, in all its glory. ENJOY! :)