Anatomy of Type

Anatomy of Type

Well, here is my name, except of course it's not the way your used to seeing it. Perhaps this reminds you of the handwriting guides in kindergarten. Each of these lines represent a different part of the letters. My name does not have much variety with this, as it does not have a descender and it was hard to find a font to make an ascender. Well, at least this font somewhat fits me...
And that's what I'll tell you about today: fonts. Why isn't there just one universal font that is used in everything from books to billboards? 1: That would be very boring. 2: Like color, fonts have hidden personalities. If people use the wrong fonts all the time, life would be a nightmare. Think about this: You go get a job application for something very professional, like a lawyer. But the entire application is printed in Comic Sans *gasp*. Everyone in the room is now wearing clown noses, party hats, and too much makeup. You are embarrassed as they laugh hysterically at you for no particular reason.
Yes, that is an over-exaggeration. Still, you would think the paper is stupid, because Comic Sans isn't a professional font. So don't fill out an application written in it, because your employers are proving themselves to be...well, stupid.
So this moral: Pay attention to what fonts are saying and choose the right ones for the right things.

Color!

In my last post, I talked a little bit about about colors and their meanings. But this post will be fully about what I know. This week we learned all about it. What I didn't know is that all colors have a good and a bad interpretation, including white and black.

What I mean:

Red: Good is confidence and power, bad is war and violence.
You can look up the rest of the color meanings if you want, but that's about it. These are used in advertising all the time to convey a message from the company to the person. All of us can admit that we imagine color to have "personalities".

What is this?

It is a color wheel. Everyone who is an art student is familiar with this. Red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors. If you mix two of those together, you get one of the secondary colors: Green, Orange, and Violet.  If you mix a primary color with a secondary color, you get a color like blue-green or red-orange.

So yeah, I hope you find this at least a tiny bit interesting, or at least learned something.

Batman Logo (I tried)

Well, this is a little embarrassing...It's quite a story. I made a few rough lines, tried to fix it with the paintbrush tool (big mistake, I'm not an artist), made around thirty anchors, deleted them all, remade the bat in the logo, but in the end I couldn't color it because the entire thing went black. Well, at least I could get the shape somewhat accurate. Usually video tutorials work for me, but next time I should try to find a written one. This video isn't bad though, I just need to use a written tutorial for things like this. Well, I could've started over from scratch, but I was running out of time. At least I tried my best.

I'm in Graphic Design Now

Hello everybody! Winter break is over, it was good, but now I'm in Graphic Design. It's not as uninteresting as I thought it would be. One of the thing we learned so far is the use of color as symbolism. Ex: Red can represent violence and war, or love and passion. Really, that is useful for film and animation. I have yet to decide if this class is fun for me though.

Anywho, our first project involves color. So we searched the internet for our favorite book/movie/etcetera posters and covers. We can also choose pictures that just interest us. Here they are:

Les Miserables (2012)

Well, if you looked at my "about me" page, you know that I am a fan of this story. The characters on the cover are sized to how important they are. Valjean is the protagonist, Javert is antagonist, Fantine is tritagonist, Cosette and Marius are major characters. But when it comes to color, there is also some symbolism. For those of you who have seen this, you know the students sing about "a new tomorrow" all the time. "Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise." -Victor Hugo. You see the sunrise at the bottom and the night at the top. Well, we see the students and the barricade in the sunrise. So, you get the point. I'm listening to the soundtrack while typing this, so you can tell I'm a huge mizzie.

But now, onto the next cover!

The Demon King by Cinda Willams Chima

This is the most recent book I finished reading, and I enjoyed it. Briefly, it's about a boy who steals an amulet, and his life changes forever. The amulet is, obviously, on the cover. The color of it is green, which can be associated with greed (he stole it from a character who was greedy). The cover is mostly brown, with can show regret. The protagonist does many things he later regrets. I'm not going to give examples for the sake of spoilers, but let's just say that at the end of the novel, he regrets everything for a lot of reasons. You can see fog over the hills at the bottom. Fog is used in movies to so suspense. I think this is for advertising, to show that it is a page-turner.

And finally, on to our last example of graphic design.

This picture

This is called typography. It is pretty much a fancy way to write words. The colors and green and blue. Instead of the green amulet however, this green shows things like renewal and growth, while the blue can symbolize intelligence and wisdom. The green is below the blue. This can say that constant practice will grow your skill of graphic design. Then once your a professional, your a master at it and make lots of money. The words that make up the "G" is for what you'll learn, and they all seem interesting to right-minded people. So if your creative, you'll know you'll like this.

In the end:

All of these made me interested in graphic design now. I think this will be fun, because I'll make stuff somewhat like this.

Final Project: A website

For the final project first semester we created a website with two pages. One was about our bio and elevator pitch, which you can find in the "About Me" page I just created here. Then the other page was our best assignments. I don't have anything for Graphic Design yet (coming 3rd Quarter!), but for my animation, I chose my very first bouncy ball animation, and my horse girl chase video for video. Both can be found in past posts here. So you get the idea. Since this website was made in Adobe Dreamweaver and will never be published to the WWW, here are screenshots so you can see the whole picture.

So, that is my website. What do you all think? I am proud of it, even though I had trouble choosing colors. Well, that's all I'm going to post for a while because winter break is in 3 days! Have a Merry Christmas, and see you in 2016!

e9 Promo Video

Well, here is the next project we did. The title says it all, this is a promotional video to convince next year's class to join. Helen and I did something like this beginning of the video rotation (even though we didn't get to edit it). I did it with another girl in the class, Elicia (http://eliciacastillo.blogspot.com/) since we had assigned partners this time. I was pretty bored filming at first, because I've been there done this. That's usually how I now feel starting to film: "Why do I have to do this? This is extremely tedious, why not a professional filmmaker?" But then halfway through, it started to get fun, and I even ignored our storyboard and filmed clips I made in my head! Besides, we lost it somewhere in the hallway...

Anyway, I did the voice acting since we were falling behind and couldn't get someone with a good voice in the class. Excuse me, I had a minor cold that day. The really fun part was editing. I absolutely LOVE experimenting with the clips, rearranging them, adding music, playing with special effects, adding captions and credits, I could go on and on and on but you get the point. Dang, next time I get enough money I'm buying a Mac so I can use Final Cut Pro at home. And then a good camera and a tripod. Filmmaking is fun.

This is the video I am probably the most proud about, more than the horse girl chase. I'm gonna show this to my family and post an excerpt on Instagram. Although, I can only think about one thing I should've done better. If you watched you can see: too many clips promoting film, not enough clips promoting graphic design, very fewer clips promoting animation. So with the captions, I tried my best to arrange the clips based on that, but talking about animation and graphic design, there were clips of us filming.

Other than that, I'm glad I could do this project again and make it better. A bit of a news update: my future job idea has changed. After this class, I want to be a filmmaker instead of animator. Yay! I'm also sad because after winter break I'll go to graphic design. Once I'm an upperclassman though, I'll have to be in video doing this hours a day in and out of school.

Well yeah, hope you enjoyed this video. And if you live around this area and you are in middle school, at least consider joining if you're interested. You don't even have to be a high tech genius, 'cause I didn't even know the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste when I came here! Now I can use basic html, and that's a huge improvement. If you don't care for it, fine by me. Live your life how you want to. I'm just saying that I love being here, and will never regret applying at the last minute.

So yeah, see you next post!

Horse Girl Chase

Oh gosh, it has been a while! At least I'm posting now, and I will share my first live action video made in this class. I made it with my partner/friend Helen. Here you go! P.S. It was my idea to use that music and her idea to wear a horse mask.

It was supposed to be action, but I guessed it turned out to be comedy. The reviews my classmates made were mainly positive. We are all video students so we payed attention to things like the rule of thirds, come in late leave early, six shots system, and all that stuff. The only things that were pretty bad was the long running up the stairs shot, and sometimes I forgot come in late leave early (filmmaker talk, you can look it up if you have to). Honestly, I'm quite proud of this, it turned out better than expected. The only thing I have to complain about is the terrible acting (which we've never been in acting class so it makes sense). Well, hope you enjoyed it.