J. Edgar

My friend, Tim Brooks, and I went to Maryland to get an interview for a video project that we were working on. I've known Tim for 7 years, and a fun fact about us is that we were born on the same day in the same year! We didn't have enough time to do anything fun on our birthday, so we saw a movie, after the interview in Columbia. We looked up trailers, and this seemed to be the best one.

Unfortunately for us, the trailer didn't ruin the story, as most trailers do these days. It seemed, to us, like it may have to do with the assassination of JFK, and some other epic events in history with more insight into what created the events.

The movie started by giving a lot of information about J. Edgar Hoover, and I felt like I was actually enjoying something that was teaching me about history. The movie kind of portrayed Hoover as a hollow shell of a person, which started to get depressing after awhile. Then, about half way through, the movie's focus shifted almost entirely from the historical and event-based story to a fictional story about being lovers with his male assistant. Seeing Leonardo Dicaprio made up like an old man rubbing hands with another younger actor made up like an old man was very awkward for me. It got even more awkward during a scene where they got into a fight, were bleeding from the mouths, and one forcibly made out with the other until it was mutual. It was interesting that at the end of the movie, they had a short disclaimer letting the audience know that they basically didn't have much information to base a lot of the story on (so they took extreme creative liberties).

I tend to like stories that have a lot of believability mixed with what if scenarios. Like, what if WWI was actually started this way, and everything could have happened that way, but with this new twist. I really enjoy movies like that. I didn't really get that from this movie, though. I liked the movie more, before it focused on how shallow and empty of a person he may have been and before the focus shifted entirely to his gay relationship.

It's interesting how, as communicators, we can alter audience's view of the past. This happens all of the time with movies and books (even history books). It really shows how important first impressions are. If a person's first exposure to a story of the past is told one way, and then the person hears of another version of the story, the person will most likely stick with the first story that they heard. This reminds me of Inception. Did I just get incepted?

Eureka Visuals - CMS & Video

After looking up and down comparison charts, and looking through advice in forums, I've decided to go with Wordpress as my CMS. I decided to use Wordpress, because it is said to have excellent SEO, right out of the box, and the back end seemed the simplest. I looked through some different themes, and themes that I like actually come packaged for multiple CMS platforms, so it didn't really have anything to do with the way that it looked. I am not familiar with CMS systems, and this was a completely new experience for me. It seems to be very much like an advanced version of Blogger, with many more customization options.

Also, I've been working on some video footage for a short documentary style series. I'm extremely excited. More to come on that, soon!

Eureka Visuals

After talking with my professor, Monica, I've decided to create an umbrella brand: Eureka Visuals. This will also be the brand that all video production will fall under. For example, if I create a video for the websites, it will be a Eureka Visuals production.

I'm finishing up design for some promo stuff and logos.





The final versions of the websites will look like this:

MACBETH - The Rude Mechanicals

I have really been taking the time to look at props and costume design, recently, and I really enjoyed what they did for this play. The visual theme of this play had to do a lot with color and clothing. All of the living characters wore black. Witches wore red and white, and dead people (ghosts) wore red. This is some pretty obvious symbolism (signifiers and signifieds), but I like the use of it. I would like to incorporate these types of things into my work, in the future. I generally don't think about costume color as a means to communicate ideas.

The end of the play was actually different than the original play. When Malcolm, played by Anna Brammeier, was crowned, everyone converged on her and raised their swords to swing. Then, the lights went out. It's actually an addition to the original, which ends with the crowning of Malcolm.

Our interpretation effects the way that we tell and present stories, and adding something like this onto the end of a story really shows how much creative power people other than a writer have on a writer's work. Through history, things like plays and other works of fiction are used to communicate ideas. Taking creative liberties to create differences between our interpretation and an original CAN BE an essential part of making things relevant to an audience. This may not be the best example of this, but it is certainly an example of a small creative change to serve as a meaning or commentary about something.

The play was well done, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. (Good job Ryan Smith!)

ALEF - Leadership Conference

I belong to an organization called ALEF (Appalachian Leadership Education Foundation), and I attended an event hosted by ALEF at Concord University. The event had speakers ranging from high ranking air force generals to employees with some pretty impressive job titles at some pretty impressive companies. They came to discuss leadership, our state, our country, and where we (the United States) are headed in the future.

One of the presenters gave some extremely good advice for being involved in leadership in a work environment. While discussing business relationships, he told us that "People quit people before people quit jobs." One thing that more than one presenter really stressed was the importance of trust, honesty, integrity, and good character.

One of the other presenters gave us some very insightful information about defense and how our country and other countries operate. He couldn't, of course, divulge any information that civilians and people outside of the government are allowed to know, but what he did present was very interesting.

This was a very important lecture to attend, and I took away a lot of great lessons from it. It is very important to learn from people who have lived longer than ourselves, and to listen to the advice, stories, and mistakes of successful people. It can be an integral part of success in life, to avoid situations and gravitate towards others, based on advice from people older than ourselves, without making the same mistakes yourself.



[Above] Picture of our group with four star general, Robert Foglesong. [Below] Notes from the presentations.

Type in Motion 9

Live the Language

This is a series of videos created for study abroad programs. After I found it, my roommate, Joey, told me that he had watched the video of Paris, before he went there on his trip. Different people have created different videos, but they all have a unified visual style. What drives these videos? Type.

It has become a theme, in videos that I find that I like, that the videos I choose as well done videos create (almost) logos out of each new title or set of words. In these videos, each title is thought out and designed, and could pass as a logo. This makes a much more interesting experience, than seeing the same typeface or just different typefaces slabbed on the screen. Even kerning properly wouldn't do it. Each title is DESIGNED, and that makes a huge difference. Even though these title shave different fonts and styles, they all seem very unified. Even the different languages seem like they all belong to the same set of videos.

The style of the type is also something that I'd like to comment on. In a lot of my work, I use a drop shadow that has an increased size (from the standard) and no distance from the object with the opacity set to 5% to 25%. This allows for subtle separation and more legibility, but usually goes unnoticed, depending on how opaque it is. There is something very classy, however, with sticking to plain white with no drop shadow, even if it is hard to read. I noticed it YEARS ago in the Oceans movies, and it's a very slick look.

Movement of the type was one of two things. It was centered while the video was in motion, behind it. Or, it was motion tracked to objects in the scene. I think that this was a really clean and classy use of the text and titles that they were using. Motion Tracked text is sexy; it appears as part of the scene, while maintaining it's own visual aesthetic.

I love the way that each title design has the same style of pronunciation, below it. It gives more unity to the titles, as well as reminds the audience about the purpose of the video (relating to the title, Live The Language).

It was interesting seeing different languages, and seeing how designers used type design with their versions of words (symbols for Beijing). Beijing's text was very interesting to see, because the variation of font was cool to see, without the perspective of the alphabet that I am used to. I honestly never even thought of fonts for different languages that were symbol based, but it was interesting to see how different and interesting symbols can look with font variation.


OTHER VIDEOS

The Fall of WDIGTS

WDIGTS is no more.. I've decided that I don't want Graphic Design to be a part of this project, anymore. I will now be focusing exclusively on video and photography.

I have also considered changing the name. WDIGTS is clunky and it's really not an appealing acronym. This isn't the main reason for the change, however. The main reason for the change is the title's, sort of, negative nature. Telling people to stop is never as power as people to do. And, I could tell, when I presented this to teachers (an important section of my target market), that they did not respond well to bashing school. If I want this to succeed in schools, I want teachers on my side. So, the future titles will be Eureka Photo and Eureka Video. KABOOM!