Today was my group’s shoot for VFS’s project space squid. Before I talk about the shoot today, i’ll give you a little background information on the project code named “Project Space Squid”.
About a month or so ago, the head of the Digital Design department department (Brett Forsyth) and  Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin the head of EBM (Entertainment Business Management) came into one of my afternoon classes to talk to us about an exciting opportunity for us. The school was organizing a massive cross-department project, which would include current VFS students, alumni, staff, and hired industry professionals. The project was to create what we’re calling an “interactive magazine” app for the Apple iPad. Which for the less tech-savy readers, is an interactive journey through a story that will intrigue you to interact with the visuals on screen. For the “articles” or what we’re calling the stories, the writing department thought it would be best to choose five of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories (recently released into the public domain) and take a section of the story to create a short film, and the rest of the story an interactive experience. Two of the five stories will be entirely created using motion graphics and real live footage.

To be a part of this project I had to express my interest, and then go through an interview process. From there we had a large meeting of all the chosen people, at which time our rolls, stories, and teams were introduced to us. I was one of the three selected as an “Interaction Designer”. I was assigned two different groups, Call of C’Thulhu, and The Music of Eric Zann. Some of my responsibilities include brainstorming with the entire team ideas for new interactive experience elements, such as using various sensors in the iPad itself. Through this entire process I have to keep user’s experience in mind — making sure interactions make sense, are do-able, are natural and instinctive, etc. This project is largely being supported by Vancouver Film School, Adobe, Hewlett Packard Computers (HP), and Wikipedia. Adobe has asked to showcase the entire project at each of their road shows across North America for the next year. In order to do this, they’d like to have a documentary to show. So at our meetings, shoots, discussions, and pretty much anywhere else we do anything for the project we’ve had a documentary crew following us, interviewing us, photographing us and writing down important milestones. Also, all the team members on each group have been given access to a collaborative blog where we each share our process work and talk about our experiences. (www.projectspacesquid.com) One of my tasks as an interaction designer, was to take a look at our competition and analyze what it was that made their app exciting, intriguing, enjoyable, entertaining, etc. To my surprise, I learned that our competition was only two to three other applications. However, after downloading these applications to my iPad, noticed that the amount of interaction was very limited (some just simple sound effects). After having done our research our group feels confident that we can truly make this project something very cutting edge. As far as I am aware, VFS is currently the only school in North America working on applications for the iPad.
So today, I had one of my teams’ (Call of C’Thulhu) short-film shoot. Today was when we shot all of the real life assets that will be keyed into a motion graphic film. We were working with a RedOneCam which right now is considered a luxury to use in the industry. We had a very productive and surprisingly short day shooting in the production studio down the block from my campus. It was great for all of the team members to be present at the shoot today because we all made sure our assets for the project were taken care of. A time-lapse was filmed today during the entire shoot that will be used in the final documentary. I took a bunch of shots during the shoot today. Click here to check them out!

I’ve been trying to get more different types of projects on my site, so this is an in-class assignment for my Advanced Print & Typography class. We were given a very simple, unformatted word document that we asked to typeset. Below you can see the original word document and then you can click here to view the PDF file or there are screenshots below.

Original Word Document

and this is how I typeset the text.
Check out the PDF by clicking here! (looks much better uncompressed!)

Typeset

Typeset Text

This morning in my advanced interface design course we were given a website and told to re-design it to make it more visually appealing to a target audience. The website was madelizas.com which is a cupcake bakery based out of Topeka, Kansas. Our guidelines stated that we had to use the logo, but we’re able to change the colour of it, and well everything else was pretty much left up to us. I spent most of the majority of the morning designing the site and a few hours this evening designing the mobile version. Check out the screenshots below or click here to view it in your web browser (it looks better). I also included an mobile version aswell.

Original Logo

Before & After

Mobile Version

Website Mock Up

Note: I do not own the copyrights to any of Mad Eliza’s images.

Well we’re in Term number 5 now, it’s getting hard to believe we have less than three and a half months left until we graduate. My class has started production on their final projects and some are already shooting for various parts of their projects. I was asked a few weeks back by a friend of mine in my class Drew Hutchinson,  if I would do some on set photography for his music video shoot. He was shooting a music video for a Vancouver based rap group entitled “Shottas” for their  hit single “We Don’t Dance”. The location that he chose to shoot really cool, it had a an amazing view over East Vancouver. I took a few hundred pictures because shooting at night is fairly new to me, and wasn’t sure how they would turn out with all the dancers moving around. To check out the album please click here! Feel free to leave comments!

My most recent branding project was for a small restaurant here in Vancouver called cocolo. We were given the assignment to find a product or business/company and create an identity for it. When we were given the assignment I decided that I would post an ad online for any businesses that felt like their brand wasn’t doing them justice, or were just starting up new and wanted a brand. I got a phone call just hours after the ad went online, and it was a small Japanese Restaurant not too far from my place. They bought the restaurant from it’s previous owners about a year ago and weren’t overly happy with the brand of the restaurant. So I set up a meeting with them to discuss ideas, and to get some more information on their restaurant. When I was there they kindly brought out dishes for me to try. I had never had Japanese food before so this was a first for me. What I learned from them was that they were hoping to attract more caucasian guests and come across as more upscale restaurant while still staying affordable for everyone. They also felt it was important to incorporate nature because it brought a sense of peace to the restaurant. They were great clients, very co-operative, and trusted me completely. Unfortunately a few days later I received an email from them explaining that something came up unexpectedly and they had sold the restaurant. Even though I wouldn’t actually be creating the physical aspects of the brand any more (menu’s, business cards, etc.) I would continue to design everything for my school project. Before I had heard about the sale of the restaurant I had met with a book binding company here in Vancouver called “Menu’s by Design” and took a look at some sample textures for the menus. I also booked a tour of one of the largest printing companies around, Hemlock Printers and learned a great amount of the printing process, and left with some swatches of sample paper too. Below is some of the work I created for the restaurant.

Original Logo

Final Logo Design

Stationary Applications

Business Card

Menus

Carryout Bag

Bambo Wall Logo Application

My last project for my motion design class was to create a title sequence. The title sequence was for a CBC pilot TV series called “When i’m Sixty-Four”. The comedy series is about a group of elderly people that just don’t want to give up their younger personalities. I wanted to keep this very simple, by using some classic white typeface against some really old home video footage. The nice thing about the footage I used that I found it in an old video archive so I didn’t need to worry about getting the proper releases to use it. The song I put in the background was chosen because I felt that it just fit. I wanted the song to make you run from the other room because you knew your new favorite TV show was on. The final copy is below, leave me a comment and let me know what you think!

A few weeks ago a longtime friend of mine, Daniel Norwood asked me to help him with some design work for a school project he was working on at Humber College. He asked me to use the colour scheme he was working with, and the basic designs he had decided on, to put together a few pieces for the lofts he was designing. This was put together in a small time frame of two days. Check out some of the work below!

Dan’s work

Final Title Block

Sample Business Card

Sample Letterhead

If you’d like to get in touch with Dan about his work, please click here.

My first branding project here at VFS was to brand either a beer, or hot tea. I chose to create a beer I called “escape”. It was created for a fictitious brewing company called “TDH Brewery”. I first decided on a target audience, college students. I then did some research on my potential competitors, Presidente Beer, and Corona Beer. These beers are commonly found at travel designations, and in warm sunny locations. I created two moodboards that I wanted to include images that represent the beer that had similar qualities.

Moodboards

Then, from there I started to develop a logo for the beer. In my research I found that teens want things that look like they were expensive, they want to feel apart of a high class society too. So if it looked more appealing, then it would sell more. For example: If one store was more visually appealing, but had the same prices as another store across the street that wasn’t quite as visually appealing, the decision to go to the more visually appealing store is obvious. McDonalds is slowly modernizing all of their restaurants to include multiple large plasma screen displays, leather couches, and in some even fireplaces — which seems like they’ve got a good understanding of the subject. So I knew what I had to do, I just had to have the perfect typefaces and colour scheme. I ended up going with a simple greyscale colour scheme which I felt would stick out the most, and some very simple typefaces.

Final Logo with Tagline

Below is a 3D render of what the bottle would look like. The 3D model was created in my 3D graphics class here at VFS. It is difficult to grasp the texture of the label in the 3D render, but it would be printed on a textured, varnished thicker (recycled) paper. The label will only have the minimal information required printed onto it in small text on the opposite side of the label.

3D Render of Bottle

Finally, the part of this branding project that I had the most fun with was coming up with an interesting approach to it’s marketing campaign. I wanted to take an “outside of the box” approach to this, and throw a little comical spin on it too. Below are some of the ads created to market “escape beer”.

Advertisement #1

Advertisement #2

Advertisement #3

Advertisement #4

Advertisement #5

If you’ve got any feedback, i’d love to hear it! Just leave a comment below!

It’s been a while since i’ve posted some work, so I decided to sit down and get some online. During my term 3 Print Design class we were given the task to create a concert promotional poster for Aretha Franklin. The brief  was the following;

“Design and produce a poster for a live music concert

featuring music legend Aretha Franklin intended to

stimulate interest and engage an audience to attend the event.”

The trick was it would have to be appealing to younger teens, but also her fan’s from many years ago. I took the more modernized simplistic approach to this design, as I felt that it would appeal well to both audiences. Below is the final design. I’d love to hear any feedback you may have!

Final Poster

The other day while walking home from work, I came across a police standoff outside of my building. There were police cars everywhere — officers had their guns drawn and were hiding behind their riot shields. I stood around trying to figure out what was going on, along with many other residents from my building. The police had closed the entire block during rush hour, but they wouldn’t tell anyone what was going on. So I did what any techy would do, pulled out my phone and hit the Twitter app. I searched the name of the street (Abbott) and was clearly not the first person that had turned to Twitter for more information. Many others had been posting what they had over heard. It then turned into a big discussion between a group of us all from various locations around the block, some even in the apartment buildings above. I was sharing the information I was getting from people around me with the people in the apartment buildings. The people in the buildings posted some pictures of what they could see, which was a great birds eye view above the police. I was even given a heads up of the sniper located on top of a building to my right. During all this Twitter madness I managed to tweet some of local newspapers about what was going on. I also tweeted the public transit Twitter account to give them a heads up that the busses were being re-routed and that the SkyTrain had to be accessed from an alternate entrance. They then tweeted to let their other followers know what was going on. Shortly after all these twitter posts, I looked up to the sky where I could see a helicopter hovering above. Shortly after checking back to twitter I noticed a post from “Vancouver’s eye in the sky”, which is a helicopter that provides traffic updates via Twitter. They too had posted about the current situation to warn drivers not to travel in that direction. The situation lasted about two hours and only about fifteen minutes before it ended two news stations arrived with cameras in hand. Meanwhile anyone on twitter would have already had a good grasp of the situation and had pictures from angles that the media wouldn’t even be able to get. In the end the situation turned out to be a homeless person that had threatened a security guard with a gun in the courtyard. The police took every precaution they could due to the daycare next door full of children. Anyways, thought I should share with you a cool scenario where social media beat the traditional media. Check out some pics I snapped with my phone from my angle that I posted to Twitter!

Traditional Media late

Behind the police tape

Standoff