The Counselling Centre

The counselling center is in the Library South building. They're very professional, and I would recommend their form of help to anyone who has even the slightest need of someone to talk to.

I went their after an incident in which I attempted to save a man's life, and failed, so I can wholeheartedly recommend their counselling for any kind of loss.

Story time

Surely I didn't do that on purpose. Surely my subconscious didn't intentionally take the flash drive, along with the rest of the trinkets and keys on my keyring, and drop it between the car door and the door frame meer moments before the door came rapidly to a sickening crunching close, taking with it my film trailer for Knocked Up (and some paint from my door). Depsite the fact that I had had bitter feelings about this film, with it's overuse of non-PG-13 language for comedy's sake, underuse of wit and irony in favour of meaningless one-liners, and general underdevelopment of the characters in the story, still I don't believe that I would destroy my trailer, into which I put countless hours of my life. My hidden packrat-ish tendencies have me still taking care of paper's I wrote in my junior year of high school, and yet I'm not entirely sure that I didn't intentionally destroy the data AND come up with a great poster idea simultaneously.

What am I talking about? It was just a coincidence. Put me down for a poster.

I'm mostly joking. The point is, I somehow managed to destroy my project by accident, and the latest backup is from some 20 manhours ago. Honestly I'm somewhat relieved. I know in future we'll all face projects we don't want to do, but for now, we're students, and we should do whatever makes the best portfolio piece. Making a trailer for Knocked Up was failing to inspire me or excite me the way the other film projects have, but I think I have a great idea for a poster.

Stan, I know you hate it when you get such little time to give us input on our work (this poster will have only one class period worth of input). Sorry about that, but continuing on the trailer would almost certainly make me go crazy. 

Packaging Design

These might be useful for Jeff's class, abeit a little too late for most.

Link to Dezignus blog post

To download the templates, scroll down to where is has a link to "Rapidshare" and "Depositfile". These are both (legal) file sharing sites that are currently hosting these files.

Lots of Examples of Beautiful Hand Lettering

Link to Article

Your keyboard's personality

I'm Famous!

Apparently an online magazine/blog called alwayswatching.org featured my V for Vendetta video in one of their stories about typography. EDIT: The author emailed me to see how I wanted to be credited on his article, which I really appreciate.

Link to Article

I got 20,000 hits from their site! I'm up to almost 36,000 39,000 47,500 56,000 views now!

Link to Youtube video

300 trailer

The drop.io version looks ok, but it's compressed, so here's a direct link. Right click (control-click on Macs) and select download or Save to.
http://chrissilich.com/300.mov

If I ever fail to bring work to class, it's probably because he jumped on it and ruined it.

Is great copywriting still great if the average american isn't smart enough to get it?


Wikipedia

FINALLY!

I finally figured out a way to get the audio out of a dvd in seperate channels.

A little background:
When we make trailers, we want to remove everything but the dialogue, so that we dont have the discontinuity of the music changing every two seconds during the trailer. Then we add our own music over the whole thing to tie it together.

DVDs have surround sound on 6 channels. 1+2 are the front left and front right, which contain a nice mix of music, dialogue, and sound effects. 3 is the front center, which is just dialogue with the occaisional important sound effect. 4 is the subwoofer. 5+6 are the rear left and right speakers, which are just the music. Ever watch a movie on tv and you had trouble understanding what a guy said because of the music or background noise? That's because it's audio made for surround sound, mixed down to stereo. The seperation into so many channels makes it easier to mentally seperate words from sounds, so you can understand dialogue despite the background noise.

This also helps us in our trailer projects. As mentioned above, dialogue is on channel three, so if we just pick that one off the dvd, and leave the rest, we magically have the dialogue, without the music. Thanks to the wonderful people at the MPAA, who put copy-protection on DVDs, this is more difficult than it seems.

I ended up using windows software called DVDAudioExtractor.exe to seperate the channels. Here's the result:


Viola, dialogue with very little else. This part of movie has loud rock music, rain, and thunder noises-- NOT ANYMORE!!!

The full wav (sorry) file is on it's slow way to sharedspace now, under grd4400>300>

My method

I don't know how the others are doing it, but here's my method. Watch the movie twice: once with the sound muted, once with the picture muted, in final cut pro, and cut all the good bits out. I noticed that if I watched it with both the audio and the video, I just ended up watching the film and forgetting to cut out the good bits. My theory is that trailers are just compliations of the best visuals and the best soundbites from a film anyway, and they almost never actually sync up, they're just held together by music and excitement.

And I'm only and hour into the movie...

1:36 kid standing
2:50
3:00 teen whip
5:17 helmet in snow
6:47 persian messengers toward sparta
7:06
7:11
7:29
7:47 persian messenger holding up skulls
9:50 insult queen
11:08 leo turning sp
11:16 leo looks up sp
11:23 leo closeup eyes
11:25 spartan families
11:36 queen close
11:48 pull sword on persian messenger
12:00 leo speech about insulting sparta
12: 42 this is sparta
12:43 kick messenger
13:02 messengers falling
14:04 leo climb prophet
17:00 drunk girl lying down
17:27 drunk girl throw hair back
17:49 drunk girl dancing
18:35 prophet translating spartan downfall
20:10 leo and queen love
21:47 love scene
22:30 leo meets 300
22:50 leo walks by inspects 300
23:12 leo and general
24:58 queen hands leo shield beau scene
26:29 leo leaving sparta, darkening
27:20 300 walking
27:25 300 meet accadians
27:49
28:29 300 aoo
28:58 leo walking through sleeping 300
19:39 freak on hill
30:08 leo sparks behind
30:50 hurt kid walking over hill
33:00 death tree
33:19 freak looking down on 300
33:25 300 walking thru hot gates
33:57 looking down
34:00 persian boats
34:26 lightning
34:27 boats in storm
34:45
34:31 leo in storm w/ shield
34:56
34:41 300 celebrate in storm
36:52 overlook persian army
37:53 pan down cliff to persian messenger
38:22 persian messenger look up
39:30 persian messenger whip
39:34 spartan jump swing
39:52 sword point
41:47 into freak
43:55 freak mad on hill
44:30 persian army coming round corner beau
44:50 leo calling orders
44:59 "they die"
45:13 pers army parting
45:45 spartans arming
45:53 pers first attack
45:54 pers run
45:56
46:07
46 19
45:59 pan spartan phalanx
46:15 "give them nothing take everything"
47:02 phalanx
47:12
47:49 spartans push from behind
48:05
49:27 spartans flip shields forward
51:32
49:39 spartans push off cliff
49:43 cliff fall
50:12 arrows fly over
50:26 arrows land
51:07 leo shield arrows
51:20 sp run thru arrows
51:23 pers 2nd attack long shot
51:38
51:35 horses
51:57
52:02
57:13 intro xerxes
57:20

Good Advertising

Yeah. I think I want to design a typeface.

FIGHTING WITH YOUR COMPUTER

I know some people had to fight with Adobe Flash or AfterEffects last semester, so I'm posting this.



Apparently it took the guy 3 months to animate.

typography

As I mentioned in the previous post, I've been thinking about specializing within graphic design, and one of my options is type design. Which is where this QB logo came from.




Obviously this type isn't my own invention, that would mean I learned some pretty bad ass type design skills really fast. Instead it's based on type I found in a design book and I have no idea what the font is. I dig the flourishes.

Anyone who can tell me the name of that typeface (or one like it) gets a cookie.

Choices

I've been thinking alot recently about how graphic designers generally specialize in one area or another of design, such as corporate identity, animation, art direction, type design, photography, illustration, technical illustration, packaging, collateral etc. Mostly I've been wondering whether it's important to choose one or more specialties while in school, at least so that you can focus your education where you want it. If so, I'm torn between type design (though we haven't done that in any detail yet), and video/animation (the after effects project whet my appetite). If anyone else is reading my blog, post a comment saying what you'd pick at this point if you had to choose.

FLASH... AA-AAAHHH... SAVIOR OF THE UNIVERSE

FLASH... AA-AAAHHH... HE'LL SAVE EVERY ONE OF US!



This is what Jeff assigned me for his class

HE WAS WARNED

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to my new blog. Film and TV with Stan, Spring 2008.