Photography

[click to view - 3 images total]

My wife and I recently purchased a Nikon D200 for our upcoming trip to Africa. We felt that pictures would be better memories and last longer than some expensive trinket we could find while over there. Since then, we've been taking photos around town trying to brush up our photography chops. I'm finding that I'm pretty rusty, but I'm having a lot of fun with it. It got me thinking of what I feel are the last 'art' photos I took. Some black and white film shots that I developed in the darkroom. Back before photoshop ruled my life. Don't get me wrong.. I love photoshop and the creative freedom it gives you, but there's something about actually going through the process of developing your film and trying to produce the best print possible with the proper contrast and exposures. Also, finding the perfect filter to use and the smell the of the development chemicals.. I just sometime miss that creative process. But I digress.. I love this new camera. Now, just to learn it well so not to miss any opportunities while on safari in Africa. I've posted some of my photos I developed through the now archaic methods and one of my dog, because he rocks.

The chair is a light study. I found it in an abysmal abandoned house on the outskirts of town. I truly believe if the blair witch house existed it would be this house. I never felt at ease here, but I really do love this picture.

The woman is a motion study. It was a series of photos that told a story and this is one of the final panels. The whole project was of her running from someone through the woods. I believe I shot this and the chair with a stock Pentax camera and a 50mm lens.

The dog is my dog - Brody. I took it with a point-and-shoot sony digital camera. Enjoy!

SCUD!

[click to view - 2 images total]

V1: Widescreen, 4x3
V2: Widescreen, 4x3

Back in the day one of my favorite comics was Scud: The Disposable Assassin. It was written and illustrated by Rob Schrab - one of the men behind the movie Monster House and the Sarah Silverman Program. The long and short of it is the comic was supposed to be concluded in issue 21. Well through a series of absurd happenings and unfortunate events (that can be found here) the series stopped with issue 20, leaving all the readers wondering how it all ended. Flash-forward 10 years to now and Rob decided to finish it and compile all the comics into one book. Fans rejoice. Well a few days ago he posted the cover art on his blog and I really liked it so I decided to make it into a desktop. After creating the cover desktop I decided to make a variant with just the main character - Scud. After all this I was pretty happy with how they turned out and figuring Rob was a cool guy, I felt he may like them too. I emailed them to him and that night I received a reply telling me how much he liked them and that he set one as his desktop. I got excited and geeked out a bit... prompting this post. Thanks for liking them Rob.

The artwork was done by Rob Schrab and the cover was colored by Jack Gray. The handguns in the background were also drawn by Rob. I took those elements and created the layout and design in photoshop. Hope you like them. Use the links above to download them.

Convos Season Opener 2007

[click to view - 5 images total]

For the last few years I've had the opportunity to work on creating the season opener video for Purdue Convocations. It's been a good working relationship and everyone has been happy with the past products. The convos dept creates a season opener brochure and provides the Adobe InDesign project for us to pull elements from. The idea is to make the whole feel of the edit fit with the brochure so the look of the piece draws directly from the provided elements they give us.

I'm posting the opening graphics that I created for the whole video. I started this graphic by creating one image that contained every category in one long comp. I originally was going to set the layers to 3D and pan across them with a camera. Once we started to make it, we decided to make it more dynamic by having the camera push through the individual categories to the music. What we came up with is below. I created all the comps and the other graphics designer, JC Trombley, put in the camera motion. I then polished and fleshed out each individual comp and added motion to the elements. I then smoothed out the camera movement and added the convos title on the end. You can see the full comp above.

The Completed Opener:


The whole opener took us about 3 days to complete. I pulled elements from InDesign, edited them in Illustrator and Photoshop and compiled the finished comps in Photoshop. I then pulled them into After Effects and added 3D motion to them all. Above you can see the finished motion version.

Dodge Ball!

In my last post I talked about fun things I've worked on for Young Life so I decided to post a 30 sec. commercial my friend Matt Wallace and I made for a YL event. It's a commercial for an all-area dodge ball tournament that was shown at the various clubs around town leading up to the event. We just thought it would be funny to have some guys training up for the tournament with bad 80's big-hair rock music and cheesy graphics so that's what we made. We shot the whole thing in about 1 hour and edited it that night. Matt did all the vocals and V/O and I edited it and made the graphics. The graphics were all made in after effects and I just used the stock lightening effect which I always found a bit cheesy. Throw in some explosions and in-your-face 3D text and call it a night. Overall the commercial was well received by the kids and the closing "DODGE BALL!" gut-belting lyric that Matt threw in at the end became the de facto rock phrase to yell randomly at clubs the remainder of the year.