A-Phlatt's Mixtape

While working at 747 Productions for my internship, Andre "A-Phlatt" Russel asked if I would be willing to design him an album cover for his upcoming mixtape - Mr. Feature Vol. I, The Double Disc Edition. I said sure, and came up with three variations before settling on this one. The design process was completed within 3 days.

The original image of A-Phlatt himself was not the best quality photo - colors were bland and the image was pretty blurry. After isolating him from the background, I converted it to a black and white image. I applied a light "Dark Strokes" filter in Photoshop to him, which provides a nice high-contrast smoothness without making it any blurrier. I used a gradient overlay to get that blue-pinkish purple color for A-Phlatt, and created a different gradient for the blues in the background. After looking at Lil Wayne's Carter IV album, we decided to use a fancier font (Snell Roundhand) for A-Phlatt's name to contrast with the grungy and bold type everywhere else (Impact font with some grunge brushes overlaid on top).

The city was created with merging several shapes of city skylines together, and is no city in particular as far as I know. I then added the splatter shapes below and merged the two and added a yellow stroke around everything to really make it pop. Using a few other brushes, I added the greens and yellow-red flourishes all around for a more soulful touch, like it is surrounding A-Phlatt (who looks pretty imposing over the city skyline). Overall I think it encompasses classiness and boldness at the same time. That QMG logo is semi-transparent, and is positioned to be kinda at the heart of the city, without interfering with it. I also created matching promotional flyers for the release - which is coming up on December 17th! Check out "She Betty Boopin'" below. (My flyer is at the beginning and end of the slideshow!) The song is pretty damn catchy...

White Stripes Wallpaper

To commemorate the return of Conan O'Brien and the appearance of Jack White on the new TBS show, I decided to get artsy-fartsy and make a desktop wallpaper. (By the way, if you havent seen the rockabilly performance that Conan and Jack did, look it up - it's pretty cool).

The main idea for the poster came from a poem I've been working on - it's still in the works, but the title is "Jack and Meg". The poem is a descriptive journey through the world that the White Stripes have created and their roles as children wandering and battling with Meg's wooden sticks and Jack's plastic guitar. (It definitely sounds better in the poem). I decided to focus on the ideals of the White Stripes, from the earlier days of Elephant and White Blood Cells, and kind of ignored the more experimental styles of Get Behind Me Satan. The duo themselves went back to their older style for tours promoting Icky Thump, so a few images are from that era as well.

I hunted around for some rolling grassy hills and found a great one with a beaten grass path right in the middle. I colorized it red, and then duplicated the hills with a different layer effect to create some of the highlights in the grass. For the white path, I just cut out that part, made it black and white, and messed with contrast/brightness. I took out some trees I didn't like, and removed the sky - since I would be creating my own. I messed with the Render Clouds filter and placed it over a pure red background and a very light vector starburst shape. I placed a peppermint candy "sun" right in the middle of the starburst, and added some inside and outside glow effects.

The skyline features a few larger than life images of Jack and Meg, and I messed with a few layer effects to get them to look how I wanted. Found a cool picture of an African elephant since they have bigger ears and are overall cooler than Indian elephants (no offense). I messed with positioning and gaussian blur to create a sense of perspective, and had a little Jack White leading the elephants with guitar in hand, like a Pachedermal Pied Piper. I wanted more images of the group, so I took the cover of Elephant, and had them sitting in the tall grass, with Jack looking straight up at the peppermint sun. The lightning effects were added to give it a little more "color" (white isnt a color, but I just wanted more white).

After creating the initial wallpaper, I realized the aspect ratio and sizing was a little off, so I also made a more horizontally-friendly version using the clone tool to "stretch" out the landscape, and added more lightning (below). It was a lot of fun to do, but it makes me miss the White Stripes...obviously love all of Jack's other endeavors, but there's something really special about Jack and Meg together.

Rack Room Shoes :30 Ad (2)

This is another commercial for Rack Room Shoes, and the assignment was the same: create a 30 second commercial using hours of footage by the same guy who directed the other one. This one is pretty self explanatory, I color-corrected the whole video with a little more yellow to give it a south-western flavor. The rotating shoes at the end was done with some chroma keying effects (green screen) and was the first time I ever used that effect. (I just watched some tutorials online to figure out the basics). The music is "Hello Operator" by the White Stripes, and it's only a coincidence that there is currently a Converse commercial using it nowadays. Or maybe they got the idea from me...

747 Productions Logo

It was a bit of a daunting task: I had only been working at my internship for a few weeks when they asked if I could redesign the logo. I admit, I knew that it needed some serious work the first time I saw it, but I never really thought I was gonna do anything with it. Here's the original stacked up against mine:

The most glaring problem of the original logo was that the design couldn't exist anywhere but a white background. If you wanted to slap it on a poster or something, it would have to include an ugly white rectangle behind it to make it stand out. The easiest way to fix this was to put the contents into a shape so that it at least has some kind of unique form.

I wanted to keep the same basic color scheme, since it had to fit with the same website. I messed with the spacing in "747" to make it fit better in the circle, and wanted it to have that cool shiny web 2.0 button look. So I messed with these layer effects: Gradient Fill, Inner Shadow, Inner Glow, and Bevel/Emboss. I left the main text pretty much as is for it's simple elegance (the font is Monotype Corsiva). I gave the whole shape a slight gray to light-gray gradient, and a light blue outline to tie the colors together.

Rack Room Shoes :30 Ad

In my non-linear post production class, all are assignments are given to us with all the footage, and it is up to us to turn it into something useful. These projects are "tests" that are given to prospective editors to assess their skill level and creativity.

For this project we had to create a 30 second ad (which of course means 29 seconds and 29 frames - that last frame is used to signal the next commercial). The add could not be any longer or we would lose points (makes sense to me). We were only told to use 3 computer graphics: "Smart Shoes" "Dumb Boyfriend" and "Rack Room Shoes" (The shoe company for which the commercial was made for in the mid 90's)

The premise: a daughter invites her new boyfriend out to lunch with her parents at a diner. The father is skeptical of the new guy, and the mom is trying to play peace keeper and just have a nice family outing. Meanwhile, the new boyfriend (Judd) engages the girl in some good ol' fashioned footsie. She gets up and leaves (probably cause she was getting too excited...) and Judd realizes that he was just feeling up Dad.

The difficult part came from culling together the right "scenes" of the commercial from literally hundreds of takes. The project was headed by a first-time director, and he didn't quite know what he wanted. So there were no less than 20 takes of the boyfriend walking into frame. It's kinda nice not having to go out and shoot once in a while...but at the same time, it was super frustrating knowing that these shots could have very easily been gotten without all this hassle. There were also entire sequences and lines that would have been impossible to include in the 30 seconds.

I chose the Black Keys' tune "Howlin' For You" (off of their latest album, Brothers) because the commercial was intended for girls in the south. The southern-blues song has the right mix of sexy and playful moods and has a fun sing-songy chorus. I made the graphics in Photoshop because I thought it would be a good idea to manipulate a single image of text and the arrow instead of using Avid's title tool and then creating another arrow. I also grabbed the Rack Room logo (thanks Google) and threw a light glow around the .png. I thought it turned out pretty good.

Keep in mind...this was shot in the mid 90's...so don't go blaming me for non-HD and whatnot.

Eiffel Tower Power Lines

I always had this grand idea of taking power lines and super imposing the Eiffel Tower in place of each regular thingy. It just kinda reminded me of it - the metal structures holding up each line were just stripped-down, less Parisian version of the Tower itself.

It was done a few summers ago - before I fully refined all my Photoshop techniques. I wish I could say I took the original photograph, but it was actually the second image I found on Google (hope no one minds...) But I mostly used the Clone Tool to paint the sky over the original structures. I then placed a high-contrast image of the Eiffel Tower in each spot where it belongs. I shrunk and lowered the opacity for those that were further away to enhance the illusion of perspective. I also increased the contrast to get a slightly more dramatic sunset. It was just for fun, and was my desktop background for a while.

The Social Network: Movie Review

As Published in The Bradley Scout

When you start a movie off with a White Stripes song, it tends to get my attention and high expectations follow. (I won’t go into detail how Napoleon Dynamite fooled me with similar pretenses...)

Last Saturday, my date and I barely made it in our seats when “Ball and a Biscuit” began rumbling and the Columbia lady popped on the screen. The first scene immediately set the film’s tone and cleared up any confusion that may have occurred from watching the trailers.

Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook Founder/CEO) is a big fat jerk.

The opening scene has Zuckerberg narcissistically ranting about joining exclusive clubs at rapid fire pace at his then girlfriend, while demeaning her intelligence. He is mechanical, unrelenting, and completely self-absorbed and it leads to his girlfriend dumping him and calling him a…well…a big fat jerk (paraphrased).

Thus begins Zuckerberg’s maniacal quest to get recognition. He does it all with relative ease, and his genius never comes into question. After hacking into Harvard’s computer network to create a Hot-or-Not type website, he is approached by some fellow students to program a website that would connect every Harvard student with pictures and personal information. Zuckerberg agrees, and then doesn’t talk to those guys for a while.

In the meantime, he goes to his best (only) friend with an idea for a college social site. His best friend becomes part of the new company, and invests all the initial startup money. Later on down the line, Zuckerberg produces “The Facebook”, ignores that first project for Harvard students, and then leaves his partner and friend in the dust.

The movie weaves in and out of the chronological narrative of the startup of Facebook, and two separate trials of Zuckerberg’s former friends and business partners suing him.

The film artfully unfolds by telling the story from the perspectives of Zukerberg, his then-best friend, Eduardo, and the Harvard guys who asked for the original website. Jesse Eisenberg plays the prodigy-hacker Zuckerberg with the perfect mix of a little bit of vulnerability and a lot of social personality disorders. Sometimes I caught myself liking his “stick it to the man” attitude, but then I was quickly reminded that he’s not being rebellious for any good reason other than furthering his little computer empire. Eduardo, played by Andrew Garfield, offers the most dynamic performance as the once-loyal and only real friend of Zuckerberg. Justin Timberlake also excels as the charismatic and wild card personality of Sean Parker, founder of Napster. The film functions excellently as a character study of the strange habits, motivations and intricacies of friendships and business partners of our time.

The actual soundtrack differs from the widely distributed trailer featuring a choir covering Radiohead’s “Creep”, which has an awe-inspiring yet melancholy feel. It differs for good reason – Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails scored the movie with a characteristic industrial-noise background that adds a dark and foreboding undertone throughout the movie.

The fitting soundtrack aside, the whole movie feels wonderfully tense as it goes back and forth with accusations, lies, excuses, and leaves the audience grasping for truth. The message of the film is vague enough for you to do a double-take before you actually declare him a jealous and misunderstood tragic hero who just needed to belong.

I was only really disappointed with social commentary that was only hinted at with Timberlake’s character. Instead of examining how Facebook changed business, social networking, and the Internet itself – the zeitgeistal shift is overshadowed by a story of ambition and greed. While still valid topics, I still cannot get over how this particular big fat jerk conquered our culture to become the CEO of a $25 billion company. See the movie to understand the history of that little part of your life that you utilize every single day.

Grade: A-