a light fantastic

and fantastic it is! colt has a materials class this term. for one of his projects he decided to make a light table. i have always wondered how any of these kinds of things are built. it was amazing to see colt create this beautiful table. he made the box, spun the wood on a lathe, stained and painted the legs, wired the electrical, sanded the acrylic, then tada........a light table. it is really cool looking and worth the house smelling like home depot for a week.

reality check

so, this guy came and spoke at my school the other day. he has his own design studio in new york and he is kind of a big deal in the motion graphics world. at the end of his great speech, he had some of the upper division students stick around for a challenge. i was fascinated by that idea so i stuck around. he gave this challenge and wanted to see storyboards and animatics the next morning at 10:00am (he gave the challenge around 9:30pm). so i thought, why not try? it could only be a good experience, and worst case scenario, if it doesn't go so good, i'm only in motion 1 and at least i tried? WRONG... not to go into too much detail because i know that most people become board with long blog entries. suffice it to say, he hated my idea and didn't see the connections and i was the only one out of the eight or nine students there who got pretty negative feedback. on top of that there were a handful of smirks and laughs from some of the people behind me. the words of kenny rogers came to mind 'you got to know when to hold em, know when to fold em, know when to walk away and know when to run'. so it was one of those things. i decided to fold my cards and after that i called it a day, blew of my next class and came home and took a nap. these two sketches above were the first two of my storyboards sketches.

there is nothing like a spilt coke in your bag to ruin the fun

this last week my school hosted a conference and i was able to make it to the last day. SERIOUS PLAY was the subject and name of the conference. there were some interesting speakers and the provided food and snacks were good. towards the end of the day i reached in my bag to get my sketch book and found that the can of coke i put in there earlier had a small hole and coke was misting out all over everything. so all my stuff was ruined and my leather bag had almost a whole coke in the bottom of it. that coupled with some dude rambling on about giant puppets kind of put me in a bad mood. i think i'm not really the conference type, but it was pretty enjoyable.

one down seven to go

well after fourteen good weeks my first term at art center has come to an end. tara and i just got back from the senior show at my school and it was super wild and super inspiring. most of the work was of face melting / gut busting quality. there was so much talent in that building tonight. it is very humbling and inspiring. in my last class today, my professor said before we left: "everything you design will one day, sooner or later end up in a landfill. you are all talented designers but you are dispensable as designers, however you are not dispensable as sons and daughters, husbands and wives, brother and sisters.... so keep your priorities straight and a good perspective." i liked that.