Schlack Attack

As time has progressed, the five sheets of Styrofoam are finally starting to take on the shape of an actually pinup wall. As you can see, each board is designated to one of the four audio tour groups, as well as one board specified for the overall project.

The group project that I am in is the Bitter Tour. At this moment we have yet to come up with a clever name for the tour, however I was thinking something along the lines of Bit-Tour. It’s a bit cheesy, but my group members and I find it both clever and catchy.  At the moment, we have just finished our first draft of the audio tour script. From the feedback we have received, we will need to spend a large amount of time editing what we have. One of the major points brought up in the class discussion of our project was to have one character (Alex) be extremely bitter and cranky about how he feels about the School of the Arts. On the other hand, (Allie) will be counter balancing Alex’s negativity with her positive and upbeat personality about how great the Arts is. Another point that needs to be revised in all four groups is that each tour should focus on all areas of the Arts, and not just the Studio Art aspects.

This week my group will be meeting on Thursday morning at 8am, to not only rewrite certain parts of the script, but also explore the Claire Trevor School of the Arts more. This will give us a better sense of what is going on in other departments, such as Dance, Drama, and Music. I will update more about how the script evolves after my groups next meeting!

This morning a majority of my group and I met up to discuss some of the last few minor details about our audio tour before class started. While we were ready and prepared to present to the class, we were thankful that there were no presentations today. Instead, we discussed topics such as possible titles for our collection of audio tours. Some of the names we came up with that I particularly liked were: Participintour, MapPin, and DropPin. In addition, we also covered possibilities for our tours such as ways to collect feedback, offer the tours in different languages, and who our target audience will be. While these options will have to be discussed within our groups on how to tackle these issues, we will also be working on gathering research and stories to narrate our tours this weekend.

Towards the end of lecture, the class walked over to the Contemporary Arts Center where Bryan announced that the 3^rd floor Outreach classroom would be our design room for the rest of the quarter.

This room may look familiar from my previous post back in November 2011, when the CAC building had its grand opening.

So in addition to having our own workspace (at least for this quarter), we will be transforming the wall shown below, into a pinup wall. This will be the space where all the groups can hang up their ideas and work in progress projects. While the wall is barren at the moment, I cannot wait to see where the audio tour and map pin project will take us!

So this week in the Digital Arts program we have just started our first project of creating an audio tour of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. Last week in lab, Martim showed us how to use some of the audio equipment so we could record some sounds around the school.

This week in lab the class began to really tackle the project head on by breaking off into groups depending on our audio tour content preferences. I decided to become apart of the bitter tour group. Our original idea was to have two speakers for the tour, one male and one female, bicker throughout the tour. This notion might change depending on how our group meeting works out this afternoon.

One thing that I found was both very entertaining and relevant to my groups project was:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_X5uR7VC4M&list=ELME28FkTdZHo&index=1

This YouTube video is not only sarcastic and snarky but also very entertaining.  In the video, the artist is able to not only give a personal touch to the video, but he is also able to give an informational tour of how to use various tools on Photoshop. I personally hope to be able to achieve the same sort of balance between fun and educational in my group’s own audio tour.

We are giving a presentation this Tuesday as a sort of proposal on what our group’s outlined plan will be for this project. After receiving some feedback and direction from the professor (Bryan Jackson), the TA (Martim), and the class, I will update this blog on what our next step in the projects process will be!

So it’s been more than a year since I was last enrolled in a Digital Arts course, let alone updated this blog; but I am glad to be back and ready to go. I just finished my first week in Arts 60 and I can say without a doubt that there have been a lot of changes! Not only has the classroom changed location, the TA is someone new, none of my classmates are the same as last year, and almost all of the content from last quarter is different than the year prior when I had taken this course. I feel a tad nervous on what is to come since I feel unprepared, nonetheless, I hope to catch up on what the rest of the class has worked on from the previous quarter and get into the swing of things.

In discussion, Martim (the TA for this years Digital Arts series) began to describe an upcoming possible project for creating an audio soundtrack of a campus tour. He played us various examples of how music/sounds can create various emotions and senses of location. We listened to artists like Janet Cardiff, who had a very intimate connection with her audience, where The Mattson 2 had a light more surfer feel to their music. After listening to many other examples, I can see that the directions to take this project can expand into numerous directions. I have very little proficiency with sound editing outside simple modifications, so this will be quite the experience!

This week was packed full of stress and sleepless nights as finals came to a close. While I was studying and memorizing for classes like economics and business, it was a welcoming break to work on the Arts 50 final project. As you already know, the class as a whole has been working on the anteatr.com site as the final project for the quarter. While we were not yet able to create a live and running site, I am sure the class will continue working on the anteatr site more when we all get back together in the Winter.

On Monday, we celebrated our last day of class by having each group present their final draft of what had been accomplished over the quarter. Since the both the Coding and Content team had collaborated with the Design team, and much of their work was based off of the layout of the site, my group (Design) volunteered to go first. Over the previous weekend my group had spent hours with the Coding team trying to mesh the design from our team, with the capabilities of the coding team. While there were some differences, I felt it overall was a nice representation of what each group was able to bring to the table. One of the major issues that came about was when my group tried to match the color scheme and style to the anteatr word mark. Going back almost two weeks, I had posted twice on the Anteatr Facebook group questioning the Word Mark team for a color theme. One member of the Word Mark team had mentioned this logo to me, saying that this had been there final decision.

Unfortunately, no one else in the group was able to give us any confirmation of what the chosen colors or style was until the night before the presentation. By that time, it was too late for the Design team to get together again and edit all the pages that we had made on Saturday. However, the previous day, the Design team had gotten together, and was able to search through all of the Word Mark member’s blogs for a logo. Taking a risk, we used the most recently posted word mark we could find (the above image) which conveniently (or looking back now, coincidently) was also the logo the one member had mentioned  he thought was the final product.

During the actual presentation, the Design group started off by showing all the research we had done on websites up to this point. Due to a misunderstanding in an email, our group thought it was mandatory to show our research of websites and layouts that had influenced our final product. However, we were later corrected by the instructor, who said that at this stage in production it was now unnecessary to go back in time to present old findings.  One other issue that had arisen was that our group had not throught far enough into the future to the point of how to organize future projects that expand beyond this quarter’s work. After collaborating with the design team after class, we came to the desicion of using a drop down menu that organized project styles and dates by categories.

After it was all send and done, the class was in an overall positive agreement with the design of the anteatr.com website. So without further ado,  here is what the four website pages of the site will look similar to (click on the image for an enlarged preview). *Just a reminder: This is only the design layout of the site in picture form. On the actual website the coding will cause the preview to be slightly different, and of course all the content and pictures will be replaced by the work of the content team.*

Lastly, I would just like to say that I really appreciated all the work we have accomplished and all the new things we learned in this course. Without it I might have never knew that I had iMovie on my laptop, or for that matter how to use it. I also would never have created my own website, which I now see as a great value to me as an artist as a way to not only display my work, but to also communicate with the virtual world. So to that I would like to thank all my classmates, as well as Michael (TA) and Bryan Jackson (Instructor). I am very disappointed that I will not be able to continue this course series until next year. But, I will be taking it next year so until then I will continue to blog about life and all that it contains!

Yesterday was the big day for shooting the anticipated vlogs! It was quite an experience to say the least… at least for me. (I would just like to take this moment to say that I am a Studio Art major, which means I am only trained to do the visual arts like: painting, drawing, computer graphics, sculpting, ceramics, etc. In no means have I ever tried/ attempted to do a performance art piece or a drama exercise; so this project was a first for me in terms of acting.) Everyone in the class signed up for a ten minute shoot in the Calit2 building where we had set up “our bedroom.” My scheduled time was at 11am, so I arrived a little before 10:30am to make sure I was cool, calm, and collective before my clip.

Here is a little preview of what the set-up looked like right before it was complete, minus all the special lighting that was used for the actual shooting on the set:

Before we get more into the shooting, lets go back a few weeks so I can explain a little bit of what I would be saying during the vlog. Not too long ago I had watched a movie on ABC Family called “Cyberbully” which directly connected me to a discussion in class earlier this quarter on the exact same topic of bullying. Between the articles I researched, the movie, the class discussion, and of course social media networkings like Facebook and Twitter, I felt that I had a strong personal connection to the cyber society and the issues of bullying. Leading up to the shoot, I watched multiple vlogs on YouTube to get a sense of what I would be doing. I even recorded a few practice vlogs of what I wanted to say about cyberbullying. However, even in the confines of my own private bedroom, the videos were nerve racking and will therefore never be posted for anyone but me to see.

Now that you know what I will be talking about, lets skip back to the moment leading up to my big 11am shoot, which went a little like this: I walked into the E-media studio and was cheerfully greeted by Michael, the TA. Unfortunelty, I was less than thrilled to do the vlog shoot and became immediately nervous and camera shy. After Michael helped set up the camera and gave me a quick pep-talk, I made my best attempt to sit down and vlog like I had seen so many other YouTube vloggers do. Through out the whole shoot (which was suppose to be around 2-5 minutes long… although I doubt I was able to make it through that long), I became completely distracted on trying to look directly at the camera, wondering how loud I was suppose to talk or if the camera could hear me at all, and of course everything I had carefully planned out in my head came out as a word vomit of incomplete sentences and awkward pauses.

While I have yet to see the content of what was recorded, I can sadly say that I performed well-below the expectations I had desired. Even with my backgroud of being a national champion figure skater who was performed both nation and world wide for huge audiences on the web and live in person, I truly believe that vlogging is a unique type of art and skill that takes much more practice than one would expect. Needless to say, I am thankful for the practice vlogging I did and rehearsed dialogue of what I had wanted to say because without it, my vlog shoot might have been even more disastrous than it had actually been.

After it had been all said and done, all I can say is good luck to the editing group assigned for this project. I hope they are able to do the best they can with the little footage they got…at least from my performance.

With less than two class meetings left till the end of the quarter, the Digital Arts 50 class has been hard at work tying up the last few projects. Over the weekend, the Design team (minus Lauren) and Content team (well… just JP, Jeffery, and Diane) had a small get together as we made the final decisions of how to layout anteatr.com. By the end of the afternoon, we can to the conclusion of four main web pages. Each member of the design group that met up on Sunday, created one of the four wireframes for the website.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So after presenting our wireframes this past Monday, we can now start our next step in the creation of the website. This week, the Design group’s goal is to get the color scheme confirmed by the Word Mark group, and have the font style of Helvetica “okayed” by the Content team. From there, our group can add some text and color into the wireframes! We will then have to work closely with the Coding group over the weekend to ensure that the design and layout  of the website stays intact through WordPress as it goes up onto the actual website, which is to be presented next Monday for a final grade.

As Fall quarter comes to an end, the Digital Art minors continue to prepare for the upcoming vlog project. This week during lab, the class made a huge amount of progress as flats were screwed together, and the walls came up!

As you can see, the construction is really starting to look like an apartment bedroom, although there is still much to do in the room: painting two coats of white on the walls, designing the exact layout of the room, and putting in all the items that make the room more personable.

In addition to this huge class project, our class has been extremley busy working on our final project. Up to last week, our class had simply created different project teams to start researching different aspects of launching our final project: anteatr.com Don’t click on it yet though! It is temporarily under construction because it is still a work in progress, that will have its launch by early December… if all goes according to plan. While it is a class contributed website, the specific group I am working with is the Design team. Our main job is to design the layout of the website, however as our team quickly learned, without much direction of what the website is about and what other teams (content, coding, sound, graphics) had in mind for their input, it was extremely difficult to have a strong jumping off point. So the mission for this week is to not only decide as a group what we want out of the website, but to also collaborate with all the groups as a class to see what is both most effective and efficient on the creation of our, Digital Arts of UCI website. So far communication has been the biggest complication in this process. While it was quite simple for each group consisting of five or so people, to get together for a group meeting, it has been quite a struggle to get the who class together outside of our regular class hours to discuss what the site should be about and include. One solution that we have tried, is the creation of a Facebook group where we can all chat and leave messages about our ideas.

From the picture you can see a little bit of the great communication taking place, however one issue that has come up is the fact that not everyone in the class is participating. This makes it hard to know where we as a class stand, when not everyone is speaking/ typing up their ideas. For those of us have been participating on the message board though, I can confidently say that an immense amount of progress has been made. Hopefully by the end of the night, the whole class will be able to come down to a decision on what elements are necessary for the website in order for us to take the next step in the creation of our class’s (and future classes’s) Digital Arts website!

Taking a well deserved break from classes, on Wednesday, November 9, 2011, the Claire Trevor School of the Arts celebrated the grand opening of its newest addition, the Contemporary Arts Center. Accompanied by complimentary beverages and tapas, a quartet, an award-winning chorale group, and honorary speakers,the early festivities in the School of the Arts became the place to be. Upon entrance to the building, one became surrounded in an environment filled with creativity, innovation, and exploration. While each of the five levels contained individual rooms and studios that displayed various aspects of art (music, drama, dance, visual, performance, digital, interactive, etc.) I mainly stayed on the third floor. In a beautiful space overlooking the entrance to the CAC building, the room 3100 (Outreach Lab) had iPads on display featuring slideshow pictures and video works from both the Digital Arts and the Summer Outreach program. As a volunteer to monitor the installations created by the one and only Bryan Jackson, I was able to help keep the videos and slideshows playing on the iPads while promoting the Digital Arts and Outreach programs to audience members that visited. It was a very successful night filled with fun and excitement.

So this week in Arts 50 we did a lot of back and forth hauling of set materials from the Video Production Studio of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts, to the Calit2 E-meida room in the Engineering School, as preparation for our upcoming vlog project. While Monday and Tuesday’s trek was extremely productive in maneuvering bedroom items, stage flats, tools, and other materials, there is still a lot to be done. As we continue to “tidy-up” the E-media room, some of the students also began to work on screwing some of the stage flats together.

By the end of the day walls were going up, and the structure of a bedroom was starting to reveal before our eyes! With only three weeks left in the quarter, we will continue to work diligently on the set up and filming of the project. Can’t wait to see the final product! Keep checking in for updates and pictures of the whole process coming together.