Jason Minsky Creating A Portfolio

Jason Minsky was born in London in 1968. He studied 3D Design at Manchester Polytechnic from 1989-1992 followed by an MA in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art from 1997-1999. His practice combines performance, photography, installation, design, crafts, events and interventions. The main points of this talk was about investing in your self. How it is important to put only your best work through and don’t give up. Always apply for opportunities and don’t be disappointment in rejection. A professional portfolio can be a careful record detailing one’s specific accomplishments attained over an extended period of time

1. To recognize the what a professional portfolio is and its purposes.

2. To be aware of the component parts that constitute an effective portfolio.

3. To understand how to develop, compile, and present a portfolio in a professional manner.

4. To utilize the professional portfolio effectively as an interview instrument.

http://www83.homepage.villanova.edu/richard.jacobs/EDU%207250/index6.html

[electronically accessed 28/4/2012]

In my course and the field of motion graphics that I am interested in, I would be looking more to create more of a digital portfolio, as in a show reel of animation and motion. When creating this you would look at creating similar attributes as stated above. Obviously you wouldn’t want to bore the viewer so you would have to take into context that you would only be showing snippets of your work into one video. This doesn’t come easy because most animation and motion are made to a specific audio to suit the content. So sourcing an audio that would suit all of the content is key.

When watching Jason Minskys Portfolio show reel, in my honest opinion I thought that it was amateurish. There were many videos shown which can be seen at.

http://www.jasonminsky.com/blog/current-projects

[electronically accessed [28/4/2012]

The videos just seemed to be piled one after the other with no editing skill of merging the clips and each clipped seemed to drag on far to long instead of just showing the best specific parts which was contradicting considering this is what he said at the start of the lecture. Looking at other show reels online a more professional approach of work would be.

[vectormeldrew electronically accessed 30/4/2012]

This show reel has a feel of professionalism, it works with the music and is a fluid motion from start to finish showing snippets of the best part of vectormeldrew work.

Coming from an employers point of view Johnson Banks has written an article about a professional portfolio on his thought of the week. From his point of view and the company he runs, he gets alot of applicants of digital portfolios all the time and rarely seems a physical portfolio for the amount of numbers applied. So a portfolio even if digital has to stand out. Sending your portfolio digitally isn’t enough you have to entice the reader to view it within the email sent. A company as prestige as Johnson Banks wants to see work that is out of the ordinary and pushes the boundaries of graphic design.

http://johnsonbanks.co.uk/thoughtfortheweek/index.php?thoughtid=190

[electronically accessed 30/04/2012]

 

Brewny Rowland – Ffresh

Ffresh is a student moving image festival for wales giving awards for film and animation to help make a link for students and the industries to shape students for future. Ffresh is holding a competition next year 2013 at Glyndwr between the 13th-15th of February. This could give me a great opportunity to get involved with some of the the film and animation side of the competition. I would be more interested in collaborating with some of the film students, working on the animation and aftereffects work. I would like to get involved with the title sequences or motion tracking as this is what i am mainly interested in on my course and the direction that I want to take. Also after speaking to Brewny Rowland there is an opportunity to create and design a poster campaign for Ffresh next year at Glyndwr. From a career point of view getting involved with competitions and collaborating with other students is something that my portfolio lacks. Also this kind of competition helps to get you noticed in the real world. I am at the moment trying to get my work noticed more by inserting my work in posts and twitter. But I would like to focus my work within film and design, specifically the design part. In year 3 we have the freedom to choose our own briefs and I could incorporate this competition into my work. I am always a keen student, trying to broaden the media that I work in and with it being a local competition and based in wales this really appeals to me.

Copyright with Janet Jones

What can be copyrighted? In the growing industries copyright is one of the main attributes to keep unique work specific to the person that created it. Copyright is the right which is completely exclusive to control reproduction and commercial exploitation of the users creative work. It protects work such as illustrations, photographs, and graphic design. Although there are certain circumstances for work made for hire. Generally the work created by the author is consider the owner of the work. Although if you are an employee of the author or creator of any work that is created by you, it is automatically the property and copyright of your employer. This usually only applies to full time employees. Although if you are creating work for an independent contractor i.e. work for hire such as websites or a compilation of work your work, this will legally be made ‘work for hire’ unless a contract is signed saying otherwise. I recently entered a competition creating a bottle design that I have blogged about. In this competition I had to sign a contract saying that all copyright is retained by the company running the competition.

When you create graphic art for a client under the idea of work for hire. Your client therefore is paying for the rights to use the creator’s work under their copyright. This can be one of the most important things with the client and identifying the copyrights within the contact between the creator and the client. The creator will own the copyright to the work unless there has been a signed copy handing over the rights to the client. You can also lend copyright to your client. Copyright within graphic design consist of a bundle of several different exclusive rights. The relevant rights to graphic designers are 1) reproduction 2) display and 3) making adaptations to the work created. Each of these rights can be owned separately. This gives the artist or designer the option to work with the client and still use their existing work. For example you can grant a publisher the right to reproduce your painting as a book cover, and you can keep the right to reproduce it as a print.

http://www.cla.co.uk/copyright_information/copyright_information

(Electronically accessed 20/4/2012, CLA Version 1.0/PS/20/10/2009/Copyright information)

Clients frequently want to own the rights of the copy right and in my opinion I can see why. The basis of asking someone to create design work for the company the client would obviously like to own the rights to have freedom within their design or brand. On the other hand it is important for the author to keep the copyrights of their work. For example say you create a weekly illustration for a magazine. If the author didn’t own the copyrights then the client could re-use this illustration in other content and then could even adjust it to be used in something like a logo. I think when offering to sell the copyright with the client it would depend on the amount of work done for it. Say it was a one off job that was a great idea you might want to keep the copyright to benefit your company or employer. Although if it is a big job where the majority of the work is done and there is no reason to really keep the copyright then it would be good to release or sell it to maintain a good relationship with the client. The other good reason to keep the copyright is to ensure you that you can create other work for other clients of similar look. Otherwise you would infringe the copyrights of the client saying you are using their work.

Copyright is the exclusive right to control reproduction and commercial exploitation of your creative work. Copyright protects any kind of artwork, including illustrations, photographs and graphic design. Except under certain circumstances, you own the copyright in your work at the moment you create it in a “fixed” form of “expression.” A fixed form of expression is any tangible medium that can be perceived by humans, including traditional forms—such as paintings, sculptures, writings—and new forms that require a machine to perceive (e.g., GIF files, CDs, websites).

In March 1981, popular author Dick Francis published a book called ‘Reflex’. The book itself is most certainly a copyright work, but lets imagine the situation if copyright applied to the title in its own right.

• Copyright law prevents a work from being copied or adapted without the owner’s permission, so if someone else uses your work without permission, you can take action against them.

In thisexample, this would mean that anyone using the word ‘Reflex’ would now be in breach of copyright. Also as copyright prohibits unauthorized adaptation, use of derived words like, reflexes, reflexing, reflexed may also be prohibited. In effect no-one could ever use these words in a document.

In my own opinion copyright is completely necessary for artist because the work is so broad and being a creative person knowing that you own the rights to your creation is important. I have to be very careful in work I create especial in the field of motion graphics. The hardest part is finding audio that can be used and isn’t under copyright infringement. I have mainly used either audio from websites that release free audio for use like http://www.sounddogs.com or very classical music where the copyright has been released because of the amount of time the composer has been deceased. With audio and film its the life of the composer plus 70 years and then the copyright is released. The depth that copyright goes can be extreme in cases and even down to sound and colour but this can be necessary on the situation especially with larger bigger corporations.

http://copyrightservice.co.uk/  (Electronically accessed 20/4/2012)

Energy Strucual Bottle Design

I was given the choice of several live competition briefs. Initially I chose 2 to give me some variation. They were packaging for cakes and wraps and a new design shape for a relentless bottle. After playing with ideas for both briefs, it was clear to me that my bottle ideas were stronger and I felt that this particular brief would be more challenging and give me options to explore new media. The brief itself is just to design a new and exciting bottle shape with no logos or graphic designs. Normal bottle shapes are so similar and to create something new and different would be a challenge also taking into fact the eco-friendly side and how the bottle is packaged and displayed.

I firstly needed information and inspiration. I knew that the bottle is to be designed for Relentless. So I researched the product and found that the market age range is 16-25 with the idea of sports and revitalization. So I took on the challenge looking at different extreme sports. I didn’t take standard sports into the picture because this bottle needs to be something fresh and also looking at relentless last television advert you could see that their focus was more around extreme sports and energy.

The main point I wanted to design was a bottle that was stylish, different from the competition, environmentally friendly and high display quality. After drawing basic sketches and designs and looking at other bottles of similar context for inspiration, I came up with a unique design. This design was meant to represent a cliff edge and that’s where I came up with the name for the bottle, the Edge bottle. I looked at many different rock climbing clubs and walls and how the faces and shapes were random and uneven. This shape appealed to me because it gave a very raw unique look.

The basic shape was hard to create. I got introduced to a Maya a 3D modeling and animation program. On this I started with the basic form of my model.

I thought because of the shape I wanted the bottle to be able to slot into each other when displayed. So I had to make every side similar but I still wanted the shape to be random. I got this idea from a similar bottle that I found on the NWSAD.

After a lot of playing about with the bottle in Maya I achieved this creating a shape that could fit but looked different from any angle. I did this by reflecting both sides of the bottle like a mirror.

The final obstacle was looking on a more realistic side of the bottle and researching a material that would work when manufactured. Because the bottle has square edges and obtuse angles the bottle would not be easy to hold if the material was too rigid. I found a material called Low density polyethylene which can be vacuumed formed and is flexible but durable. Also it is recyclable which was a key point in finding my material.

Overall I thought that I had met the brief and gone beyond of what it asked. I took into consideration the packaging the display quality and space awareness and how to keep the bottle environmentally friendly. If I had a bit more time I would have created a scale model of the bottle using the 3D cad machine in the CCI building. Also I think I could have shown the bottle in different colours as the relentless brand has many different flavors all displayed as different colours and it would have been nice to show some variety. I created a theme to work around the bottle and the name I created ‘Edge’ adding a background and logo to the mounted boards. The bottle is designed for people between the age of 16-25. It shows excitement design and a different visual that no other bottle has seen or been produced.

Process of a Typeface (PDP)

The brief was set to find a typeface that represented a random word that was given to each individual student. I was given the word ‘process’. Initially I went through all the typefaces in my library. Then narrowing them down to my favorite five. With all five displayed, I went through the different weights and came down to the two final fonts, Klavika and amplitude book. Amplitude book is used as the main typeface for Wallpaper Magazine and Klavika is just a standard typeface that i acquired. Both of these types have similar angles on the arches and lobes. I decided to choose Klavika medium because there was more consistency within the letter forms and the angles matched on similar letters as where amplitude was too varied. Klavika is modern and yet has a smooth natural curved feel giving it a great look to the word process.

The next step was to develop the word out of context and also using the typeface chosen. I decided to create an animation playing on the word process using it as the idea for my storyboard. ‘The process of type.’ My inspiration came from an image from the NWSAD collective.

I took this image and turned it into an animation. I decided to keep the colour scheme the same because I thought the blue on the grey complimented each other and the subtle colours gave a great feel of creation. Also the highlighted blue is effective but not overpowering. Originally I saw an animation created by a student at Glyndwr University on the NWSAD. The video is called ‘The History of a Title Sequence’ and shows the basic creation of the typeface. This video creates typefaces using a structured grid. I decided that my animation should show the process of creating the typeface that I had chosen. I also had been looking at Sebas and Clim, which are a London based creative duo with over 7 years of experience in motion graphics. Together they introduce a young, fresh vision with flair, merging refined design with thoughtful and fluid animation. From their video ‘Tiny Story’ I focused on the fluid motion of the movement and creative animation. I decided that I wanted to incorporate the same fun and fluid motion into my movie.

After creating the structure and grid for what the letter forms would sit in, I decided that this was the part of the animation to be influenced by Sebas and Clim. I took the illustrator file and imported it into after effects and animated each part individually. Giving each part bounce and life, really playing on the idea of elasticity as the video Tiny Story does. Giving the viewer the feel that the video or animated is alive.

Now that I had a basic structure I brought in the letter forms as if they were been dropped from an ink blotch. This was to give the idea that it was more created by hand. Then looking back at my first image of inspiration I brought in the names of the parts of the letters to turn the animation more informative for the viewer. I decided to turn these parts 3D to give the image more depth of field and also to take your attention away from what the word actually says ‘process’ so that it is revealed at the end of the animation. Also one of the most effective and bold choices of this animation was the decision to do it in portrait. I felt that this gave it a difference that no other animation gives and also draws your attention to the center of the video and also a good use of space when the video is made full screen.

The music used is Bach symphony no.1. I also can use this piece of music because the copyright has expired. After 70 years of the death of the composer the copyright is left open and I was freely aloud to use the music.

Overall I was very pleased with the outcome of the video and thought it met the brief. The visual works well with the audio giving it a rich fluid feel. My favorite part was animating the lines and structured grid. Designing different ways in which they could animate and trying to bring them to life. I still feel the video lacks something and needs more exciting visuals but considering that I made the video in 2 days I proud of the outcome. Also I have had a few comments that maybe the video doesn’t suit the portrait view so maybe this is something I need to go back and look at.