Reflection

     Four years of e-Communication and here I am sitting in my last class on my last day as I write this reflection. I'm still trying to figure out what happened and where the time went. I remember filming for the first e-Comm promo video from my first year like it was yesterday. I remember making those first connections and meeting new people. Time flew by, but that time didn't fly by in vain.

     The amount of things I learned during my time in e-Comm cannot be written down on a single blog post, so I'll stick with the main bullet points.

Deadlines: Deadlines are a must and you have to be responsible for your own time. If you let something sit there without doing any work on it, nothing will get done.

Communication: You cannot be isolated and introverted if you're going to advance anywhere in any media field. You have to build relationships early and effectively and be able to collaborate with anybody-no matter how little you two get along.

Take Criticism: Criticism can hurt but it's always a good thing. Nothing would ever improve without critique, so it's important to know how to take it. Rarely will the intention be to hurt you, but even if it is, take the notes with grace and be able to react well to it and make adjustments based on the comments.

     Deadlines: The past two years, I have been largely responsible for my own deadlines, but it's not as easy as circling a date on the calendar. I have had large projects sit and stew while I sat idly by until I saw that date come up quickly and I panic and spend hours and hours working on them for several days at a time trying to finish.

Communication: Planning Route Sixteen was not an easy task, and it would have been much harder doing it on my own. Thankfully, it taught me how to properly collaborate and communicate with others to put out the best show and projects that we are/were able to.

Take Criticism: I've entered projects into e-Magine the past two years and each year they tore into it. Thankfully, though, I took their notes and rolled with them. I improved the project that didn't place Junior year and got it placed by Senior year.

     An obvious weakness of mine is procrastination/distraction. It is a little too easy for me to blow off a huge project so I can slack off during the hour until it becomes too late to make something the best that it can be. However, this wasn't for nothing. I was able to understand my weaknesses before something majorly important came before me in college. I learned what I need to do to fix this before it becomes severely problematic.

A strength of mine is my communication. The last 4 years have taught me the importance of communication, and I have been able to make a lot of collaborative projects because of my communication skills that I have acquired.

     I figure I will be able to keep doing freelance animation in college even though I'm not going to be studying it in school. I will be able to use my communication skills to land jobs and be able to work well with people once I enter the professional field concerning my degree.

     If I have one regret, though, it's that I didn't squeeze everything out of e-Communication that I did. I too often used it as an excuse to jump on the computer a few hours a day, and I wish I would have spent more time doing what I came here to do instead of what I'm supposed to leave at home. If there was something to change, it would be my work ethic and mentality towards e-Comm.

     e-Communication was easily one of the best decisions I've made in my life. It brought me to a school I love with some of the most creative minds in the school district with opportunities that I didn't thing were possible. All in all, thank you e-Communication for helping me become the person I am.

Route 16

Route Sixteen

Concept:

     The object was to find an alternative to the normal demonstration that occurred for the seniors. In the past, seniors were to stand in front of their peers and teachers and professionals in an auditorium with their work in the background. There were flaws in this method and the major question that was brought up was: When will this be useful for e-Communication students after this?

     The answer was simple: it will not be. Companies will rarely ask for a formal stand-up presentation of a portfolio, so training students to present this way seemed arbitrary.
With this in mind, we quickly determined that the best solution was to make the event more of a fair than a presentation. Each student would be allowed to have their own table and talk to potential employers/family/friends at their own pace/leisure and be able to take a more individualized approach.

Planning:

     For the five major strands e-Communication has (Animation, Convergence Journalism, Graphic Design, Video Production, and Web Production), a student leader was chosen and I was honored to take on the leadership role for the Animation strand. We began to meet almost four months before the event to plan every small detail.

     First on the table was a theme. This process took roughly a month alone just for the concepts to build on their own before one was narrowed down. Several of the ideas were more professional such as Expose, Reveal, etc., but ultimately, we decided that e-Communication was not supposed to be formal. One idea that was thrown out was Journey, and instead of sticking with that name, I used a small idea from that to build the main theme: Route Sixteen.

     To build off that, we just wrote down the things we thought of when we heard Route Sixteen. The main ideas were road maps, interstate signs, roads etc. This, of course, was all pertinent to the graphic design leader, Jess Richards (https://www.behance.net/jessicarichards1022). Soon thereafter, she had the logo and color scheme available, and we were very impressed.
     After the logo was done, we got right to work on the website and the animation. I was asked to take on the animation of the logo for the website and show of the night.
     Having this task, I immediately began sketching concepts and ideas that I could make later depending on how much I liked it. My first goal was to have everything sort of fly in on its own (left), but because I couldn't get the logo in separate pieces, it didn't work out like that. So I started thinking more about how I could use the car at the bottom of the logo. I thought about having it just drive to the right with a pan through a forest or road, but it didn't seem like it was enough, so I put it around a circle and had it spin around until it hit the sign and the circle around it would fade. I still felt like it was a little boring, so I added some scenery to combine my first landscape idea with this one. Initially, I put way too much in it and had it do too many rotations so that it was difficult to look at and it strained your eyes. So i got rid of a lot while still making it look full and slowed the rotation speed until I got the final result on the left.



     After I was done animating, we still had a lot to plan before the show. We took straight to Pinterest and saving ideas we liked until we came up with our plan: Every student would be given a gray tablecloth over their 4'x4' table wit ha nameplate with their "stop" in the show. For example, I was the 4th stop, so my nameplate had a number 4 on it with the hexagon from the original logo. Students would also be given their own computer to display their work over their 4 years in e-Communication and Graphic Design students got a backdrop to hang up some of their other work. The endorsed students also got a sign to signal that they were endorsed and students were encouraged to bring something extra that was pertinent to e-Communication and important to them. Once everything was done, the planning was complete, and we just had to wait for the show to begin.

Execution:

     On Thursday, April 28th, it was time for Route Sixteen. Even though the event didn't start until 6:00, our doors were opened at about 5:30 and people began going around at that time. Parents came, professionals, former students, and many more just to witness the spectacular event we put together. Even though the planners were presenting and participating in the event, it was awesome seeing all of the work we put into it come together into one beautiful night.

Most people that came were interested in just about everybody's work because of the diversity of said work across all 50 something seniors. Everybody participating put a lot of work into it and, as someone who helped to plan it, it meant a lot that others cared as much as I hoped they would.

As for myself, I had my family come and even had a few friends come surprise me after they both said they were busier earlier. After boasting the e-Communication program, it felt great to walk the walk and prove to them how great our program truly is.

The Ed Sullivan Show Presents

The Ed Sullivan Show Presents:

Since the beginning of the school year (August, 2015), I have been working on a project modeling the Beatles' most recognizable instruments from their first string of performances on The Ed Sullivan Show. This includes Paul McCartney's Hofner Bass, John Lennon's Rickenbacker, and, of course, the iconic 4 piece Ludwig Oyster drum set of Ringo Starr. 

The project originated because I wanted to make some changes to the drum model I sculpted last year (left) and make it more realistic. Some notes I received were that I needed to have more faces on each cylinder to smooth it out a little bit, make everything more proportional to each other and so on. When I learned I no longer had the .mb file I did all of my work on, I had to start from scratch, so I started exactly where I started last year: the kick drum. 

The kick drum is the basis for everything else and made it possible to accurately size everything in the project. Once I had the size of the bass drum, I modeled the cylinders for the 3 other drums in the set before moving on to more intricate details such as the clasps holding them in place, the stands, etc. Once the basic drums were sculpted completely, I began drawing up the stands for each of the drums and cymbals. The main concern with the first project was that the stands for the cymbals were only realistic at the base, and the shortcuts I took everywhere were noticeable. Keeping this in mind, I very carefully made sure every small detail was perfect before animating the next. After the drums, stands, and cymbals were done, I got to focus on the drum pedals.

Initially, these weren't supposed to be a big deal because they weren't originally supposed to be seen because the drums would be in front of them in a museum style. Of any single piece of the drums that I sculpted, or any of the instruments for that matter, this part took me the longest as I spent about 3 weeks alone sculpting it to perfection. Thankfully, it was not all for none as I ended up changing the design and they presented after all.

Once the drums were done, I was able to move on to the guitars. I started with the most recognizable of the bunch, Paul McCartney's Hofner bass. I began by laying down a reference image and tracing the body of the guitar with the Create Polygon tool. After this, I manipulated the points one final time before extruding the body to give it volume. For the neck, I originally used a rectangular prism, but it didn't take long to realize how non-effective it was at looking clean, so I replaced it with a cylinder and cut the cylinder in half across the length of it, and it looked perfect. I would do the same for all of the frets and moving the bottom vertices out to give it a little bit of shape. Once all three pieces of the bass were finished (head, neck, body), I sculpted the strings. The strings were just cylinders that I manipulated to bend and twist how I needed them to twist to look accurate. 

There was not a whole lot different that I did to the Rickenbacker, other than instead of making it a left-handed instrument (as I did with the Hofner), I made it a traditional right-handed instrument, added two more strings, and that was about it aside from smaller details about the actual body itself. The process remained the same regardless.

Once I finished the three instruments, I realized I did not have enough time to add the fourth instrument of the Beatles, George's Gretsch guitar, so I took the cut and sought to rebuild the stage from their second appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, and then I worked with appropriate lighting to give it the same effect as the night they performed live for America.

But what good is a tour of the Beatles' instruments without a little bit of Beatles music? With this in mind, I edited the very famous, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Beatles!" quote from Ed Sullivan himself with a remastered version of their first song they played that night, I Want to Hold Your Hand and trimmed it down to just over a minute by replacing the second chorus with the final chorus and cutting it short.

After this, I added a few cameras with a few theatric angles and strung it all together in After Effects once they were all rendered out appropriately. To the right is the final result that I entered into eMagine, the local media festival in the Kansas City metropolitan area my high school hosts.