queens revised

my cast of queens revision.

motion graphics - fall 07

in some random ways, i am far removed from tech geekdom. not being sure how to post this flash movie is an example of not being a geek. i took motion graphics last semester. not sure i want to admit it because i doubt it means my project will benefit from knowing it. time. time would be nice.

going to try to show the last project for that class. we had to create a 2-3 minute flash movie with a transaction and call to action about a moving cause.

not sure i'm posting it correctly. turn up your speakers.

it'll be all shiny, new, and pretty

Shipping Monday! I'm so happy! I can't wait!

creative process

My creative process screwed me over tonight! I stayed at work to finish up the comp for tomorrow. The process invaded my soul. I forgot the garage closes at 8.

It's 9:00 pm. Do you know where your car is? Yes, locked up in a garage.

Now I have to wait for my husband to come get me.

On the positive note, it gives me more time to find images for the process assignment. I decided to go with how to make your mom happy. I'm feeling a need to express mucho sarcasm and this would be a perfect outlet.

Well at least this happened at 9 and not 11 pm. :)

whoopie, mom, and car washes

tuesday. today is tuesday. not wednesday. which makes tomorrow wednesday, not thursday. why so difficult for me to grasp today?

thankfully, it's tuesday and not wednesday. gives the illusion of more time than i thought i had. only not, because the only illusion is my head cannot keep the days of the week straight, this week.

project 6. hmph. love the idea of process. technical writing is my schtick so writing a process is not so scary for me. which process though. this project isn't going to be about setting up your email or using an ftp program to transfer files.

my three options, in no particular order (homage to dancing with the stars):

• making whoopie pies - i love whoopie pies and love making them for others to enjoy. they're also the first dessert i was paid to make for someone so they have a special place in my heart. the twist would be making the brochure in the shape of a whoopie pie with a big ole image on the front.
  
• washing your car - the joke is an old family story. step 1 - check the yellow pages...step X, drive to the car wash. step x + 1, pay the attendant.
  
• how to please your mom - appropriate for mother's day and it'd be completely sarcastic

i like all of them. would love to do the car washing thing but i'm not sure i can make 8 pages out of it.

from rough to comps

I've seen some other folks already writing about the current frenetic pace of the class and I wholeheartedly agree. It's hard for me to believe we're getting off easy this semester. OK, we have one less assignment but the schedule is strange. I would give back some of the time during spring break to make it less hectic now. And to think I thought our revisions for the ad campaign were due that Saturday after break.

Yeah, this assignment schedule seems helter-skelter.

I took a step back from the classification project. After trying to find some great photos of red velvet, red robes, and funky photos of playing cards, I remembered I plopped the design onto the page around 1:30 am the night before and I shouldn't be married to it. It was also causing me some content problems because I felt I needed to highlight the theme of cards, when it really has very little to do with the overall piece.

Enter Cate Blanchett in all her Elizabethan-glory and a new working title: screen-worthy queens. I'm not sold on the title but for now, the image and the new title is helping make the copy flow better.

Going to do some good ole fashioned paper and pencil revisions. My fluidity and creativity works better when I'm physically writing rather than typing.

Much more comfortable too and I can better focus on the writing. Otherwise, I have baseball scores and stats scrolling around on the screen or get sucked into facebook or an email... it's never good.

doggie bloggie

A friend sent a link to his friend's dog's blog. Read a few entries for some laughs but am disturbed by the count of his 'expressing.'

I signed up to dogster and the cat version a couple of years ago. Your pet can keep a journal/blog there but I hadn't thought about doing this on a grander, more public scale.

For now, I think I'll stick to hoping I capture some of his funnier moments on film. He certainly is a character. If he were to keep a blog, he'd have stories of his own to share. .. you might catch him writing something like...

Last night I was resting on the loveseat when my mom called me from the kitchen. It was one of those magical moments most dogs dream about but never get to experience. Being beckoned from the kitchen after you've been fed? Can it get any better?

In my excitement, I thought about jumping over the back of the loveseat instead of alighting in a manner required of dog of my pedigree. A cackle from my dad brought me back to my senses. But you better believe once my paws hit the ground, I was running into that kitchen. Life is so uncertain. You never know what can happen in a moment's notice.

To my utter surprise and absolute delight, there was a chunk of chicken on the floor. Normally I take offense to the command "clean it up." Really, what is that all about? Do I have Hoover or Dyson written on my name tag and no one told me? Last night was an exception. Clumsy Mom, God love her, dropped half a chicken breast on the floor. It was succulent. It was dressed with, get this, tomatoes, fresh thyme, and, now hold on fellas, real bacon.

Surely had I known there was real bacon, I would've risked bodily injury and jumped over the back of the loveseat. Earlier this week I had some leftover spinach. Not bad at all. OK, yes, it was cooked in bacon grease but I definitely got a full serving of veggies with this one.

Here's why I need to think more about veggies and less about bacon: None of my clothes fit me anymore!

what have i done?

this is my confessional. if i confess, perhaps my burden will be lifted.

i bought a temporary subscription to a clipart site. allow me to share the bad taste:

Flash project (edited from original post)

So I think I'm going way cheesy for the flash project. Using modified clip art, I'll do a story of a potato who's depressed because of all the low carb dieting these days. A steak walks by and says something nice to cheer him up. (Yes, it's perfectly normal for steaks and potatoes to be walking around a city.) The potato takes it the wrong way and becomes obsessed with the steak and starts stalking it. Steak gets fed up with the creepiness and decides to do away with the potato. Exactly how, I'm not sure yet. It'll be set to 'you're just too good to be true. can't take my eyes off of you...'

I think it'll work out and I want to keep the cheese level nice and high the whole time.

Vote on how you'd like to see the ending or post an alternate ending here.

Here's the beginning of my creative process:
After Saturday's class I was thinking quite a bit about Cap'n Crunch as the serial cereal killer. Googled the idea after my husband said "I think something about that's been done before." I didn't read of what I saw but it seems it's not a new concept so I dropped that idea. Then, remembering what Allison did for her project, I thought about telling this story about falling in a puddle in front of a porta-potty. Decided the humor of that story is in the telling of it and I don't want to do any voice recording. The next idea was the story of our clogged kitchen sink back in our old apartment. It became a story over the days it lasted. Two different friends from different circles said it would make a great, silent, B&W film. Eerie. Probably because I had this image of a rat flying atop a geyser of dirty sink water when the plumber sent a shock of forced air through the pipes. (So much yuck and stank came up whenever we tried to unclog it, that I was convinced there'd be dead rat parts floating up at some point.) Decided the story was too simple for 2 minutes but too difficult to capture with my limited illustrator skills.

It's just too much...

It's 12:15 am. I'm still writing copy. Haven't started the design yet. Read about half of the assigned readings.

It's just too much. I haven't futzed around this week. Did I spend every waking and non-working moment on homework? OK, no, but I came close.

I'm going to whine a bit here because, after all, what better thing to do when feeling the time crunch than to waste time whining about not having enough time?

Here's the thing. Reading, researching, writing, and designing all within 1 week is simply too much. Oh, and picking a suitable publication.

Sunday - read the reserved reading. Decided on my topics of queens and how I could tie it into today's world. Started looking for a good publication. Well, that's a big piece. If you don't read any that fit this topic, it can be difficult to find the right publication. But how can you know if your story fits in well with a publication you don't read? Not only topic wise but format? If I pick up Esquire for this month, how can I possibly know if it's normal for them to have a 2 spread story? Or maybe this is the month when it's all about men's spring fashions and normally they might have a story aimed at educating the mind...

Catch my drift? Why do we need a supporting publication? Why can't we say "i see this running in an entertainment magazine..."

I spent a couple of hours on Sunday reading through a catalog of magazines. Not that I'd necessarily be able to find one in real life if the summary sounded about right.

Monday I started my research. I can't imagine someone picking this topic without knowing a fair amount about sovereign history. Maybe I picked something too intricate.

Tuesday I read some of hale and some of S&W.

Wednesday I went magazine shopping. Finished S&W. Read through the 6 magazines I bought.

Thursday I stole time during the workday to buy more magazines. Picked back up on the writing I started on Sunday as I researched. Read through the two more magazines I had. Looked to see if I could find a PDF archive of ACCeSS DirecTV magazine. Nope.

Friday... I'm still writing and no design.

I am not so self-centered to think I'm the only one in this boat right now.

It's just too much. Give us more time for phase 2 or lighten up on the reading. Something.

To have something researched and well-developed enough to get crit within a week's time is not getting me at my best. With phase 3 being right around the corner, I never have time to truly criticize my own work and polish it. So it's like the whole time I'm just trying to polish a turd, and that's not my personal style.

Back to some dandy kings and be nice to me when you see my draft design!

Late out of the gate

I realize I'm posting this too late and that most of us go blog hunting on Friday night but I can always change my design if someone offers a great suggestion.

Having a hard time picking a publication for the classification assignment. I'm classifying queens.

Using an intro about scandal and recent releases about monarchs (The Other Boleyn Girl, The Tudors, Elizabeth, The Queen), I'm presenting 4 categories of queens. Mostly this focuses on 13th - 15th century. The categories are - discarded queens, queen of hearts, queens trump all, and kings who would be queens. Still need a catchy, card reference for that one.

So I need a publication where a story about scandal, history, and entertainment can cross. Despite quality time spent at B&N last night and even looking online at a magazine database, I'm sorta stuck. Well, I ended up the same place as I did Sunday and that was thinking my two best bets are Vanity Fair or Urbanite. Only Vanity Fair doesn't do 4-page articles; they have one pagers or 10 pagers. Urbanite tends to focus on Baltimore stories except for their one pagers where they review movies, books, etc.

Any ideas???

Sex takes 3 to 13 minutes

Love it when they come out with this stuff. One of my favorite parts is the bullet point "Researcher hopes to ease minds of those who think they "should last forever." Translates to we spent a lot of money to make men feel better about their sexual performance.

As evidenced by my previous post, my revisions for this week are finito! That's not to say I won't have another round to go with them. In the meantime, what can I tell you?

I went off in search for my school's alumni magazine. Oddly, they haven't yet caught up with me since moving in June. I wasn't searching to read it, I was curious how they handle their web presence. Do they PDF the magazine and plop it up as a link? My heart was warmed to see they don't. OK, that's not going to make me think twice about not giving money but still, I'm happy to see they don't make that mistake.

Happier still when I read the lead story, which mentioned someone I used to hang out with. Those were the days of devoting hours to a dark, basement dry bar--it wasn't always dry--listening to live jazz, pining over this trumpet player or that bass player, and pretending to do homework. The Hatch. What a place! I'd love to see what's become of it but I know I can never recapture it's impact on me.

From '90-94, if school was in session, you could almost always find us there on a Monday night, occupying a table filled with open notebooks and textbooks. "Us" was the three of us: Becky, Megan, and me. Our reasons for being there were not always innocent but we veiled it well by getting through our work for the night. Over 14 years later and the images are still clear in my head--the director snapping his fingers and the exact movement of his head, the tunes they played and the ones I'd put down my pen for, the ridiculous faces the sometimes-present guitar player made, and the feeling in my gut caused by certain trumpet notes.

A few years after I graduated I went to check out The Hatch. I had different friends with me and I didn't know people involved with the jazz band. (One does not know Jeff Holmes, one simply escapes his wrath.) My intention was not to recreate what once was, rather I wanted to share a meaningful experience with different friends. Only later did I appreciate that the original experience, though drawn out over four years, was made meaningful by those specific friends.

This revelation stunned me. During these evenings, we didn't talk much. It wasn't possible to talk easily over the sound of the band. You could talk during breaks but we usually hunkered down over our books then because, truthfully, it was almost impossible to read/write/calculate/memorize/comprehend with music that loud. I questioned what kept me coming back to this place, Monday after Monday for four years if it wasn't the music, the love of jazz, the lust of one musician or another. Why, then, would it matter who was at the table?

I never equated those evenings with friendship or relationship building. Had I, I probably wouldn't have been game for them since I stink at both. Eventually I realized the draw was one of the few things I truly cherish about friendship--that shared comfort which allows you to sit for hours and share few words, yet go home feeling as if you had a night out together. Those friendships don't come along every day and, sadly, they don't always stick.

You will probably never find the three of us together again and certainly not at The Hatch for the jazz band. Though two of us live less than 1 hour away we almost never make the time to get together. Our lives and priorities are so very different from each other that even when we do, it can be painfully awkward. The third friend, Megan, lives in Denve and married one of those guys from the band. Good for her! During school she had a big crush on him. About 7 years after we graduated, they were both living in Denver and eventually a romance--not a midnight booty call, mind you--began. An unfortunate series of circumstances led to us not being on talking terms.

Last year I drove through UMass on my way to Vermont to meet up with my husband and in-laws for a family vacation. The drive through brought back many memories. Some day I might have enough time to visit and walk to some of the memorable places. Like the hardscaped area outside the library where Megan once got me real good when she asked "Guess who asked me about you? Come on, just guess. You have to guess. No, you're never going to get it." Like a little kid being teased with a wrapped gift I peppered her with "who? WHO? WHO?!" The climax hilarious, but heartbreaking, "Nobody, cuz you're a loser!" (I used that one for months on everyone I knew, hoping they hadn't heard it yet.)

I spent 10 years of my life in that area, most of it as a student or employee of UMass. I'd love to move back some day but struggle with the idea. Though I hesitate to quantify my reappearance at The Hatch, I wonder if moving back would uncover similar sentiments.

How much of our experience is shaped by the people we share it with? Are the people the experience and the remaining superfluous? If relationships are the experience, where does it leave someone like me: a self-admitted relationship failure?