my experience

This was my first digital class where we worked with Flash and After Effects; both softwares which i’m completely new to. This class was definitely a challenge for me. Having great classmates definitely helped because I got to hear many different kinds of feedbacks when it came to the projects.

I liked the fact that we spent a day getting feedbacks, that helped a lot. I think it’ll be helpful if we get to spend one day on buttons. Maybe a session where we follow along with the instructor in creating buttons. Although the last project was meant to be small, I still found it challenging. I think spending three weeks on it instead of two would be helpful.

My favorite part of the entire semester was going to the museum. I thought it was a great idea to related our last project with a piece from the museum or our experience of the museum and the exhibition. It taught me how I can incorporate my experience into my work. This is something I can probably do in my own time; create a piece in Flash reflecting something personal. It’ll also help me understand Flash and After Effects.

During my winter-break, i’m making it my personal goal to learn Flash and After Effects really well. I’m also going re-do my projects since i’ll have plenty of time. Overall I had a great experience, learned a lot, and having a patient instructor helped since I was completely new to the softwares.

logo animation

10 minutes of logo animation!

another Creep

This is another music video made of the song Creep. I really love this video. It’s well thought of and edited. The animation looks great.

Wierrrrrdddd

This a very bizzare flash animation I found. This is a video of someone making crepe and the song creep by Radiohead is playing in the background. There are a lot of things here that doesn’t make any sense at all, but it’s a cute video and I love the song.

My Website

This is my website, all created in Flash by a friend of mine. He created the website in flash but I believe the coding is called XML. All I know about XML is, it’s very simple where if I need to add more work, I can do it myself.

Flash Music Video

This is a music video I found made all in flash, or so I was told.

Re-made Dumpling Letters

I got great feedback from my title animation. Everyone really liked creating letters out of dumpling idea, no one saw the flaws that I was seeing. Two of the critiques I got was that the “dumpling festival” read “festival dumpling,” I honestly wasn’t aware of this because since I was working with it for so long, it read “dumpling festival” no matter how I placed the pots. When the lighting issue got pointed out, I told my side of the story, which was me having to work with poor lighting. To that, I was told that I didn’t necessarily have to have my pots be on stove. I thought I did because I had the sizzling oil sound going in the background.

So I decided to re-shoot my dumpling letters. This time I made it even better than the last. I also fried them before photographing the letters so that the cooked dumpling colors are consistent. I also placed them in a dish filled with lettuce to bring out the brownish colors of the dumplings.

This 2nd shoot was somewhat successful, although i’m not 100% satisfied by it. I still have lighting and focus issues. I had trouble bringing the file into after effects so I decided to create my flash file with my old dumpling title animation. I’m going to get critique on my new photos and if needed and I will re-shoot them and re-edit.

My Dumpling Letter Experience

So Jessica and I were brainstorming after class as to what I should for a title animation. She gave me this great idea to use Dumplings as a part of my title animation. So I started doing sketches with different dumplings. I had this one idea of taking all the dumplings that were offered in the festival and creating letters with it, but that idea became too complicated. Finally, I decided to keep it simple and pick a basic pot sticker dumpling and cut out the letters. Another reason why I picked pot sticker is because it was popular in the Dumpling Festival. I used ground chicken because it was less bloody and found a dumpling recipe online.

The hard part was taking the photographs, my slr was acting weird so I had to use my digital camera. I had to use one had to hold the products and take photos with the other hand. The worse part was shooting in the basement. The kitchen upstairs was in rubbles due to a earlier gas leak which caused a fire, so I had to shoot in the basement with terrible lighting. I had a lot of light issues because the horrible light created really ugly shadows. I also had focusing issues which is obvious.

My idea was to start of with me making dumplings, I didn’t want the viewer to know i’m creating letters made out of dumplings right away. So I took very abstract shots and kept my actions vague. It’s when I start putting letters in the pan is when the viewer can see that I have created letters. I think I could have executed the letters better, but it was difficult creating letters out of food, since I cut out all the letters using x-acto knife as opposed to using cookie cutters. Only thing I was satisfied with was the legibility of the letters, each letter looked the way it was meant to be.

After I put each letter into the pan, I take close-shots of the grouped letters and finally take an arial shot of the entire word which is “dumpling festival.”

Bad News….

So I emailed the curator of 5 points right after class, Yuta did give me his number but I wanted to respect his privacy so I emailed him since he only has his email address on his website.

I didn’t hear from him so as a last resort, I called him and apologized and told him I had emailed him regarding an interview. He said he didn’t check his email and he didn’t have the time to do an interview on Saturday. I asked him if there were anyone who was doing graffiti on Saturday but of course no one was since it was a raining all day.

I did not want to wait until Sunday to do the interview and he didn’t seem very enthusiastic over the entire idea. I knew the Dumpling festival was taking place in the Lower East Side so I rushed there before they close. I interviewed a bunch of people, I asked them how did they hear about this place? what are they eating? If they like it, would recommend it? etc.

I also got some shots of the crowd in general, I was thinking I can either make a montage with a really fast beat music or I can do a voiceover. I wanted more than just the interview from people so I approached the host of the Dumpling Festival, who was there to promote her cookbook. She was super friendly and even though she was exhausted from talking all day, she agreed to an interview.

Only bad part was that she was sitting next to the dj booth. I couldn’t ask her to re-locate because it was pouring rain and she was autographing her cookbooks. Even though her voice is audible, it’s hard to hear over the music, so i’m going to add subtitles.

I say my overall footage wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, considering the fact that I had to shoot when it was drizzling and stop when it was pouring.

P.S. I think this Jonathan (merres) guy is extremely unprofessional. How is it that you are the only curator of the place, you have no assistant, the only way to get in touch with you is via email and YOU DON’T CHECK YOUR EMAIL EVERYDAY!!! and that, ladies and gentlemen is what grinds my gears!!!!

5 points photo