Mini Art School Numero Cuatro

Storyboard

I'm not really sure how creating a storyboard of our MMP relates to the way that storyboards were presented in our readings for this week.  I spent a lot of time looking for images to place into my storyboard.  It was fairly simple to come up with an implementation timeline, but again, the majority of my time was spent trying to find pictures to illustrate each part of my timeline.  I created my storyboard using PowerPoint, then I imported it into Keynote and exported it to iMovie and then finally to YouTube. I know a lot of those steps could have been avoided, but I literally spent hours trying to upload my original PowerPoint that I saved as a QuickTime movie to YouTube only to find out that most .MOV files cannot be uploaded successfully. So going all around the mulberry bush was the way that I solved that problem. 

Getting back to the focus of this section of Mini Art School, storyboarding, I could see using storyboarding as a way to organize your ideas in relation to a movie or photo shoot.  In my opinion it could be equated to the prewriting step of the writing process.  It is a great organizational tool that lets you simply see, through visual cues, what the action plan for a specific "shoot" is.  I guess when I put it in that context you could actually apply it to our MMP.  It did help to establish an implementation action plan.
60 Second Video
This is an edited version of a video that I made, using Animoto, in regards to my qualifications as an educational leader.  I normally send the longer version (2 min 7 sec) to districts that I have interviewed with.  I embed the video into my thank you email.  On the extended version, I add the district's logo right after my picture.  I attempted to edit the video using iMovie, but found that it was much easier to edit it using Animoto.  I know that we were supposed to add credits at the end, but that would have put me way over the 60 allotment.  I am still over the time limit by 3 seconds with this version.  Animoto does have a credits option, but that comes with a paid subscription.  I could have easily added another text slide with my name to this to create a credits slide, but again, that would have put me well over the time limit.  I was able to significantly shorten the length of my film by editing the amount of time that the audio recording played.  All of the photos in this video are my own, screenshots of websites that I have created, or they came from stock photography websites (mostly Getty Images). 

 

Mini Art School Numero Tres

This post is long, so please click on the Read More link below to see my second activity.
I really enjoyed this week's required project.  It was so much fun to look through all of my albums on iPhoto and then crop some of the pictures to give them a "different feel".  I found myself utilizing the "rule of thirds" that Golombisky and Hagen (2010, p. 133) mention when I was cropping my pictures.  I wanted to create something new like the exercise suggested, but I also wanted my picture to be visually appealing.  Now I know why a grid of 9 squares always appears when I crop or edit photos on iPhoto.  I always tried to make each third proportional, but now I know the rule behind what I was doing instinctively.  I know that the exercise only required us to pick 6 images to work with, but I decided to do more than that because I was genuinely enjoying manipulating the images.  I placed the original images and the cropped versions in the photo collage below.  See if you can guess which is the cropped version and which is the original photograph.  All photographs were taken by me, except the ones that have to do with my wedding.  Happy browsing!

 

Mini Art School Numero Dos

This week was all about typography and texture.  The first art activity I chose to try was based on typography.  The goal of activity number one was to choose about 1 dozen fonts and type a few words that would correspond to the emotion or theme evoked by the font and then write a word or phrase that would go against the emotion or theme that the font represented.  I had the most fun with this activity.  I am big on fonts!! When I scroll through my fonts I always think of what they represent and when I am trying to choose a font I really try to choose a font that would contribute to the theme of my writing or the goal of my presentation.  That is one of the reasons why I enjoy creating presentations so much.  It is the one time in the academic world that you can get away from boring and old Times New Roman.  So take a look at my fonts and tell me what you think.  Did I do a good job at representing and misrepresenting each font that I chose?

Activity #1

The second activity was also from the Design Basics Index.  This was a textural composition.  The purpose of this activity was to take a simple shape and use that as a focal point.  Twelve identical shapes needed to be created and placed around the original shape.  Each shape had to have a different texture and by the end of the activity a "visually pleasing and interesting overall composition" needed to be created.  I had some trouble with this exercise.  It was difficult to find textures that would coordinate, when the instructions specified that they needed to be different.  I tried to keep some in the same color family and to use complimentary colors to help balance things out but I am not sure it worked so well.  Positioning the shapes in a more organic pattern was also difficult since the shape I chose was symmetrical, but had curved lines.  I wound up using what I like to call an improvised griding structure to arrange the shapes.  Overall, I am not pleased with the final results.  It is not organic looking and I do not like some of the textures I chose.  The wrinkled paper bag texture is my favorite and I think it visually pleasing next to the pink and denim textured hearts.  

Activity #2

Mini Art School Numero Uno

The first activity that I chose to complete was the Alignment Exercise on p. 87 in the Designs Basics Index.  The activity suggested that I create an ad for a toy store first using alignment in a structured way and then producing a similar advertisement, but this time I needed to use alignment is a more free flowing way.  Well, let's just say that my mind really has a hard time thinking in a non-linear way.  I have created two advertisements, however, both seem to use alignment in a more structured manner. See if you can guess which ad I intended to be the more loosely structured of the two.

Advertisement #1

Advertisement #2

Composition #1

Composition #2

Both Compositions

The second activity that I chose complete was all about composition (p. 71). The goal of the exercise was to help me fill in space in many ways. I started off by creating 12 different sized rectangles on a word document using the auto-shapes tool. I then printed out two copies of the rectangle layout and started to sketch.  As you can see, the first sheet that I began to sketch contains basic shapes. I held this sheet horizontally as I began to fill in each square. As I made my way across the paper my doodles became a bit more detailed. For the second sheet, I held the paper vertically. I did this because I wanted to change the way I saw the rectangles, hoping that this would give me a bit more inspiration and steer me away from filling in the negative space with hearts, stars, and smiley faces. I worked my way down the page in a right to left motion. I began to bend the rules of the exercise a bit as I made my way across and down the page. The original directions requested that I fill in each box with geometric shapes. As you can see, I did that for the first set of squares, but on my second composition sheet I began to use more organic or free form shapes and lines. I also just started filling in the negative space with my pencil rather than drawing distinct lines and shapes. By the end (bottom left), I was able to draw attention to another part of the rectangle rather than having the main focus of each box be in the middle.

A Small Public Service Announcement...

Please disregard the formatting errors in the post below.  My computer has been acting funny all day and I just can't get what I see in my draft window to post correctly on my blog.  After two hours of trying to fix it I am giving up for today.  I will try to work on it tomorrow.  Thanks for your understanding and I apologize for any inconvenience.

Jen

Website Design Critique

For my website design critique I picked two websites to examine, both examples of great design practices.  The first website I chose to look at was a site for a small business located in New York City and in Los Angeles.  The business is called Blind Barber.  I found the website after Googling "best designed websites".  I chose to start my critique with an award winning design concept so I would have something to compare the other sites that I was looking at to.

The second site that I chose was a site that I look at almost everyday.  This site belongs to a gym called Guerrilla Fitness.  This is a gym that my husband belongs to.  The gym's website design had a lot to do with me choosing this gym for him (it was a present from me).  I think that it exemplifies the basic design concepts that Glomsky and Hagen (2010) discuss.

Before you view my screencasts I would like to let you know that my Internet connection and/or my computer is very slow today.  So some of my words blend together and the video may lag a bit.  I tried to re-record the second part of my critique twice, but the best version of what I was trying to convey is posted here.  The point that I was trying to make in regards to the Blind Barber site, that really gets garbled up in my second screencast, is that that particular page in that website (the one with the video) is really just a more advanced approach to the "Works Every Time Layout" that Glomsky and Hagen explained in the White Space is Not Your Enemy text.