Still Life Photography

I'm taking a photography class again, and this time around I'm doing some still life photography for my project. I decided to shoot my babies, Astro A40's. They're gaming headphones used in MLG.
















The teacher will be picking one of these for me to continue to edit, touch up, and finalize... so stay tuned!

Zebulon Records Logo

A friend of mine asked me to do some work for him... he's attempting to start-up a record label and needed a unique logo to represent the company. He had a very focused idea of using an alien, and making the alien's tongue spell out the record label's name, "Zebulon". At first, it seemed a bit ridiculous and crazy, but I went with it to see what I'd be able to do. I'm actually pretty happy with the results. It was a great challenge too that took quite a bit of time to pull off. The best part is that the client loved it!

Back in Action

Hey all, been a long time since I've written anything up here, so instead of coming up with lame excuses, I'll just say sorry!

But I do have some exciting news, I have an awesome project coming up and I can't wait to dig in. Limp Bizkit has asked me to be involved with their next website! I plan on documenting the process for A-Z so you guys will be able to see first hand what will going on. I don't want to say too much, but I will say check back often to see what's going on.

I also landed a couple of side web jobs that will be taking up some time too, so I'll let you guys check those out.

Thanks to everyone who has been reading my nonsense for this long!

Day 8 - Graffiti Photo Shoot

So I told you a little bit about 1 of my classes, Corporate Branding. My 2nd class this month is called Digital Photography about, dang, you guessed it, Photography!

Everyone in class was issued a Canon Powershot camera, which is a surprisingly powerful point and shoot camera. Luckily my roommate is awesome and has a Nikon D40 on hand. I'm extremely jealous, it's just an awesome tool to have. Original photography is such a valuable asset to great design.

So for our first project we had to pick a "niche" in photography to study. I did landscape photography, more specifically urban culture and such. So I was assigned a client to create a concept for, Benjamin Moore paints. So today I went to downtown Orlando to check out some graffiti art in the area to help out with this.

Check out some photos I got, these will eventually be retouched and improved on to create the concept I'm talking about, so stayed tuned for more on that.

Day 7 - Logo Development

One week into the 30 day challenge and so far so good. Woot!

So this month I'm in a class called Corporate Branding... it focuses on the branding schemes used by modern companies and the theory behind the choices they make. As part of this class we're re-branding a golf course. Their focus? Renewable energy.

I got to do the initial brand sketches and see how it turned out from there, so check it out:


Early sketching ideas:


Decided concept:

The group liked the idea of playing on a shape or form that looks modern, to reflect the idea of renewable energy, yet have other things that suggest the history of golf.


Some vector progress with some font ideas:



Eventually we decided the shape was too representative of a "fruit-like" shape and was too complex. So, we simplified it a bit and went with something that was a bit more modular and versatile.

Here's the final style guide.



So with this logo we were able to create an entire rebrand for a mock golf course, and I gotta say, it's been a really cool experience going from A-Z. There are a bunch of other assets we made to support this, such as this website and web banner:

Web banner:


Website:


These are the only ones I have as they were created by me, but there are others the group contributed, so I'll post those another time.

Why the Red Sox rock my socks

I remember when I was just a little tyke. A night at my dad's house meant loud and thunderous rants, cries, and cheers exploding from the living room. A quick glance at the TV exposed why; the Red Sox were playing. All I could do was roll my eyes and wonder why a baseball game could drive a man so mad.

Now I understand it exactly.

Sure I'm a New England native, but these memories of my dad made it almost impossible to avoid becoming absorbed into the Red Sox nation. And I love every second of it.

86 long years of waiting tested our loyalty as a fanbase. Generations of passionate fans banded together praying to see the day when the great "curse" would end. And end it did, in arguably one of the most exciting playoff and world series ever. A wave of relief fell upon the dedicated Fenway Park faithful when the Red Sox were once again declared the champions. And after 2007, the voice of the Red Sox Nation only grew more strong.

Baseball is unlike any other sport for many obvious reasons, but people still can't seem to understand why I enjoy it so much. Baseball definitely takes a level of patience that I don't expect a lot of people to have. However, it's enduring these long and sometimes uninteresting innings that always pays off in the end. Baseball has the ability to drastically change in a split second, and I can't tell you how many of these moments I've witnessed that have litterally possessed me and launched me out of my chair in excitment. It's kind of like watching a bomb you know is active, but the timer isn't existing. Staring at it isn't exactly exciting, but when that thing blows it's going to take you by complete surprise.

The 2009 season has shaped up to be an interesting one... I remain optimistic that we can remain a contender for a spot in the World Series. It's definitely going to take a bit more work and some more consistancy. However, a pluthra of injuries and shortcoming performances from some players leave me worried. Nonetheless, nights like tonight prove that the Red Sox have a bag of magic in their pockets that can rear it's head at any time. In an astonishing 9th inning rally, new member Victor Martinez was able to come up huge in delivering a clutch run. Combined with the acts of Ortiz's 6th inning blast and Pedroia's double off the wall, it was a reminder of just how much the Red Sox can deliver in moments of seemingly obvious defeat.

I can't wait to see how the playoffs unfold, and what jaw dropping moments will ensue. It's great to see the Yankees and Red Sox so competitive this year, as just about every game has been a fight to the very last pitch. As the regular season gets closer and closer to concluding I only expect this rivalry to get dirtier. I know it always give me a good oppurtunity to brush up on my photoshopping skills! *evil laugh*

LETS GO RED SOX!

Day 5 - A Sad Day for Music

Well folks not much to say today, other than the remembrance of a legend.

So as some of you may or may not know, Les Paul died today.

Les Paul was basically the father of music today. He invented the solid body guitar which founded a new generation of guitars and the loud and bold sound we know of in rock today. He was 94 years old and died in his home of pneumonia.

Music is extremely important to me and it's sad to see such an important contributor go, but at least he lived a long a fulfilling life. RIP Lester William Polsfuss! May the sound of guitars rock the souls of many generations to come!

Day 4 - Unwrapping ME!

Last month we had a class called Digital Video Project, which was the 3rd and final class of our video creation classes. We were given a month long project where we had to create a documentary based on ourself. In addition we had to cover a process we went through in a previous project. The whole thing had to be under 5 minutes. It was created using Final Cut, After Effects, and contains screen captures of me working with 3Ds Max and Photoshop. Enjoy!

Unwrapping Max Avedisian from Max Avedisian on Vimeo.

Day 3 - Infected Mushrooms

Hey all, another blog coming at you. Nothing too post-worthy, but a great band none the less. Figure I would expose a badass music group to you guys, they seem to find themselves coming at my eardrum time and time again. Infected Mushroom is a psy-trance group out of Sweden currently residing in LA. They're renowned worldwide for their interesting and unique approach. Their discography is pretty extensive at this point and they've got another album under wraps. Which is great because I can't wait!

I mostly like it because it's very rhythmic and not too lyrically intensive, which is perfect when you find yourself doing long hours of work. It's just great background music.. if you check out more than one album by them you'll see what I mean... their style changes drastically from 1 album to the next, it's like hearing a different band every time, very refreshing...

This is the latest single from them titled "Smashing the Opponent" from their new album due out in September. It features Jon Davis from Korn... pretty cool considering Korn and Infected Mushroom are on pretty opposite spectrums of music. A great song though, so check it out.



That's it I guess, if you like what you hear definitely make sure you give their other stuff a listen.

Hope you guys had a good weekend, see you tommorrow!

Day 2 - Hidden Cell Phone Features

Well here we go with the everyday challenge, I came across this article that had some interesting facts on cell phones and their hidden features... check them out incase you ever find yourself in a jam!

FIRST*
Emergency
The Emergency Number worldwide for Mobile is 112. If you find Yourself out of the coverage area of your mobile network and there is an Emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to Establish the emergency number for you, and interestingly, this number 112 can be dialed even if the keypad is locked. Try it out.*

SECOND*
Have you locked your keys in the car?
Does your car have remote keyless entry? This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys In the car and the spare keys are at home, call someone at home on their cell phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot >From your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other 'remote' for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).*

Editor's Note*: It works fine! We tried it out and it unlocked our car over
a cell phone!'*

THIRD*
Hidden Battery Power
Imagine your cell battery is very low. To activate, press the keys **3370#.* Your cell phone will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50% increase in battery. This reserve will get charged when you charge your cell phone next time.*

FOURTH*
How to disable a STOLEN mobile phone?
To check your Mobile phone's serial number, key in the following Digits on your phone: *#06#. A 15-digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe. If your phone gets stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code. They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless. You probably won't get your phone back, but at least you know that whoever stole it can't use/sell it either. If everybody does this, there would be no point in people stealing mobile phones.

As for me, I'm just hanging out in West Palm Beach this weekend. About to get some sushi later. It's nice to get away from Orlando for a while... I've been pretty busy with projects but at least I'll have something to show you guys soon. Check back often, this challenge is ON!

The Everyday Challenge...

So since I've been such a terrible blogger these last couple months, I'm going to challenge myself to blog at least once everyday for the next month. I can't promise that the blog entries will be anything amazing but at least it'll be eye candy for a day.

This month I'm in DPH (Digital Photography) and CRB (Corporate Branding). I'm going to have alot of awesome stuff to put up for you guys to see soon, last month I had DVP (Digital Video Project) which was a documentary we had to create on ourselves and a process we went through to create a project. Look for that to be uploaded before next weekend. On top of that, I'll also be uploading some pre-pro and thought-process related stuff for my Photography class where I'll be creating an ad for Benjamin Moore. For corporate branding you'll get to check out some logos my group is creating for a golf course.

So lots of cool stuff coming up. Check back soon. I mean it this time ;)

Hey.. 3D aint half bad Pt. 2

I just finished (well not really) my final for my 2 months of 3D classes. I've never touched 3D before and it's been a lot of fun. I know the geometry isn't the greatest, but it was more the texturing I was looking forward to. I love photoshop so it was a good chance to try something new.

It's a Japanese influenced alleyway with graffiti art done by Banksy. I call it Banksy's Corner.

Original Model



Texture maps - not all of them but some...



Final render (not really, just out of time, some things could be touched up)

Hey.. 3D aint half bad Pt. 1

So after wrestling my way through tutorials and giving myself countless headaches trying to figure out 3DS Max, I've actually produced something worthwhile. As a huge fan of video games, I've always wanted to touch the realm of 3D and what it takes to design something for them. For my current class 3D Animation we're required to model a 3D scene, exterior or interior, subject of our choice. I chose to do an exterior scene of a city alleyway. Right now strictly the modeling and some lighting is complete, next comes the texturing. Stay tuned for more.

Do you know this?

I wouldn't usually blog about a simple tool in Photoshop, but knowing this years prior would've saved me years off my life, and quite possibly half a head of hair. If you've always been too lazy to name your Photoshop layers (like me) and instead found yourself creating an abundance of unnamed layers (like me) thus forcing you to resort to lame hiding / unhiding techniques to identify layers (like me) than BEHOLD YOUR SAVIOR!

With the move tool selected, simply do the following:

RIGHT CLICK THE LAYER!

The following dialog box will pop up showing you a hierarchy of layers in which you can select. Upon clicking one, the corresponding layer will be selected in your Layers list. Amazing!



Now if I had only known that at a much earlier age... hopefully you discover this solution sooner than I did.

Look what I got for 12 Bones

This beautiful thing:



You know, after all the BS we go through here at Full Sail, it's reasons like these that I love them. They really do make sure their students are up to date on software and hardware before any other school in the nation.

Since they're on good terms with Adobe, they were able to supply every student the brand new Adobe Creative Suite 4 for only $12.00.

This includes:

InDesign CS4
Photoshop CS4 Extended
Illustrator CS4
Acrobat 9 Pro
Flash CS4 Professional
Dreamweaver CS4
Fireworks CS4
Contribute CS4
After Effects CS4
Premiere Pro CS4
Soundbooth CS4
OnLocation CS4
Encore CS4

Also: Bridge CS4, Device Central CS4, Dynamic Link, Training Link

It's like Christmas all over again!

New Armpit logo

So in order to keep the style of the new Armpit site consistent, Alex came with with the idea of printing out the logo and sketching it out. I used a ball point pen and a sharpie to get the Wes Borland look a lot his drawings have.

Slicing Tutorial

In this tutorial, I'll be giving a basic rundown on how to slice a design made in Photoshop, and ready it for web use. The example is done in Photoshop CS3, so keep in mind there may minor differences from version to version. Also like I said this is a basic example... a lot can be accomplished with this tool so make sure you check out it's full potential in your spare time.

The design you see is a design I'm working on for the new version of The Armpit, so consider it a sneak peek!

The first step is to actually slice it. To do this, select the Slice Tool located on the tool bar. It'll be a knife icon by default. Make sure the actual Slice Tool is selected, and not the Slice Select Tool

With the Slice Tool selected, begin your first slice. Simply draw a rectangle around the object you're slicing. Keep in mind, the less slices you end up creating, the easier it will be to code and lay out.



Slice anything with images that is important and contributes to the design of the website. In my design, you'll see I had to slice the boxes designed for twitter updates, as well as the navigation buttons that uses images. The design also uses a repeating background for the main content area, so I sliced a sliver for that too. The main content area also required I sliced a header and footer for it.

Note: Using snapping (View > Snap) for the slice selections will insure that your slices line up edge for edge and are pixel perfect. This way when it comes time to lay out your slices through code, you won't have any discrepancies.



My design sliced out!

Now we have to name these slices. Hold down click on the Slice Tool and select the Slice Select Tool. Now, double click on a slice to bring up it's properties.



Now we can use this dialog box to give our slices names. Photoshop gives names automatically, which can get hairy when you're trying to identify one slice from the next. Refrain from using capitals and spaces obviously, as this is a web format we're preparing for. After naming your slice, hit Ok to close out. Repeat for the rest of your slices. This is also a great place to check dimensions of slices as you'll need to define their sizes when coding.

Next ... saving. There are a few tricks here that can help you big time.

When saving designs that use slices, you must go to File > Save for web and devices...



The following dialog box is one that is designed to help you optimize your design for web standards. Along the top you'll see Original, Optimized, 2-up, and 4-up. Original is your design in it's current state, Optimized is your design as example of saving it in it's highest possible settings, 2-up is a side by side demonstration of your design in 2 standards in your choosing, and 4-up is the same thing with 4 examples, for comparison purposes. Consider the requirements of your website and decide what file format would be best for your slices. For example, designs using transparency would best work with PNG formats (although IE 6 does not support this) and designs without transparency best use JPEG. Since this particular design uses little colors and not a whole lot of fine gradient detail, I chose to go with a medium JPEG detail. This will help speed up the load time on the web while not compromising appearance.

Once you have selected your file type, click Save to view more options.

The problem with Photoshop is that it assumes that we want it to write our whole website, code and all. We need to fix that and make Photoshop realize we're the web designers, not them!

In this new window, you'll a pretty usual Save dialog box, but focus on the bottom part. The first drop down box indicates what format you'd like to save the files as. Drop the box down to images only to prevent Photoshop from writing code for our site as mentioned earlier.

The 3rd box helps Photoshop indicate what exactly we want to save. As we just got done slicing an entire site, the appropriate option would be all user slices. However, other options such as Selected Slices is good for changing specific slices if you find that you must do so after saving them the first time.



The 2nd drop down box offers a chance to customize the way Photoshop saves these files. Go ahead and drop it down to Other..., because by default Photoshop tries to define a path to save this files out to. Drop the HTML box down to Saving Files. Here you'll see a check box with a place to save the images into, simply uncheck this.



Now click Save and you'll have all your nicely sliced images in a folder ready to coded up. Double check to make sure all your slices saved out properly.



Thanks for reading, check back for more!

Staying Focused

Well welcome to the new format of my blog. I've been working hard as nails on this site trying to get it finished and looking the way I want it to. This is funkyrabbitmedia.com, my own personal website where I'll be posting any interested blogs, both life and web design related. Expect anything to be posted here from now on. That also means I plan on posting here more frequently.

So now I have my blog integrated into my site, which makes things a lot easier for me. I did it using Blogger's publishing tool, basically it publishes new information via FTP to my web server, where it gets interpreted by code and displayed nicely here. But that topic is for another day.

Right now I have two web projects on my hands; this site and another version of the Armpit. I did a version of the Armpit a little while ago and posted about it here, but it was a quick project that was pretty easy to do. I'm going to be doing some step my step tutorials on how I made it starting from the slicing to the code, so look forward to that.

Classes have kept me busy, so I'm working on these sites in my spare time. I like it, it keeps me focused and driven! So check back often!

September to Remember

First things first, congratulations to the 2008 Red Sox for making yet another Playoff appearance! Will they have what it takes to overcoming amazing teams like the Rays or the Angels and retain their World Series title? Time will tell, but I've been very impressed with how they've been playing this season.

2nd - I turned 20 this September. It feels very weird to not be a teen any more, but I guess that's life? It's moving wayy too fast for me, but I'm doing my best to keep up! Thanks for the cake mom! And thanks for all the thoughtful cards and packages! My family is awesome! Wish I could've been there to see you all...

This month brought a close to my very boring month of September. It's been very low key and I've had a lot of time on my hands due to me only having one class this month. My schedule was Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. The class was Flash fundamentals, a class that introduced the basic concepts of flash animations, a popular animation program for the web. I had the same class last month but I barely failed it. Full Sail is very understanding of the time frame of classes and how the fast paced learning environment can affect students, which is why if you fail for grades you can retake it for free.

This time around though I was fortunate to have a great teacher by the name of Jason Madsen, he was very patient and went all out to make sure we got it this time around. He used excellent examples and had good projects. Thanks Jason!

My schedule gave me some free time to get my hands dirty with another project, so I ended up building a website for a Limp Bizkit fan-site. It's called The Armpit, and it's been the biggest Limp Bizkit fan-site since it opened in 2003. Members of the band themselves acknowledge this, they've posted on the forums several times staying very close to the fans despite their lack of activity within the band.

I know Limp Bizkit was basically just a thing of the 90's - early 2000 but I've been a member of the community there since the site opened, and I've developed a lot of good friends there, including the web-master Alex. So he's the one who gave me the project.

It's just a temp site until their next version is released, but it's improved ten-fold over their last design. The Armpit was notorious for using annoying iFrames in their designs, making content very cluttered and ultimately an eyesore.

So luckily the web stuff I learned a couple of months ago became very handy, I was able to integrate it to make a fully functional PHP / CSS / HTML site thats scalable to any resolution. Nice!

Enough talk though - check it out HERE.

Today I'll be looking for some new apartments to move into for the month of November. It's simply too expensive to stay here, and I'll be moving in with a good friend of mine. Hopefully I find somewhere good!

Thanks to my family for staying close and helping me out with all the care packages, it means a lot! I'll keep in touch...

Oh, How Cliche

I did the opening credits for a couple of my friends who made a movie here on campus. It's a romantic comedy about Zombies! Anyways they wanted an opening that would lead the viewer to think it was the opposite, so that's what I tried to do.