Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Full Sail: The End is Near

So my experience here at Full Sail is coming to a close very quickly. Here's the remaining classes I've yet to take....

Digital Publishing (current)
Interactive Media Design and Usability (current)
History of Visual Communications
Interactive Media Design Project
Portfolio Creation
Career Communications
Production Management
Psychology of Human Interaction
Digital Media Assembly (3 months)
Media and Society

Wow. That list is short. Holy crap. I'm very excited to be done here. I'm excited about learning more as I get out in the industry. I've realized that knowledge is infinite and I won't be done learning when I graduate from Full Sail. I can't wait to see what's in store for my near future.

Word,

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Koolaid is NOT Kool.

Warning...this is an angry blog post! If you can't take the immense anger that will be released by these words, I suggest you stop reading right now.

So, about 2 weeks ago, I spilled red Koolaid on my laptop's keyboard. NOT KOOL AT ALL! When it happened, I quickly tried to suck the koolaid out of the keyboard with my lips. Seriously, I did, ask Lance or Becca, they were there when it happened. So after that, I turned off my laptop and let any remaining koolaid dry out for a while. When I came back to turn it on, my keyboard was toast. Dead. Done. It wouldn't work at all. I was pissed.

I took it into the Apple store to see if they could do anything for me, and they said it would be $1300 to fix it. SWEET! So, I decided that if I'm gonna have to pay $1300 to fix it, I might as well buy a brand new one for a couple hundred more. I bought a new one and two days before it gets to me, I get my broken laptop back. I turn it on and miraculously, it works! I was pumped! So since I have a functioning laptop now, I called Apple back to get a return request for the laptop that's now being sent to me. They process the request and then I just had to wait for the laptop to get to me, so I can return it and get my money back.

The day after I got my broken (but miraculously fixed) laptop back, the keys started crapping out again. My spacebar, command, and colon keys stopped working. FRICK!

So now I'm keeping the new laptop. Today, I took out the HDD and Ram from my broken laptop and put it into my new one. Terrible process...nerve-racking to say the least.

I guess that really wasn't very angry at all. I suck at being angry.

Leaving the Koolaid to the kids,

Monday, November 17, 2008

Day 10: Admit Defeat

Yeah, so it turns out that I completely missed blogging yesterday, therefore, blogging for 30 days straight is extremely impossible. Unless your Brighten Photography, then it's extremely possible.
Because of this crazy school I'm at, I just don't have enough time for these shenanigans. I'm sorry to let soooooo many of you down.

Tail between my legs,

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Day 9: Why are you reading this?

...I've got nothing for you today. I'm sorry.

But with much love,

Friday, November 14, 2008

Day 8: Throwback Day

Alright, these classes are kicking the crap out of me right now and I don't have much time to play around, so today is throwback day! This is from my first month here at Full Sail, a class called Design and Art Theory. We had to come up with a product and then make advertisements for that product.

I decided to make CRAP! tshirts. CRAP was something we used in class help us with composition. It stood for Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity. On the back of the shirt, I tried to illustrate each of those within each word.





My teacher was actually ecstatic and freaking out over my final project. She was telling me all about how I should copyright it and she was giving me these websites that I should go to to "patent" the idea. However, I didn't really think that they were THAT good, so I never did.

Grrrrrrrr,

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Day 7: Happy Birthday Lance!

It's Lance's 21st today! So I felt that it would be a great time to take the day off of blogging...and wish him the best of wishful wishes.



happy bday buddy,

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Day 6: Banksy

Since I really didn't have time to do anything besides my school work today, I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce you all to one of my heroes. He goes by the name of Banksy (no one really knows his real identity) and he's a street artist from England. Here's some of his work...











Most of his work is made using stencils, but he does some other crazy street art too, like sculptures and statues, etc. Look at his site...Banksy...if you ask me, he's a genius.

Dreaming,

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Day 5: The Eye?

Here's some more spray paint action for ya. It's painted on cardboard, about 3' x 3'. I painted the whole thing red, pink, and purple plaid a long time ago, and just now decided to finish it. Well, it's kind of finished. I ended up just masking off a design and spraying it black with white flecks. It almost looks like outer space. Gnarly. Speaking of, I think I'll be doing a space painting one of these days. Check out this site... Space Paintings I'd like to try my hand out at something similar to that. We'll see.

Masked off


Sprayed black w/ white flecks



Uhh....yup!

Monday, November 10, 2008

Day 4: Procrastination.

Today....I did nothing. zip. zero. nada.

I didn't have class today, and I have a project that's due tomorrow. It's a video project that I was supposed to film last month, and then edit this month. The thing is, I've started over on this project 3 different times. And each time, I decided that the project was going to suck, so I gave up on it, and started with something new. I think my problem is that when I know that something isn't going to turn out the way I want it to, I lose motivation and inspiration to work on it. I hate finishing something just to finish it. If it's not going to turn out the way I want it to, I would rather not finish it at all.

What sucks even more is that now I have all of these sweet ideas for video projects which I could have filmed last month, but it's too late. I'm stuck with crappy footage and no place to go with it. Call it bad planning on my part. I can't wait for this month to be over!


Getting back up tomorrow,

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Day 3: WAR! part 2

So, I finished my painting today. As you can see, it's all made using spray paint and masking tape. As far as a meaning behind it...I would like to say that I had this big underlying theme to it, but I don't. I just feel like pieces of art that pertain to war have more power to them or something. It's like the images are stronger and can be more powerful since everyone can relate to war in some way. For good or bad.

Personally, I think people should fight for what they believe in. And if you have to go to war to defend what you believe in, then do it! We all need to stop being such pansies when it comes to standing up for ourselves, our families, our countries, our beliefs, OUR FAITH. (maybe I'm just speaking for myself there)



Here's a crappy picture of the final version... (speaking of, would anyone like to donate to the "Buy Aaron a Digital Camera Fund"? It's for a good cause)



Thanks for reading,

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Day 2: WAR! part 1

Here's an acrylic/spray painting that I started today. Sorry to Lauren Conger, I painted over our tree masterpiece for this one. It's not that I didn't LOVE our painting...I'm just too poor/lazy right now to go buy another canvas.



The final piece should be up tomorrow.

Ciao,

Friday, November 7, 2008

Day 1: Random Sketch from Class

I realize that this is a pretty lame post, but it'll do. The first is just a sketch that I was messing around with in class today. The other two are from my first couple of months at Full Sail. Enjoy.

Stupid Horse.


Sad Clown.
(i think he's sad because his nose is cracked, and his eyes are lopsided)


Talking Hand.



See ya tomorrow,

Thursday, November 6, 2008

30 Days of Blog! (starts tomorrow)

...because my older brother isn't the only one who has the ability to blog everyday for thirty days straight. (and because I'm a huge slacker and need a little bit of motivation)

Kept Stanky,

Monday, August 4, 2008

How you know school has taken over your life....

This is pretty funny.

The past two months I've taken two classes dealing with Flash Actionscript. (see post below...did i mention it's the coolest game ever?) Anywho, basically, Actionscript is the scripting language that you use inside of Flash to create flash games and websites and applications. Now, I've come to the realization that actionscript has engulfed my life. Let me explain...

A couple mornings ago, after a long night of working on this website for thunderground, I woke myself up with actionscript. Sounds weird, I know. But have you ever had a dream that transitioned into reality? I have. In this case, I think that I was halfway between conscious and unconscious, and that's when the code started running through my head. The code flew by very fast in my head and read something a little like this....

mind.addEventListener(Event.WAKE, setupBack);

function setupBack (e:Event):void {
var back:Back = new Back();
back.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, updateBack);
addChild(back);
}

function updateBack (e:Event):void {
if (back.itches == true) {
wakeUp();
ScratchBack();
}
}

function wakeUp (e:Event) {
mind.conscious == true;
}

function ScratchBack(e:Event) {
arm.x = back.x;
}

Now of that probably makes sense to anyone, but just go with me here. Obviously, this exact code didn't run through my head when I was waking up. It all happened very fast, but it was something very similar to it. So after that code ran, I immediately woke up and I had this intense itch in the center of my back.

It was just really crazy. I was a little freaked out by the whole thing. So what's the moral of the story? I guess there isn't one. I just have really weird dreams sometimes and I'm a HUGE nerd. I'm sorry if you took the time to read this.

Dreamin' Fresh;

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

best game you'll ever play....ever.

Yo! I just got done with my Flash Actionscript (or as Lance calls it, Flass Acsinscript) class! It was a lot of fun! A crapton of work...but fun, nonetheless. I made a game. You should check it out. Tell me what you think. I'm not happy with how the graphics turned out, but the actionscript functions, and that was the whole point of the class.

I do occasionally get an error when you shoot an enemy as it hits your plane. I dont know what's up with that. If you're plane dissapears, just refresh the page. I'll figure it out someday. Enjoy.

ps...the current high score is 960, set by Becca Dornan. Someday, i'll figure out how to save high scores. That's a little bit out of my skill level at the moment.

Fresh Script,

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Steve Jobs frowned on me today.


...that's right, I installed Windows today. Is it considered blasphemy if I was excited to install Windows on my Mac? anyway, let the 3D rendering begin! you can expect some 3d projects on here soon.

with a fresh OS,



(this post was sponsored by Rockstar)

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Christmas in June

Tonight, I did something crazy. I swapped out my old 160 Gb internal hard drive for a 320 Gb. (see following diagram)


I needed more room, because I'll be installing Windows shortly, so I can run a couple different PC-only Applications, including Sony's Acid Pro and 3D Studio Max, among others. woo hoo! yes, i know, im a big nerd.

I also upgraded my RAM from 2 Gb to 4 Gb! you know what they say...Christmas only comes once a year. wait...what? nevermind.

keepin' the hardware fresh,

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Have you ever smoked 37 cigarettes at once? I have.

JK...i've never done that. But it did feel like i was when i was walking to my car after class today. (there's a lot of smokers at FS)

I haven't posted in a while. Im so sorry. But wait, wait, wait...before you start throwing things at me...hear me out. Last month i was in Developmental Psychology (really boring but somewhat interesting) and Web Design (really really boring, but stuff that i need to know). The Web Design class was all based on HTML and CSS coding. If you don't know what that is...go read a book or google it or something. Needless to say, coding sucks. Everyone knows it sucks. Even web programmers know it sucks. It's just so freakin' boring! I guess I'm just trying to come up with an excuse for why I haven't posted in some time.

Basically, the only thing I did last month that's worth posting is this Cup O' Soul! website. This was the final project for Web Design, where we had to take an existing site, and redo it. I chose this local coffee house in Winter Park. I'd say that, compared to some of the other site's that I saw from my class, mine turned out really good. But I know that I could have done better. It was just hard for me to find the passion this past month.

On a much lighter note...

...doing good so far.

Always,

Friday, May 2, 2008

Playdohfield: Coming Soon

Here's my final "Motion Graphics Project" piece. I had to pick one topic and then make a 60 second motion piece for it. Then I had to cut that down into a 30 second and a 15 second. For this project, I really wanted to try to master the 3d environment and camera movements in After Effects, so that's what I focused on. I created the claymation and did the voiceovers myself. Here ya go!



I won't include the 30 or the 15 second takes. They're basically the exact same thing, just quicker cuts.

I'd like to continue to work with motion graphics in the future. I was actually thinking about failing this class on purpose, so I could have another month to work on it. I've decided not to do that though, and to just work on it in my free time. I love it and could definitely see myself pursuing a job in motion graphics.

Oh, and I think that I'm going to drop out of Full Sail and become a voice over actor. Because I'm so good at it. (sarcasm)

Keepin' It Fresh with the NEW and IMPROVED Freshness Seal,

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Trans-Demographic Ad

Without further ado...



This project was very difficult and stressful for me. I was supposed to make a 30 second trans-demographic ad which had to include some video in it somewhere. It was also recommended to use a 3d environment.

I started out making a playdoh ad directed towards kids, where I was going to make a claymation with playdoh, and then create all the graphic scenery for my playdoh figure to interact with. But after a couple different shoots, I realized that I was in WAY over my head for the time period that I had to work with. I did play around with a little something that can be found here. It's not anything serious, so don't expect anything.

So I ended up making a Burton ad directed towards women, because chicks who snowboard are so much hotter than chicks that don't. I did this ad in a little over two days. I think it turned out alright.

Keepin' It Fresh,
Aaron J