One Minute Video Shoot

Peter, Matt, Andrea and I went to Briarwood Farms to do our one minute video shoot.   It turned out to be a very good idea to have brought two cameras so that we could shoot simultaneously.  This offered us to do some more dynamic things with the camera angle and transitions from dialogue to dialogue.  It was also fantastic to have a shotgun mic that we were able to utilize, as we could just pull one audio to be the foundation for two separate angles.

There were some very core Avid skills that came to make the one minute video successful.  First was to have a separate audio and video tracks and the ability to add title screens and cut.  Looking up some quick Lynda tutorials on tail and top edits made the process a lot faster.

One key take away that I will forever remember is how important the buttons beside the tracks are.  They are like hiding and unhiding layers in Photoshop.  If you leave one that you do not intend to edit on, I found that huge gaps would occur where I don’t want it to be.  For example I struggled with disappearing audio because of that reason.  Finally when I tried to export, if I don’t have the right tracks highlighted, then I would be missing parts in the final video, as I found out after waiting ten minutes for it to render and then having to render it again.

https://senema.senecac.on.ca/videos/2947/samuel-li

Applying Gradient Meshes to Sweet Peppers

Gradient Meshes for Peppers

The assignment is to use the gradient mesh tool in Illustrator and recreate the peppers. The challenge was to emulate the reflective surface as well as learning how to incorporate the stems in the illustration and mesh.

Completed on Illustrator

Reference Picture

To stem or not to stem?

As I was starting on the first pepper, I contemplated whether or not to include the stem or not in the mesh. Learning from my past experience, I thought it would be a good idea to include it after receiving some counsel from another student. The difficulty was extruding a piece from centre of the pepper in the mesh causing the mesh to go wonky from time to time when adding in mesh nodes.

Extruding the Stem

The challenge is real

Satisfactory stem and pepper

The completed red pepper. The key was getting the basic shape with as little lines as possible.

I also decided to include the stem with the green pepper mesh because the stem was extruding from the top.

Separate Stems

For the yellow pepper I decided to add on the stem separately because the majority of the stem grew out of the centre and it would be impractical to have two separate areas wit different shape and colours on the gradient mesh. Here is the comparison between a stem within the mesh (red pepper) and two separate meshes (yellow pepper).

Yellow Pepper with separate stem

Comparison

Also I decided to do the same technique with the orange pepper given the complexity of the stems.

Finished!

Developing an Android App: PocketChords

“We build tools that build us” – Marshall McLuhan

I started this Android App project a long time ago out of a need to have a quick way to pull out chord sheets to play along with on my Android Device.  But my professor Sumit Bhatia blew my mind with Marshall McLuhan and caused me to reevaluate why I am making this app.  After reading, The Medium is the Message by Marshall McLuhan, I began to understand that the mere existence of a technology has the opportunity to affect culture.  The genius of professor Bhatia was that he began linking this idea with the fact that the quality and usability of this technology or medium determines if this impact happens.  For example, the mere existence of the internet began to create tremors into how the world interacted with each other, but it was when developers began demonstrating and developing functional uses for the internet when the world started to be transformed.  Facebook, Google and Wikipedia are all examples of how our lives are now different from the generation before us.

Simply to create for the sake of creating would not be as effective as creating with a focused awareness on the impact an app can have on the world.  I need to dig deeper.

At first I thought I would create an app that would help people organize their set lists, access their song chords offline that’s super light on storage, allow people to write down their own songs on the fly and share their chords with others.  But after some time sitting down and thinking, this is truly at the heart of what I want to accomplish:

To be a force in creating culture by expanding our freedom to play music

This is the goal of PocketChords.  For this reason this app will be designed and oriented.   The next post I will begin diving into the nitty-gritty and share my thought-processes on some significant lessons learned while making the app.

-Sam