I have spent the last month or so working in a completely new medium: video. Author Pat McDermott is shouldering a huge amount of the responsibility of promoting the re-release of her novel A Band of Roses, and as her graphic/web designer and marketing consultant, I have offered to try my hand at the trend of creating a video "trailer". Apparently it is a hugely popular marketing tool in the independent publishing world, typically a series of still images panning across the screen or zooming in/out, with accompanying captions to give the gist of the story.

The only problem is, many of these trailers aren't really very well done. I have watched several, and been disappointed (and occasionally embarrassed) by the lack of finesse, subtlety, pacing, and dramatic formula they tend to exhibit, making some of them seem more like PowerPoint presentations than marketing pieces. There are a few I've seen that are outright embarassing, and seem to have been composed with a sledgehammer and a shoehorn.

One in particular tells the story of a psychic of some kind who is on vacation. Slow, lilting music, scenes of stucco neighborhoods slowly panning by... and then, at about 1:00, scenes of lightning, zombies (using images from Resident Evil and other video games) and demons flash by on the screen accompanied by terrifying loud music. This goes on for maybe 5 seconds, and then abruptly returns to the previous music and pacing. No transition or even editing of the soundtrack. It was as if the zombie scene came from another trailer completely and was ham-fistedly pasted over the original piece.

I mean no disrespect to the creator of said trailer, but I do feel justified in offering some very frank and objective criticism when I see something like this. I suppose it's a side-effect of having the no-holds-barred Murray Tinkelman as my college professor, a guy who would just as soon throw a chair or tell you to get the hell out of his class than explain to you why what you did was wrong. Man, I miss that guy.

In any case, yes, there are elements of these trailers that are well-done, and I do like some of the photo choices that are vague and archetypal enough in nature to intrigue the viewer. Others are oddly out of place, too specific, and seem to completely kill the atmosphere of the overall piece. It's a book, after all. You can't show the viewer what the character is supposed to look like based on some available stock photography. I consider it far better to leave things as vague as possible and let the reader's imagination paint in the details.

The general problem with many of these efforts is one of presentation, and craftsmanship. It's entirely possible that the book the trailer advertises is a great one. But that will never matter if the marketing is no good. I consider myself lucky to have a formal education in art, design, and illustration, as I feel the concepts I learned over the years apply to this type of project just as they would a painting. I try to be conscious of the importance of the work as a whole, not just a string of "cool ideas" laid end to end, but a complete composition.

With that in mind, I took this project on, my goal from the start being to attempt to use the conventions of existing book trailer "culture", but present the finished piece in a way that was more dramatically relevant to a trailer you'd see for a big-budget film. I dusted off a 2-year-old copy of Adobe AfterEffects that I had been meaning to immerse myself in for some time, and a couple of textbooks I had bought when I planned on learning AfterEffects a while back (that never really materialized). I dove in, learned the basics, and progressed from a bumbling hack to a fairly competent craftsman within a week or so.

The trailer project is still in the draft stage, although not much remains before it's completed. I'm very excited to add this piece to my portfolio, and the skills of video compositing and animation to my general repetoire. You can see the current work-in-progress here.

More on this as I near completion. I have already added some live-action video and filled in the missing 15-second gap towards the end with the remainder of the captions, which Ms. McDermott and I ironed out to perfection over the weekend. I'm currently having a teeny bit of trouble getting a render of the most recent version completed (something wrong with the way AE is processing the soundtrack source file), but I'll continue to update the WIP link as changes are made.

Oh, and I forgot to mention... working on these may be a bit tedious, but it's fun.

Labels: artists, movies, technology, trailers, video, work

Posted by Shag at 8:58 AM

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I just took a peek at my Netflix queue to see what was headed my way once I return the movies I have at home. I was a little disturbed to find out what was destined to arrive in my mailbox in the very near future.

THIS:

In case you were wondering, yes that is Sean Connery. The movie, which I had until yesterday completely forgotten that I had ordered, is called Zardoz, a post-apocalyptic commentary on caste systems, organized religion, and apparently, fashion dos and don'ts.

Being a fan of the whole dystopia genre, my curiosity (which later deteriorated into morbid curiosity) was piqued when I heard about this supposed cult-classic by the guy who directed Deliverance, featuring former James Bond and future Juan Sanchez Villalobos Ramirez clad in a red diaper and suspenders. Um... apparently there's also a lot of stuff about penises in the movie too. At least, that's what I've heard. Based on that picture up there, I can hardly say I'm surprised.

In the last few years, I've been quite an avid fan of movies predicting bleak futures for humanity, mostly because of how plausible some of them seem. Before I continue with the real reason for this post, allow me to list a few of my favorite films depicting utterly insane, and largely believable, scenarios concerning the future of mankind:

The whole Mad Max trilogy: An Australian highway cop in a really awesome car goes nuts and exacts gruesome revenge after a biker gang kills his family. Later he becomes a legendary messiah figure, pisses off Tina Turner, and battles a retarded giant in a steel cage.

Logan's Run: The entire population of the US lives in a huge domed city controlled by computers. To stifle population growth, people celebrate their 30th birthdays with a mandatory mass-suicide ritual.

A Boy and His Dog: Don Johnson and a talking (?) dog named "Blood" try to survive as scavengers in a nuclear wasteland, and end up discovering an underground community of bible-thumping nutcases wearing clown makeup and overalls.

Equilibrium: To put an end to man's predisposition to violence and war, people are forced to take drugs that suppress all emotions. Christian Bale is a lawman who arrests/kills anyone who goes off their meds.

Wizards: Millions of years after humankind is wiped out by nuclear war, the forces of good (magic) and evil (technology) battle for dominance of the world.

THX 1138: Robert Duvall is a bald drone in a society of bald drones who is tricked into going off his mandatory mood-suppressing drugs and gets caught, sentenced, and imprisoned for his crime of having feelings and falling in love with his roommate.

Minority Report: Tom Cruise yells his way through this adaptation of Philip K. Dick's story of a future police department that can accurately predict the future and pre-emptively arrest criminals before they've even done anything wrong, opening up a whole messy philosophical and moral can of worms.

Demolition Man: Basically a re-telling of Huxley's Brave New World with guns, explosions, and Denis Leary. 'Nuff said.

And the list goes on and on, some examples being, of course, infinitely better than others.

So to all my friends, family, and loved ones: In case my mind does not survive the journey of Zardoz, know that I love you all and will see you on the other side.

Labels: fascism, fear, guns, humor, movies, religion, technology, war

Posted by Shag at 9:28 AM

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In the past month or so, I've been doing some work on a few new projects and ideas, in addition to keeping (thank God) my regular 9 to 5, bill-paying job.

Keep an eye out for a more smoothly integrated photo gallery system on my site. I was using Web Gallery Creator, but I hate it. I mostly just used it because it was easy, but I had major annoyance issues with the fact that it wasn't possible to work with the code so that it fit into my own site template. At the moment, I'm screwing around with a nifty and simple little freeware program, which bears the hilarious title of "ThumbaWumba" (link here). I have one test-gallery posted already, but I need to perfect the HTML template before I take the time to process the rest of them (they've been taken down for the moment). I do NOT like the text-based controls(next page, previous page, etc.) and am planning to replace them with graphics.

Anyway, this one's pretty easy to use, and the templates are completely editable using HTML. One slight problem though, which I am amazed the program's author didn't foresee: The HTML template editing feature limits each line of code to a specific number of characters... let's say it's 60 for the sake of argument. This means any HTML tags that exceed those 60 characters get chopped in half and moved to the next line of code. Long lines of script and the finer details of image and href tags are destroyed in the process. Since my website's template uses a ton of rollover images, meaning tons of long-ass script in the head content, that does not make me happy.

I am about 99% of the way to finding a way around this using a system of Dreamweaver templates, because creating customized, easy and fast image galleries is going to be a huge factor in...

My latest project, which is a full start-to-finish website for a local custom homebuilding company. I'm very excited about this, I think I can safely say it is my most professional-grade freelance project to date. I would post a link to the test-site here, but I prefer to wait until the site is completed and the owner, one Matt Harkins, is satisfied with the results.

Beyond that, I have been learning SQL and ASP at work, and I find it both fascinating and mind-wrenchingly irritating. Luckily, I'm a quick study, because my knowledge of this stuff is quickly inflating my value to the company at a time where many people are uncertain if they will even have a job in the near future. (We'll see how well they remember this when I'm up for a raise in August.)

A few days ago, my boss said he had some bad news for me. I jokingly asked him if I was fired, and he said there was no way I was losing this job, even if I wanted to. Then he went on to tell me the REAL bad news, which was that he had somehow screwed up the data source for our current ASP project, meaning my entire day's worth of work on the company website had to be done over more or less from scratch.

Labels: economy, illustratology, photos, technology

Posted by Shag at 4:07 PM

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I hate spam, and I know I'm not the only one.

Wikipedia, my favorite semi-reliable source of knowledge, describes "spam" (as it applies to email) as "Unsolicited Bulk Email". Basically, a modernized version of junk mail, except that it mostly has to do with increasing the size of your penis and helping Nigerian bankers smuggle some dead guy's money.There has probably been some form of spam in existence since the beginning of human history.

Almost everyone has, at some point, found flyers or ads or bible verses stuck under their windshield wiper. Go to Las Vegas, and you'll see guys about every 8 feet all the way down the Strip, handing out little cards to everyone who passes by, regardless of age, sex, or demeanor. These cards typically feature photos of unclothed women, complete with phone numbers for escort services, stripping agencies, or phone sex lines. It makes me wonder-- did they do this kind of thing in Ancient Rome or other eras of civilization? I can understand how movable type and the Industrial Revolution made advertising in ALL forms a lot easier, and a lot more pervasive, but in the grand scope of history, those are pretty recent developments. I do theorize that there has always been pornography or some form of selling sex, and probably there have always been scams and salesmen. Do you think cavemen handed out stones with cave-paintings on them to advertise hot cavewomen that would come to your cave and dance and grunt for only 5 pig-skulls? I think it's not only possible, but fairly likely.

So, let's move forward a couple million years, to a time and place in which every morning I have between 200 and 600 emails in my inbox. On some days, 100% of these are spam. Other days, I get one or two real messages from friends or family or clients. The other 598 messages are the most obnoxious, idiotic, unsolicited hogwash I have ever seen.

Look, I understand the principle. I work in marketing, and much of my job consists of finding cost-effective ways to raise awareness and sales of my company's products. Advertising by email costs virtually nothing, and occasionally it may actually help promote a business or gain customers. But how are you going to promote a product with subject lines full of complete nonsense? Is this actually fooling anyone? I'm talking about the really spammy stuff, the messages that have subjects like some of the ones I received today:

• He my vendetta - (What does this even mean?)


• Everything for you penis at low prices - (My penis has everything it needs, thanks.)


• in aback as waggle - (Again, total nonsense. How is this supposed to entice me to buy things?)


• New Winter Poetry Contest - Enter Now! Win 10,000 Dollars - (I don't write poetry)

In fact, Mr. David Wong has compiled a hilarious Spam Subject Line Museum at his Pointless Waste Of Time website. My examples seem rather tame compared to some of his listings. Reinforcing my point; is anyone actually opening these emails? And if not, what's the point of sending trillions of them?

See, when you're in Las Vegas, and a guy is handing out sex-cards, you have the option of not taking one if you're not interested in paying for sex, or you could take one and throw it in the next available garbage can. If you actually wanted a midget sex message from Muswellbrook Netball Association Vice President Tracy Goldman, you would probably just call her up and ask if she would be willing to give you the scoop on midget sex (don't get your hopes up, I'm sure she's very busy). With spam, you are constantly getting dozens of repeated emails trying to sell you things that there is absolutely no chance you would ever want or need (like a midget sex message, because I'm actually not even sure what that entails. Is it a message you need to hear if you ARE a midget, or does the midget give you the message? Either way, I'm not interested).

The reason I even mention any of this is because spam is not only annoying, it is fast becoming dangerous. In recent years, spam and similar maladies like spyware, viruses, autodialers, etc. have shifted from being passive annoyances to very proactive and aggressive tools of destruction. With every safeguard we can install on our computer, some genius with way too much time on his hands finds a new loophole.

In a recent news story, a 40-year-old substitute teacher is in danger of being sentenced to 40 YEARS in prison for accidentally and unwittingly exposing a classroom full of 7th-graders to various pornographic pop-up advertisements that appeared out of nowhere while letting the kids surf the net on the class computer. As it turns out, in this case, the teacher had hired a lawyer who was woefully uninformed and unprepared to specifically place the blame on spammers and spybots. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for her appeal, as she has already been convicted of 4 felonies in this case.

A couple of years ago, some asshole company saw fit to install an ad on my computer without telling me. This ad was for something called The Amazing Diet Patch, a transdermal patch that pumped you full of some sort of diet drugs. This ad would pop up at random moments, complete with a very loud female announcer who would tell me all about the diet patch, and scare the bejesus out of my cat. When I wasn't hearing Diet Patch Lady's voice in my nightmares, I was hearing it in reality because it woke me up out of a sound sleep from the office next to my bedroom. I became so frustrated with the ad that I tracked down the phone number for the shady-sounding company that was behind the product, called them up, and demanded to be transferred to the tech department to explain how to get the thing off of my system. Since I was talking to some order-entry paean who probably had no idea what I was talking about, I got nowhere with this request.

My point is that there is no reason this ad should have been installed to begin with. If I want a diet patch, I'll go find one and buy it. If I want porn, or a midget sex message, or information on penny stocks, I'll seek it out on my own, thank you very much. I hate spam and spyware much as I would hate someone breaking the window of my apartment to sneak in while I was asleep and ask me if I wanted to buy something. Even if it was something really, REALLY good.

When spam and its ilk cross the line from annoyance to invasion, we all need to step back and realize that although there are some laws to govern this type of activity (like the CAN-SPAM act), there is no real way to enforce them until the damage has already been done, whether it's damage to your peace of mind or to your PC. So I will make a plea to all you spammers out there:

Please just stop doing what you're doing. Your way of doing business should be illegal, and at the very least it should give you trouble sleeping at night. If your products were any good in the first place, you would not need to resort to sneaky and cryptic marketing strategies. Nobody is shopping online for Diet Patches, searching for midget sex messages, or in need of any sort of herbal substitutes for marijuana unless they are really, really dumb or desperate. Your day will come!

Labels: consumerism, privacy, stupidity, technology

Posted by Shag at 9:31 AM

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Coming in February 2007 (or sooner)!

Yes, I am becoming one of those "blog people". If you'd like to know what the blog is going to be about (eww.. I hate the word "blog"... I wish it was called something else. It sounds like some kind of gross combination of "blood" and "egg") I really don't know quite yet.

This blog is mostly inspired by sheer laziness, please note the irony of that statement, since the actual mechanics of putting the blogging tags into my own web format were a living hell that drove me to the brink of insanity. I just decided months ago that I wanted an extremely simple and fast way to post any random thoughts, ideas, or news that I had onto my site without having to go through the whole hassle of republishing a page every time.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it when it actually begins to accumulate some substance.

-Rick

Labels: blogging, illustratology, technology

Posted by Shag at 8:18 AM

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