After about 4 months of very off-and-on work on my Muse painting, I am nearing completion.
Life has been busy, especially at the old 9-to-5, due to the upcoming AWS and STAFDA trade shows in Chicago and Atlanta, respectively. Since about August, I have usually been too tired to do anything other than eat and take a nap when I get home from work. Shows are shipped, finally, and the stress levels are down a bit, at least for the time being.
In any case, updates on the progress of the Muse project can be seen in slideshow format here (requires Flash plugin). I have more photos in my camera, slideshow will be updated in the next day or two as I continue toward the finish line.
After reading an interesting article on spam email and how it is generated, I decided to Google my email address. I was a bit disturbed to find that one of the search results was a post on some weird Italian pop music discussion board containing an outright theft of one of my favorite design pieces, a CD cover I made for a dear friend a few years ago.
Although I'm a bit annoyed that someone would steal my work without my permission, I realized that in this age of 1s and 0s, "borrowing" someone's digital artwork is only as easy as the artist allows it to be. I have been neglectful of this until now, thinking not only that my work was not popular enough by any stretch of the imagination to be stolen, but also that nobody would have the gall to do such a thing.
Part of me is also somewhat flattered, however. The idea that someone looking for an image to illustrate the phrase "Rainbow in the Dark" stumbled upon my work in a Google search (or whatever) and decided it was a perfect match, well... it's reaffirming in a way. Perhaps theft is an even more sincere form of flattery than imitation.
My solution at the moment strikes me as inelegant but necessary, at least until I find a better one. I plan to watermark all of the work on my site. I hope to achieve this in a manner that is subtle and obvious at the same time. Apologies in advance.
I have a new project underway, one that I'm pretty excited about. Having just received my glorious Adobe Master Collection CS4 package, and subsequently having to add another gigabyte of RAM to my computer because one of the boards died on me, I am completely geared up and rearing to go on my latest brainstorm.
Not being quite the prolific illustrator I had once hoped to be, projects involving the use of my hands and a paintbrush tend to be rare. However, they are almost always something I dive into with passion and enthusiasm, and I always find painting to be an enjoyable and very Zen undertaking.
This latest painting is a tribute to inspiration, and to someone who has been a constant source of ideas, feedback, and collaboration on some of the most important work I've done over the past year. She is my own personal Muse, and a damn good one, responsible for such varied inspirations as an idea for a movie script, comic strips, and input on the redesign of my website, portfolio and resume, and the recently completed trailer for "A Band of Roses". I'm hoping to have this thing done in time for her birthday (Guy Fawkes Day).
Lacking the convenience of posing living human models and costumes for this piece, I've been using Poser as a digital substitute. So far, so good. I intend to finish the poses, lighting, perspective/camera angles and a final render, and bring it into Photoshop to add a decent background and any image adjustments or effects I deem necessary. All of that will merely serve as a reference photo for the final phase, which is to transfer it to canvas and repaint it for a more organic finished piece. As it stands, here's where I'm at (still needs a lot of refinement, especially the lighting):
As for the painting itself, I'm currently leaning toward either oils or acrylics. Acrylic seems more likely, but I must admit my technique in that medium is pretty weak compared to working with oil. Oil is messy and takes forever to dry. I could switch to alkyds, but that would probably mean an investment of money into a completely new and unfamiliar medium, so I think I'll just stick with what I know. If I need it to dry faster, I'll just stick with my old standbys of liquin dryer and varnish.
The trailer is done! It's posted on YouTube, and the customer, Pat McDermott, seems to be very satisfied with the results.
Upon uploading this video initially, I was faced with a major disappointment. For some reason, the video appeared blurry and pixellated, until I clicked on the little "HQ" toggle on the lower right side of the movie player frame. I was scrambling to find out what had gone wrong, and apologizing profusely to my customer for delivering a sub-excellent product.
It all made a little more sense after finding this blurb in the YouTube Help forums:
We made improvements to standard quality for video uploads! Unless there is a large difference between standard quality and HQ , the upload will produce standard quality by default (and not HQ as before).
In other words, the bar has been raised and you're going to find it hard to get HQ encoding at present, with the "upgrade" to "standard (normal) quality." It can be done but you may need to search the forum to find out possible ways that could work for you. Most of us are too tired to repeat ourselves on this, and no one I know is convinced they have a foolproof method forrendering that will ALWAYS give you HQ encoding.
In other words, the resolution and quality of my uploaded video was TOO GOOD. So good that YouTube split it up into high-quality and low-quality versions for the benefit of people with slower connection speeds. I will have to keep this in mind for future projects, as I think the whole HQ toggle thing is obnoxious, and frankly, unnecessary. If anything, the HQ display should be the default setting, allowing people to lower the quality if needed for streaming speed, etc.
Regardless, this is a very exciting milestone for me. I have been interested in working with video for many years, and have never really had the opportunity. Now I am dying for my recent purchase of Adobe Master Collection CS4 to arrive so I can do even cooler stuff from here on out.
Ms. McDermott is currently on a rampage (in a good way), posting this link on her site, her Facebook page, and sending it out to a staggering number of colleagues, web loops, discussion groups, and a company called Blazing Trailers that specializes in showcasing exactly this kind of media.
I am proud of my work on this project. If it generates some more work of this nature in the future, even better. I look forward to creating more trailers for Pat when she rolls out the remaining books in her series!
I seem to be satisfied? I'm ecstatic! You did a fabulous job, Rick! I'm glad you've extended your considerable talents into video. Thank you so much!
— By Pat McDermott, on
May 21, 2009 12:22 PM
You're very welcome! I've already got a few fragments of ideas bubbling for the next one.
— By Shag, on
May 27, 2009 9:49 AM
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.
Quick news flash! As of yesterday evening, author Pat McDermott now has a fully functional blog, which I suggest you read. Pat is the author of "A Band of Roses", and the upcoming "Fiery Roses", two action/adventure stories set in an alternate world in which Brian Boru survived the Battle of Clontarf and propagated the rule of Irish monarchy to the present day. Good stuff.
Her book can now be purchased as an e-book through Red Rose Publishing. It's very obvious after reading a single page that her novel is the result of a lot of hard work and research. The sequel, "Fiery Roses," is coming soon!
March of this year has definitely followed the old adage thus far, not only in terms of weather, but also the general climate of life and work.
Kicking the month off with a bit of turbulence was an excellent trip back up to Rainbow Ridge for a pleasant weekend with some old friends. A new addition to the group this time around was Jack, the 16-month-old son of Brian and Amy. (More on this trip in a future post...)
On the heels of that, there has been getting back to reality and back to work, to finish up the website that I have been working with Matt Harkins on since the end of January. Final changes were completed on Sunday, and the maiden voyage from my hard drive, through the tubes, and out into the Internets was completed Monday night. Here's the finished site if you'd like to check it out. This guy does some pretty fabulous work. Of course, I'm hoping he feels the same about me... ha ha.
Next on the agenda is finalizing the blog architecture and template for author Pat McDermott. She has just completed a publishing deal with a new publisher to redistribute her first novel as an e-book, and the second installment is ready to launch. She asked me to help her get into the world of blogging, and remarked that it seemed a little odd for so many people to write about stuff and expect everyone else to actually care. I agree, for the most part. I blog for my own enjoyment, I honestly don't care all that much who reads this or why. However, in Pat's case, I think it would be roughly the equivalent of a veteran actor doing standup comedy gigs on the weekends to stay on his toes.
In any case, I will certainly make the announcement when her blog is complete, because I am sure she will have a lot of interesting things to share and talk about, her numerous travels not being the least of them. The work on my end is about 95% completed, we have a meeting scheduled this weekend to finalize it and run through her preferences, tweaks on fonts, colors, etc. You can see a preview of the work-in-progress here.
Point is, after a hectic start to March, I think I'm over the hump, at least for the moment. I have a few odds and ends to attend to, and the recent frenzy at my 9 to 5 gig has died down considerably. It's nice to be busy once in a while, but with the lovely weather of Spring just around the corner, it's also nice to be able to relax and enjoy doing nothing, which is what I do best.
Your help with getting me into the blogosphere has been phenomenal, Rick. I love the site you designed and appreciate your patient lessons walking me through the blogging process. All I have to do now is find something interesting to blog about! Thank you.
— By Pat McDermott, on
March 23, 2009 9:08 AM
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