Witches of Willow Wood

This week I finished the mock book cover for my friend's story called The Witches of Willow Wood. It's about 3 young girls who discover a magical land. It's just the cover though so now I have to go back and do the back cover which I'll post when it's complete.



I went to see the movie Becoming Jane at the Arclight yesterday which is the story of Jane Austen's life, but it made me kind of depressed. She never married but it's the story of her love affair and the reasons they couldn't be together. I prefer when romantic movies have happy endings. Also went to dinner at the Formosa Cafe on Santa Monica Blvd which is a restaurant inside a train car. I liked it a lot there. It felt very cozy and had pretty good food.

Pride and Prejudice trailer

Here's the latest copy of the trailer I made for my editing class. I cut about 12 seconds off it because it was feeling a little long. i might want to go back and play with the audio a bit and try to make it better, but for now I'm pretty happy with the way it's come out. I got to use some of the stuff I learned in my motion graphics class to make the title cards. The next trailer I'm going to start on is The Last King of Scotland so that I have a variety of genres.

my pride and prejudice trailer

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Because it's compressed to an mpeg-4 it looks like of pixelated. Oh well.

The end of summer

School's gonna be starting again at USC soon and it's the weirdest feeling not to be going back there with everyone. It's going to be especially strange not to be doing sorority rush school, which was such a consuming process but ended up being pretty fun. Instead, I'll be finishing up this editing class next Thursday and then will have no excuse to not apply for jobs.

Also, i took the plunge and bought a Macbook Pro!! It looks a lot like my other powerbook, but my old computer's over 4 years old and is starting to have problems. The hinge broke off so I couldn't close the screen and it was kind of slow-moving. I tested out my new computer's speed by ripping the DVD for last kind of scotland. On my old computer, it took over 10 hours!! New computer only took a half hour. yaaaay!!! And they had a deal where we could get $200 off a video ipod so I bought one for only $50. It was my lucky day. My old ipod was the very first generation that came out so I'm looking forward to all the cool new video ipod features. I am officially a technology whore now.

Inconceivable

I'm very glad that I'm starting a new editing class on monday because I am going stir crazy! This weekend should be fun though since I've basically sat on my butt all week. I even got so bored that I got in my car, drove to Hollywood for no good reason and then drove back. I was originally planning to go see Harry Potter the night it opened but it snuck up on me and I missed it so instead I'm going to see it with my mom on Friday night. I don't know if this is gonna be one of the better Harry Potter movies because the 5th book is kind of a transitional book that sets up for Book 6. Then on Saturday I'm taking a one-day class called Photographing the Urban Landscape. We're going to take the metro from North Hollywood to photograph the LA Cathedral, the Disney concert hall, Olvera Street, Union Station and Chinatown. It's going to be all day in the sun so I'll probably get sunburnt, but will hopefully get some awesome pictures which I will post here later.

Sunday morning I'm going to brunch in Los Feliz. I really like the area and it's one of the places I'm seriously considering moving to when I'm ready to get my own apartment. The other day my parents and I took a drive down to Silverlake and Los Feliz to check out the neighborhood and to write down names of apartments that we thought looked nice. I researched online and it seems like the general price for a 2 bedroom, 2 bath is between $1700 and 2000 a month. So with a roommate splitting the cost that would be something like $900/1000 a month. Which sounded like a lot to me but I know people who are living around SC paying $850 a month and that area's not as nice. I guess it's just the price of living in Los Angeles but I think I'm going to try to find a place for even less expensive.

I'm in the 4th week of my motion graphics class and even though the class is 8 hours long and I usually feel like gouging my eyes out by the end of the day I'm actually enjoying the class and learning a lot. I don't think I would've learned it on my own, so it's nice to have something forcing me to do the work. This week we had to take a quote and animate it.

I was trying to figure out how to post the quicktime movies here, but apparently you can't unless it's already online. Oh well.


Next Friday the Harry Potter book comes out!!

The sun in retreat made the skyline look like crooked teeth

Tomorrow is the last day of my 2-week adobe illustrator class. I'm really glad that I took the class because I was always afraid to open the program and use it before so I just avoided it and stuck to photoshop and indesign. But this class forced me to figure it out and I think I learned a lot. A frustrating part of this week was when I had to make my first assignment which was to create this landscape picture of suburban houses based off a picture he gave us. I spent forever working on it because I was working on the old PC in the other room. It took maybe 5 hours. I was happy with it and saved it to the desktop, but the next day it was nowhere to be found on the computer! Totally gone! So I had done all this work and I couldn't turn it in and I looked like a slacker.

Today's assignment was to take a family photograph and draw it in illustrator. The boundaries were pretty loose so instead of a family picture, I wanted to make the project applicable so I chose one of Ewan McGregor smoking a cigarette and drew that. I made it into a movie poster that I imagined would be called The Wanderer and would star Ewan and also Natalie Portman and Jason Isaacs. Hopefully this one will make up for the lack of first project.




Also, last night, matt and I went to see The Wind Fisherman at AFI. It was a year ago that we worked on it. I remember how hot it was during filming. People were running around in 100 degree heat all day but when you saw the film nobody looked sweaty or red which was surprising but good. It looked really great with the original score added and the CGI work. It was also nice to see all the people who had worked on it. I like to be on the AFI campus because it's up on a hill and has the most amazing views of the LA skyline.

If you want to be someone else, change your life

I've been thinking about what I would be doing as a career if I wasn't going to be a designer. Here's a list of what I came up with.

1) A wedding gown designer. When I was 13, becoming a dress designer was one of my dreams. I used to scribble pictures of dresses on napkins when my family went out to eat. Unfortunately, my insight into the gown industry was limited and all my drawing came out looking like the exact same piece o'crap gown: thin spagetti strap, umpire waist and then simple flowy bottom, which is probably the last thing I'd pick as my actual wedding dress. Alas, I didn't become Vera Wang, but I do enjoy flipping through the bridal magazines at the drugstore and checking out all the new designs.



2) A mythbuster. I am totally hooked on that show and I think it'd be really fun to figure out the different experiments and test them out. Of course, I am clueless when it comes to science so I would probably never make the cut.

3) A Greenpeace (or PETA) activist. Yep, that would be me cleaning oil off all the baby seals and ducks. I don't think it pays well and I'd probably be arrested for disorderly conduct, but it would be exceptionally cool.



4) A foodie. I'd work for a local paper in some very chic town that has wonderful restaurants and I would go to them all and sample the food for free. Then I'd write about it. I'd probably be really fat, but at least I'd be fat and happy. In this vein, I also dreamed about being a pastry chef (and open my own bakery in Hell's Kitchen like Kyotofu) or a wedding cake decorator. Everyone loves desserts so I think it'd be fun to create the desserts that people love. I would be a lot like Sookie from Gilmore Girls.

If you're looking for a good Los Angeles food blog, my favorite is http://www.potatomato.com/mt/index.html


Sookie

5) An adventurer/riverboat captain. I had a dream last night where I was riverboating in a creepy bayou but it was more like roaring rapids and the boat capsized and I had to save my family from almost certain death. But in real life, I don't think anyone judges riverboat captains. You're not held up to very high expectations, as long as you don't steer the boat into a sandbank or something like that.



Although I could still ditch my plan to be a designer and go to culinary school, I'm re-energized now that my summer classes have started and I feel like I'm actually being productive again. My motion graphics class starts on Friday, I can't wait! My dad got to fly out to Pittsburgh for my cousin's Bat Mitzvah, but we couldn't go so I felt really left out. It was apparently a big family reunion and we missed it! Extended family has started being more important to me than it was when I was younger. My dad filmed my grandpa and his brother talk about our family history and I learned a lot of things I didn't know. For instance, I am a little Romanian. It really throws off your sense of identity when you throw a new heritage into the mix.

I went to see Jon Brion last week at Largo on Fairfax, my most favorite singer/songwriter/composer. He shaved off his lumberjack/Gandolf beard which was unfortunate because I've grown fond of it. He was amazing as usual and there seemed to be lots of famous musicians in the crowd who got up to play with him. There were the Watkin siblings from the group Nickel Creek, the drummer from Rilo Kiley, and some others whose names I have forgotten. I've also been at the Hollywood Cemetary for screenings of old movies. I saw Gilda not long ago and tomorrow is Rebel Without a Cause. We bring a picnic and I really enjoy going there, despite being surrounded by graves. It's not as creepy as it sounds.

I love california

I went on a drive on Sunday through the hills past Frazier Park, through the mountain, down through Ojai and ending up around Carpinteria. It was about a 6 hour drive and was really relaxing. It's nice to get out of town and see the different landscapes of california. I also got to visit this creek that runs through the hills and take a picture for a poster project I've been wanting to do for a long time but couldn't find any stock photo that was what I wanted. The creek was down from the road about 10 feet so I had to climb down a rocky hill to get to it. Luckily I didn't slip and roll down the hill and I was able to get the perfect shot!










Coming up this Thursday is the Student Key Art Reception for the movie poster/trailer contest that some friends and I entered. They're not going to announce the winners until the reception. I don't expect to win at all because I did a trailer and it was my first time making one so there was a lot of experimentation, but I'm excited about being at the reception and seeing everyone else's entries. I'll take lots of pictures and post them at the end of the week.

Here is the finished poster I made for "Summer of Fireflies" that I mentioned in my last post. It's a film that I made up so that I could make a poster for it. I've been trying to make a shift from using stock photos to taking my own photos. So I had this jar and I took the photo of it on the grass in the front yard and then made a poster with that. I figured this film would be a coming of age story kind of like Bridge to Terabithia or Charlotte's Web. When I was a little kid living in New Jersey I used to run around catching fireflies in a jar, so that's the memory I was trying to capture with the feel of this poster.

Graduation and swashbuckling

I've been holding off on writing the post about graduation because I've been using the last week to relax and recharge. I got pretty stressed out the last few weeks of school with everything due. Graduation came quickly and slowly if that makes any sense. I wanted to be done with all the stress of finals but I wanted to hang on to the fun of college so time felt sped up in some regards and sluggish in others. The ceremony was pretty nice, except I wore new shoes that tore up my feet, my hair decided to rebel against me, and the padded shoulders of the graduation gown made me look like a linebacker. The main ceremony had Ted Kopple as a speaker, which was cool. At the end of the main ceremony they released doves (how fancy and slightly weird is that?) and made us sing the alma mater, which reminded me of high school graduation where we had to sing the alma mater and no one knew the words so everyone just hummed off key. Same thing this time. The smaller graduation was wonderful. We had a speaker who I thought was really inspiring and relevent to artists. Since there were about 100 people graduating, including MFA students, the dean talked about each of us and what we planned on doing, which I thought was nicely personal. After the ceremony, my family got to check out my photo exhibited in the undergraduate art show and then we went to dinner at Maggiano's. A very nice day. Packing up my apartment, however, was not as nice.



I've usurped the front room and it is still entirely filled with boxes of my stuff. I had to basically gut my room to be able to fit things back in, so I've got about 8 bags of clothes and other random things that have been hiding in my room since elementary school to donate to Goodwill. Now that I've made space, I need to paint my room. I decided to paint it a nice orange color and move all my furniture around to make space for the gigantic bookshelf I bought at IKEA (which is the best store in the world). Trying to make it as uncluttered as possible. Now that I'm home, I've found that living with my family is very nice and I'm enjoying the peace and quiet, but I wish it was somewhere other than Valencia. You have to drive at least 20 minutes to get out of the valley and I really don't like it here, but I think in the long run it'll help me get started saving up money. And I've lost 8 pounds since moving home, probably because I have time to make nice salads rather than buy whatever's in the vending machine outside the art building.

My goal in taking the summer off was to work on my portfolio, which I've started doing by making a list of projects for myself. Right now I'm working on a poster about fireflies; we'll have to wait and see how that one comes out. I'm starting classes in June, which include motion graphics at santa monica college, editing for film/tv at COC, and a photographing the downtown LA landscape which caught my eye. I guess all the planning helps me from going insane until august when I start applying for real jobs (eeek). I just don't want to feel like I wasted the last 4 years by being an unproductive bum, which is what I'm starting to feel like at the moment.


BEST GRADUATION PRESENT EVER: A 23" Mac Cinema Display screen!!! And also a USC alumni liscence plate holder from my brother that I've been holding out for.




And in a totally unrelated note I want to mention how much I enjoy the new Pirates of the Caribbean posters. At first I hated them because adding fog just seemed too easy, but the more I looked at them, the more I realized that, although they don't look like the first two, they're the perfect way to wrap up the trilogy in terms of the visual look.



And also notice how Kiera knightly is morphing from girly girl to grungy pirate.



to

Las Vegas/Helvetica

As a last hoorah of college and to relieve some stress before finals, freshman suitemate buddies Angie, Hilary, Graham and I went to Las Vegas. We stayed at the Monte Carlo for a weekend of debauchery. It's already about a million degrees in Las Vegas. We sat by the pool during the day which isn't always my favorite activity because I don't like to feel too hot. I'd prefer to be cold and cozy up, but it was nice to get my mind away from graduation and life and sit around making sketches. I went to the M&M store and bought about 10 pounds of different colors. I have no clue what I'll use them for, but I couldn't resist all the different colors. We got to check out the clubs/bars Rum Jungle and Tabu. They were having rock night at Tabu but there was no dance floor so everyone was just dancing in the aisles. And some drunk guy had his shirt off and was harassing all the girls in the club by slapping them on the butts with his belt. He was eventually dragged from the club. Overall, good times and I think my liver needs a few weeks to recover.


Rum Jungle


An endless sea of colored candies

The Helvetica screening went really well! My job was to sell the buttons that we all made and they were very popular. A lot of people bought my "Helvetica girl" and "Helvetica boy" buttons so I was really happy. Yes, I know I'm a design nerd. I've embraced it. Anyway, the film was interesting. I can't believe nobody's made it before. And all the big designers in LA were there. We had giant cakes that we ordered from violets that spelled out Helvetica, but we overestimated how much people would actually eat so our teachers made us take the leftovers home, so I had about 20 pounds of cake sitting in my fridge. The following morning was the panel discussion with the filmmaker and Matthew Carter!! He's a famous type designer who made the fonts Georgia, Tahoma, and Verdana. He's super classy and British. I was so starstruck. What's nice about being starstruck as a designer is that they're not celebrities to anyone else, so they're actually accessable to talk to. I spoke with him about Yale, because he teaches there and now I'm kind of bouncing back to the idea of Yale for grad school. sigh.





Delicious cakes from Violet's bakery. Each one was a different flavor.



After your fifth slice of Helvetica cake, the sugar high makes you do crazy things. Thanks to Candice for giving me a crown in this picture.


Me and Matthew Carter and his classy british-ness

Look at all the pretty colors

Each year Pantone comes out with their guidebook, which includes their guesses about what the trendy colors for the upcoming year will be. I don't know why I find this interesting, but I've always been fascinated with colors and what aspects of a particular hue make it the most popular. Does it relate to something culturally in the world? Who starts the trends? What makes a color that's so popular one year be totally shunned the following? I'm also interested in how colors relate to interior design and also graphic design. I was hyped up to take this "color theory for interior decorating" course this summer and then I found out it was only offered during the year and since I have to start the job search by August I can't take it! Anyway, according to the folks at Pantone, the trends this year include:



Simply Elegant: Color treatments are equally unique in beautiful blends of mahogany and silvered mink, silvery blues, elegant purples and deep bronzed tones set off by the glint of pale gold, frosty almond and copper.

Classic Chic: Gray provides a real presence in both light and deeper tones, while the sister shade of silver and a lustrous champagne add a glamorous sparkle. A mineralized yellow and a sensuous red bring a ripple of excitement to cappuccino brown. A classic palette would not be complete without the ubiquitous yang and yen of black and white, often used with the cappuccino colors.

Melange: In addition to the warm fruit flavors, and feeding the need for fresh, vital combinations, there is a toasty tan, a vibrant poppy red, a vivacious yellow, a balancing blue –– all well–grounded by a rustic khaki.

Grass Roots: Grass Roots starts with the variations on a green theme, moves on to mineral blue and various wood tones that are enhanced by unexpected mixes including grape, rose and terra cotta.

Light Touch: Take the classic pastels of foamy aquas and greens, pinks and lavenders, powdery blues, sun–tinged yellows and angora whites to the next level by infusing them with a touch of champagne, or by introducing the sophistication of a silvery gray or rosy taupe.


With college graduation looming, I had to make a decision about where I was going to live after I move out from my apartment. My options were to find a cheap apartment somewhere in LA and pick up a few roommates or to move back home. After much back and forth, I decided to move home for several reasons. I want to take a little breather this summer and spend May-August perfecting my portfolio and creating new projects so I don't end up ruining my chances of being hired at a place I really want to work at. I'll also being taking classes in motion graphics and letterpress. Secondly, if I live at home, I'll save a huge amount on rent and food and utilities. It means having to put up with fucking republican yuppie Valencia when i'd be much happier in Silverlake or somewhere cooler and artsier, but I've already resigned myself to the fact that I'll have no life for a year because I'll be working so much. It'd be nice to commute for the first year and be able to make a dent in the student loans while saving up for furniture and my own apartment. I'm worried if I do it any other way, I won't be able to do it all and end up living in a box. This means I'll be spending the first few weeks majorly overhauling my bedroom so I can fit all my college stuff into the room without having to live on a pile of crap. Maybe I should use the pantone color trend guide to decide what color to paint.

Blog is back!

After much consideration, I've decided to resurrect my blog. I think I had let it die because I found it difficult to post with all the craziness of school and the idea of an online diary started to seem weird to me. I mean, everyone can read your thoughts which a lot of times I didn't think about and started to seem creepy to me. But my New York Design Study Tour class has been keeping a blog for several weeks and it's peaked my interest in my own blog once again. Since its the class' blog, I can't post random thoughts...they've all got to be connected to new york and the class. So my blog is back! I think I'm going to open up the topics to more design and art subjects and post visual examples of things that I like.

Events coming up:

On April 27th, our campus will be hosting the Helvetica documentary for all of Los Angeles. For those who don't know, Helvetica is a very popular typeface that came about 50 years ago, which is why the event is in celebration of its anniversary/birthday. Helvetica is used everywhere basically. If you haven't noticed, designers are very nerdy people, but I've embraced that and acclimated to the design culture. As members of the AIGA student board, we've gotta go to the screening and work, but that's ok with me because afterwords they're having a cake that spells out Helvetica and a cool afterparty.



Due this tuesday is the Key Art Awards student submissions. The key art awards honor film designers and they offer a student competition where they send out images of 3 films from that year and you make either a trailer or poster. I decided to make a trailer because I'm crazy. But I'm interested in editing and really wanted to practice making trailers, so if mine sucks and I don't win then at least I can say I've had the practice. The 3 films are Walk the Line, Brokeback Mountain, and Pirates of the Caribbean 2. I chose pirates. I am putting the finishing touches on my trailer today and tomorrow, but I like the look of it so hopefully it'll do well. I'll try to post a version here if I can soon.

I also went to the senior seminar art show last thursday. It was cool to see everyone's work up in a real gallery space, but I did feel a little left out because I took senior seminar last semester and we didn't get to put our work in a show. Although we did do a lot of work on professional preparation which I found to be a pretty good tradeoff. I guess there's not time to do both.


Try to find me in this photo. It's in front of one of the gallery spaces.


Designers, hooray!