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.



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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