Schoolwork - part 2
In my continuing series of oversharing about the classes I took last semester…
Graduate Design Studio
A studio class taught by Dan Boyarski, head of the school, and by two other instructors - Colin Campbell and Tina Blaine. There were three sections to the class.
1. Interpreting Voice - mostly dealing with typography, both static and dynamic type. We produced dozens of graphical treatments of quotes we were given. Mine was from the avant garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who in 1913 wrote, “Catalogs, posters, advertisements of all sorts. Believe me, they contain the poetry of our epoch.” Lots of time spent alone in InDesign and AfterEffects and together in critiques. It helped to build critiquing skills, explore a design space given some specific constraints, and strengthen our communication design skills.
2. Information Visualization - an exercise where we each had a different thing to be re-interpreted using the principles of information design - mostly content, some artifacts and spaces. I got Scrabble. People, I *hate* Scrabble. I learned a bit of respect for the game, but not before I pledged to never play it again. My interpretation was based around seeing the board topographically, with individual tile scores represented by their respective heights. It gave a nice way to see scores at a glance - something ordinary Scrabble doesn’t do well. My final piece was a 3D Flash animation of a particularly high scoring game I found on the internet between a Scrabble pro and a ScrabbleBot. I used Swift3D (terrible, terrible application) and Flash. There were animated tiles flying through the air, growing taller, multiple camera angles - much craziness (of the elegant, restrained sort).
3. Sound Design - We covered the basics of sound production, talked a great deal about the role of sound in film (read Chion’s Audio-Vision if that’s your film sound or sound design interests you), and produced two pieces: a soundscape and an sonified version of our kinetic type piece from the first section. As a sometimes foley artist, I worked on my techniques for performing sound using physical objects as well as software-based synthesizers. There was lots of editing, layering, effecting, and all that other fun stuff as well. I used Deck, Peak, Reason, and Live. Part of my piece incorporated a conversation at a party between a number of aliens - odd, yes, but a great way to learn about formants and other elements of speech along with the dynamics of conversation (think sound puppetry). Apollinaire got a dramatic reinterpretation using some of the “poetry” of recent TV ads - a bit of a juxtaposition, but it worked out well.