05.24.2008
3:16 am
I was reading an article on how Gen Y doesn’t read newspapers recently that got me thinking a bit. Although, declining readership is by no means new news, I think what really triggered me was that they specifically targeted Gen Y (app. those born from 1981-2000, also called ‘Millenials’). Being that I’m one of those Gen Y’ers who doesn’t read newspapers, I thought it might prove valuable to extract the reasons why I don’t read the newspaper.
05.09.2008
4:39 am
I’ve been getting extremely interested in programming as of late, particularly in regards to Flash AS3 and Processing. And within these two, I was getting extremely interested in their integration of sound analysis being tied to code-based visual experiments. There’s been a number of people doing some pretty amazing things already with code-based visuality, including Jared Tarbell, Eric Natzke, and of course the first major Flash code-artist superstar Joshua Davis (among many, many others). + Continue Reading
05.06.2008
3:43 pm
So I spent a few hours last night playing around in Cinema4D and getting used to the interface, working with the tools, modelling etc. Also spent a number of hours trying to figure out reflections and playing around with C4D’s Mo-Graph module which is pretty fantastically dope. I forgot to render out some of my different scenes as I was playing around except for this last one. 
05.05.2008
2:28 am
Okay, seriously, I don’t know what kinda vitamins or super-berries or what Reznor’s taking now that he’s sober, but apparently three albums in less than two years is no big deal.
First it was Year Zero which featured an alternate reality game building up to and coinciding with the release of the album in early 2007 (plus the Year Zero Remixed album, which fair enough is all remixed by other artists, but it’s still another project on the guy’s plate).
Then it was the lyric-free, musical 4-disc exploration Ghosts in February 2008. Additionally, coinciding with the release of Ghosts, Reznor announced a YouTube video contest to create visuals for the Ghost album.
And now, a mere three months after Ghosts, Reznor releases The Slip, for free. That’s right, he’s giving the entire album away for free online. I haven’t listened to the album yet as I just finished downloading it, but I imagine it is pure class like all of his work.
05.02.2008
4:08 am
The Raconteurs performing Carolina Drama, which is far and away my favorite song of the year so far, live at the recently passed Coachella ‘08. I really wish I could’ve gone to Coachella to see this live:
I’ve been listening to this damn song on repeat for like…. 4hrs straight. I just can’t get enough of it. I really wanna find the damn milkman now though…
05.01.2008
8:54 am
This originally started as a design for a Design With Image and Time project. We were matched up with partners and were told to design a tattoo for our partner. The instructor gave us a number of evaluative research methods to try and drill to the emotional core of our partners so that we could create the most representative tattoo for our partners.
I ended up being partnered with my very dear and beautiful friend Blair who is very much a girly girl that has a strong art-nerd side running through her. I immediately thought of a Gil Elvgren pinup picture for her. One of the things I’ve always liked about Elvgren’s pinup pictures is that they’re always extremely beautiful women, obviously, but when you get into the image a little bit more they always have some sort of dorkiness to them. I thought that that was almost the epitome of Blair. After bouncing the idea off of her I found out that she had a love of pinup girls and had actually been thinking about getting a tattoo eventually of a pinup girl. So it was a resounding success. 
05.01.2008
8:29 am
A visual response for my English 101 class to Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are-A Changin’. We had to select a poem or reading from the semester’s coursepack and then interpret it into some sort of visual response.
I read the poem before I went to sleep to give my sub-conscious a chance to chew on it for a while as it tends to be how I get my best ideas. Lo and behold, 4:30am rolls around and I’m woken up out of a dead sleep by a nightmare/dream about the meek inheriting the earth, which is essentially what Dylan’s song is about. My dream was significantly more violent and was placed a number of years in the future, but essentially the image below was the last remnant of the dream when I woke up. A lone anguish cry of the repressed before they revolt and tear down the glass castles of lies, greed, corruption, and manipulation.
The final version was a 19″ high x 27.5″ wide poster. The final .psd file was a few megs over 1gb (!). 
05.01.2008
7:12 am
Welcome to the re-launch of my online portfolio (as well as integration of a blog) at theflattestcat.com. It went through a lot of different ideas, concepts, and technologies over the last couple months before I landed here with this, so I hope you like it. Additionally, I’d like to send out a very special welcome to all of the visitors from may1reboot.com, take a look around let me know what you think and I look forward to seeing all of the other new work today.
I’ll also be posting more work over the next couple hours as I have some school stuff that I haven’t posted yet.
05.01.2008
4:04 am
The Devji Group is a group of Edmonton brothers who own seven different clothing boutiques in Edmonton. Their stores cover the gamut from high men’s and women’s fashion to classic rock tees and motocross brands over to hip hop, skate and urban culture for both genders. In summer 2006 they were looking to enhance their online presence for all seven of their clothing companies to better inform their customers as well as promote the rather diverse selection of top-quality brand names that their stores carry.
I worked in co-ordination with Zaar Marketing to create designs to accurately capture the various target markets of each clothing company and help thematically separate each store from one another. I was responsible for logo revisions for many of the stores, the design of all of the websites as well as development of xhtml-strict templates for integration with the WordPress Blogging Platform.
Project Link: Soular Clothing
Project Link: Method Streetwea
Project Link: Queue Clothing
Project Link: Sophia’s Clothing
05.01.2008
3:20 am
05.01.2008
3:11 am
I’ve been busy watching movies over at TED lately whenever I’m eating lunch or something as a break from work/friends/whatever, much more informative and entertaining that trying to find something on that useless thing we call the tv (although, really, I don’t even pay for cable and haven’t for about 4 years, so I guess that’s kind of a void point). Anyway, found a couple of gems that are worth looking at if you have some free time:
TED | Talks | Michael Pollan: The omnivore’s next dilemma :: this video makes me beg the question, why isn’t everyone switching over to this type of farming?
TED | Talks | Helen Fisher: The science of love, and the future of women :: interesting video on the actual bio-chemistry behind that infamous feeling that has been at the center of some of mankind’s greatest achievements as well as failures
TED | Talks | David Gallo: Underwater astonishments :: a brief talk that’s pretty interesting, make sure to watch near the end where he shows an octopus appearing out of an algae plant. I don’t think humans can claim to be very damn special until they can make something like THAT reality for us, hah.
05.01.2008
2:39 am
Pardon the Dylan reference, I’m not actually going to shun all of my old work, in fact I’m going to promote it. I was digging through my archives as I was getting ready to put this site live and I found a ton of my old digital photo manipulations from quite a few years ago when I was first teaching myself photoshop. No, I don’t own most of the original photos seen in the images, but I thought it was interesting to see where I was and where I am now (and I’m sorry to anyone whose images I might’ve ripped off, I’ve learned my lesson since!).
But, and I know I’m dating myself here, digging through these images totally took me back a few years. It took me down memory lane when I still talked with Sigurd (I still owe this Flatcat alias to him) and he turned me onto the Lockjaw boys, .nu domains were free (Kiiroi!), Prate, Harsh, Token/MSchmidt, GMunk, Chapter3, and Idiocase were re-defining the web and everyone wanted to be Soopa Famous. It seems so long ago… and I feel really old all of a sudden…
Anyway, take heed that everything posted below is 5-8 years old and enjoy.
05.01.2008
2:04 am
Another Foundation Media Arts project. We had to create a “self-less self portrait”, maximum two minutes in length. I drove around Vancouver in my Golf while my friend Lexi videotaped. I then took the footage into Premiere and pieced together a clip two minutes in length which I then took over to After Effects. In After Effects I added the type, and added some filters, duplications and blending modes to create the overall aesthetic for the piece. The sound was recorded using a Zoom H4 Recorder just down the street from my apartment in one take (yes, the ambulance coincidently came by as I was recording… I guess that’s one of the benefits to living near a hospital). I’ve gotta say, I was quite impressed with the sound quality of the H4 after using it for this and my audio project.
Additionally, this was the first time I’d ever actually touched Adobe Premiere and After Effects. I found both, with the help of some video tutorials, extremely easy to pickup and get working with. Obviously I have only had a very elementary experience with them thus far, but I’m definitely looking forward to spending some more time experimenting and playing around with them in the future.
Self-less Self Portrait from flatcat on Vimeo.
05.01.2008
1:22 am
Just a small collection of some of the various identities I’ve done for various reasons over the last couple years that don’t have enough background to make their own separate posts about.
05.01.2008
12:16 am
Emily Carr also put on the first ever Foundation video competition to promote the year end Foundation Show.
I never actually got around to finishing my video, there was just too much stuff going on and too many deadlines to finish it in time. Plus, I wasn’t particularly happy with the footage I had shot, so I’ve decided to save the concept for another day or another project, which I don’t think it will be too hard to find something to apply it to. I did, however, finish off the end credit sequence and was quite happy with how it turned out as it was one of my first major forays into After Effects outside of my self-less self portrait (which was mostly just using blending modes…). I can see that I definitely will enjoy getting into After Effects a lot more in the future. The glitchy text effects were created using Video Co-Pilot’s Twitch
ECIAD Title Sequence from flatcat on Vimeo.
All content and imagery © 2008 David Ronnie & Flatcat Inc.
