Recent Photos

Just a few of some photos I’ve taken recently. Head over to my Flickr account to see everything I’ve tossed up there recently.

Tagged in: Photography
Category: Personal Work

Pinup Illustration

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.

Tagged in: ECUAD, Illustration
Category: Personal Work

Glass Castle Apocalypse

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 (!).

Tagged in: Design, ECUAD, Illustration, Print
Category: Personal Work

O

An illustration experiment I created for the Emily Carr viewbook.

Tagged in: Illustration
Category: Experiments, Personal Work

My Back Pages

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.

Tagged in: Design
Category: Experiments, Personal Work

Self-less Self Portrait

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.

Tagged in: Audio, ECUAD, Video
Category: Experiments, Personal Work

Foundation Video Competition

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.

Tagged in: After Effects, ECUAD, Video
Category: Experiments, Personal Work

Foundation Poster Competition

Emily Carr had a competition for Foundation students to create/design a poster to help promote the end-of-year Foundation show.

I had been doing a lot of study on the Russian Avant-Garde when I started working on this poster and attempted to do a homage of sorts to all of the beautiful work from that era. As the poster progressed I ended up throwing a bit of a modern spin on it (hence the pink). There’s two thousand and eight of the little white squares to represent our Foundation year (class of ‘08), and each of the twenty four black squares represents in size (relatively) of the number of students from each of the twenty-four countries in our Foundation year.

Tagged in: Design, ECUAD
Category: Personal Work

Emily Carr Cabarets

I was on the planning committee for the Emily Carr cabarets (school-sponsored fundraising events/parties) and was responsible for the design of the posters for the two major cabarets for this past school year.

The first poster was for our cabaret that happened around halloween. Some of the other members of the committee submitted drawings for the person/characters which I then re-traced in Illustrator. All typography and layout was done by me as well in Illustrator. For the second cabaret which was just before valentine’s day, I designed and conceptualized the entire poster to coincide with the 90s theme of the party.

Tagged in: Design, ECUAD, Illustration
Category: Personal Work

Imploding Existence

My second foray into audio was for my Emily Carr Foundation Media Arts class. We were assigned a project to create a 2-minute “experimental” audio piece (re: no music). Utilizing Zoom’s H4 Recorder, we were instructed to record some sounds. We then had to bring these sounds into Audacity to compile and create our final audio piece. Additionally, we were not allowed to utilize anymore than three sounds.

I recorded myself saying part of a passage from the beginning of Tool’s Third Eye, which is actually part of a skit by comedian Bill Hicks. This recording was then layered multiple times upon itself and each instance heavily modified using Audacity’s editing tools and effects to create an extremely atmospheric and psychedelic piece. There’s some pretty heavy bass near the end when it’s reaching it’s climax, so CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED: watch your volume/subs.

File Link: Imploding Existence

Tagged in: Audio, ECUAD, Media Arts
Category: Experiments, Personal Work

Morning Mist

An old audio project from my time at Guru Digital Arts College. One of the few projects from that time that still holds up fairly well. If I remember correctly, the title comes from my walk/bus-ride to school that day which was extremely foggy. This was made in Acid Pro, I believe, utilizing the sound libraries that come with the program. It should also probably be noted that I had no sound program experience before this and I think the Acid Pro segment of the course consisted of two full day classes (if that…) including the creation of our final project…

File: Morning Mist

Tagged in: Audio, Guru Digital Arts
Category: Experiments, Personal Work