Imposter! Or Why Is That Rooster Wearing A Helmet?

Not too long ago, a coworker announced that the gallery his wife worked for was having a gallery show called "ImPosters", and they were looking for fake band posters. Now, you have to understand... I have been training for this for the past 10 or so years... in fact, I have a list of the worst (yet greatest) band names that some friends and I have worked on over the years. Here are some of the relatively unoffensive and socially acceptable ones to give you an idea:

Friends Forever, The Nuggets, Steam Room, Windowless Van, The Limp, Donkey Punch, Lump Sum, Bologna Crutch, Hot Lunch, The Mirrored Aviators, Mouthfart... and the list goes on (for pages and pages... literally).

The list also gets more disgusting as it goes. Anyway, the point is that I had been training for this poster show, so I got it together and did some of my finest work to date. The result is the Stunt Cock poster. The funny thing is that I'm just absolutely proud of this design... from the clean look to the ridiculous text to the layers of symbolism. Well, maybe "layers" sounds too deep... it's no onion or anything, but there are a couple different ways to look at it at least. I also made it into a t-shirt, although it's the only one in existence. That doesn't make it less awesome though. Maybe I should start selling them.

A Missouri Morning

I can't just take a normal picture... it's not even possible. Over the weekend, we took a family getaway to the town of Hermann, MO. It's a quaint little place built around making it convenient to drink assloads of wine. I could go off an endless rant about how obnoxious these people are after their first bottle's worth of wine, but hey, I'm pretty obnoxious without the wine... so let's not compare.

I woke up Sunday morning to find that a fog had descended over the town, and unlike your average person, I get thrilled beyond belief about fog. I LOVE it.

So I grabbed my camera and headed out to grab some shots of the town, and as I quickly realized, no one is awake at 7:30am in Hermann. Not a single soul. I was able to trot out into the middle of the road and snap shot after shot without any concern whatsoever of being hit by a car. It was surreal, to say the least. I suppose it's fitting, then, that every single shot I came back with was a surreal look at the town.

This shot in particular was one of my favorites, with the sun fighting hard to break through the fog. I did some work on the raw image to give it the yellow tint, but not much exaggeration was required to create the unsettling feeling this scene puts off. I dig it. As soon as I get enough time, I will do a beginner's tutorial on fun with the photoshop raw filter and show you some of the tricks I like to use. It's more exciting than it sounds, I promise.

As It Turns Out, Models Do Need Sleep

Jon Armstrong (of The Black Box Society) and I could work together on pretty much anything, but when we're not working ourselves half to death at our real jobs, we tend to shoot videos together. Jon and I generally take on co-writing, co-directing roles, but this was the first time we really tested that dynamic... and it worked really well. We also discovered that our leading man, Dave Alans, was absolutely fantastic, and we WILL work with him again.

This particular clip is a 30 second bumper, concepted for iChannel internet radio. The production level on this was obviously fairly low, as the aim was more to pitch the idea than anything else. iChannel wanted to show that people could enjoy their unique music anywhere, anytime, and in a more intimate way than other internet radio, so we decided to play on the idea that iChannel brings the artist to you... maybe almost too close.

Setting The Table

Lately I've been enjoying setting up little mindless vignettes and taking pictures of them. I don't know what it is, but I'm an absolute sucker for that super-shallow depth of field.

This table and chair set is actually dollhouse furniture, and I can assure you that I didn't feel weird shopping in the dollhouse section of the hobby store. I'm sure the old guy behind the counter didn't think I was nuts either.

The funny thing was that I was absolutely thrilled about all the microscopic, detailed furniture and stuff. There were tiny potted plants, silverwear, park benches, toilets and SO much more. Everything a tiny little person could ever want in their miniscule existence!

Since I couldn't buy the whole place (I would have), I proudly walked up to the counter with the table and chairs, a bag of fake grass, a miniature tea set, and some random bits of tiny wood. As I checked out, He gave me a look that said "I don't want to know what you're doing later tonight."

Maybe next time I go back to buy more dollhouse furniture (which is inevitable... I'm hooked now), I'll give myself a wispy moustache and see how that feels. That strikes me as the way I probably should look when doing that kind of shopping.

Rohan Woods School

The Rohan Woods website is a project I worked on as Creative Director at SteadyRain. Aside from creating the design itself, I also led a crew in creating an introductory video to reside in the header throughout the website. As Creative Director, I much prefer to be hands-on whenever possible, and I went to the extreme on this one... from editing DNN modules (to ensure every single one had the correct margins) to personally taking the camera on location and doing pickup shots for the video.

The first comp... loved by designers, but missing the client's vision.That's not to say that this design came easy though... regardless of a fantastic client relationship, it took us a while to get our visions to meet up. I'm still very enamored with some of my earlier attempts, but it just wasn't quite right in the client's eyes. Of course, the designer in me couldn't help but love all the little details in my design... but eventually, after 11 revisions, we arrived at bliss for everyone. While not as graphically rich, the final version is both professional and playful.

Again, this was not a case of blindly missed marks, or a client who is hard to please... it was actually an exciting, shared discovery process. I got a great deal out of working closely with the client to reach the solution, and it taught me a boatload about listening to clients better.

At first, I didn't want to take off my designer's hat and listen to them... my first inclination was to assume that my design was SO great that it was beyond them. Of course, true or not, the goal is to please the client and hopefully to walk out on the other side with something you can be proud to have poured your blood, sweat and tears into... and once I gave up my design ego, it became an invigorating process. My phone calls with the client to discuss changes were more about discussing why I made certain decisions than they were about giving me a list of changes, which I would then have to defend.

The video portion of the project took some work to pull together, and in fact, it was originally envisioned as an audio-and-photography Flash piece. Being new to the idea of working with kids, I over-prepared myself, and as it turns out, I was smart to do so.

We had hoped to get all kinds of great audio snippets of the students talking about the school and then turn them into engaging slideshow audio... but I quickly saw that the visuals were what was going to sell people, and while I still ran audio the whole time, I started shooting video of everyone. As the day progressed, we ended up shooting tons of b-roll as well as some unplanned outdoor scenes too.

Once I was able to get a working cut of the footage together, it was obvious that it made an engaging video, but thanks to an unexpected snowstorm the footage was a bit bleak. After some exterior pickup shooting on a sunny day though, and some levels adjustments to the existing footage, we were there... and I think the final product speaks for itself, as it was intended to all along.

www.rohanwoods.org