AQMD Internship

Recently, I was given the opportunity to become a student intern for the South Coast Air Quality Management District in Diamond Bar, Ca. They are better known as the AQMD. I was hired as a graphic design student intern, however everything I did at my internship was related to video production. I created storyboards, wrote scripts, recorded video footage using a Sony Handycam DCR-VX2100 and a JVC Pro HD GY-HM100U, and edited the footage with Adobe Premier Pro CS5. AQMD has a video series titled "On The Air", which is series of videos in a studio setting with a host interviewing a special guest about topics involving air quality. I came up with a series titled "On Location" which would involve a host interviewing people on location, for example, students at a local city college, or doing a video about electric cars, interviewing a mom about how the air quality affects her children and the other children playing at a local park. My internship was unfortunately brief, however I was able to produce, shoot and edit one of my videos. A group of interns, myself included, went to East Los Angeles College as part of a "Clean the Air" campaign. I recorded my fellow student interns interacting with the students on campus, and also recorded a couple of interviews with some students on campus. I then used AQMD's studio and recorded an introduction and outro, as well as a quick interview with one of the student interns that was a part of the campaign. The studio footage was recorded using 3 of the JVC cameras I described above, which is a tapeless media camera, so I just took the memory card and put it into my card reader on my laptop and edited the footage with Premier Pro. Now, I am no professional by any means, and I have yet to take an actual editing course, but I received great reviews for the final product. Here's the video in all of it's glory. Enjoy!

A very personal project...

On March 20th, 2010, I married the love of my life, Ms. Rebecca Ortiz. Our wedding, while not the biggest, was a very intimate ceremony with friends and family present. My mother-in-law, was unable to make the ceremony due to health reasons, so since I had already began taking classes at RCC (Riverside City College for those of you that don't know), I decided that when we got our wedding pictures and video of the ceremony, that I would put a DVD together to send to my mother-in-law so that I could basically give her the feeling that she was AT the wedding. It took me some time, but I finally completed my personal project. Truth be told, it was actually completed months ago, and I am only just now posting it to my blog. I will give a basic run down of what I did.

First, I had to learn how to use Adobe Encore CS5, which made it a little difficult because there aren't any current books for this program. The closest book I found, was for CS2. The book is titled "DVD Authoring with Adobe Encore", published back in April 2004. This book wasn't current at all, but it was a great read and while CS5 does have new features, this book helped me get the job done with the basics. After I read the book, I laid out my plan in Encore.

My idea was to not only put the video of the ceremony on the DVD, but to add something extra. So while I was reading the book on Encore, I discovered that I could use the program to make a slideshow. So that's what I started with. I gathered all the photos of me and my wife only, and I put a slideshow together. Couldn't believe how easy this was with Encore. I selected two different songs, "My Baby You" by Marc Anthony, which is one of my wife's favorite songs. And "Brighter Than Sunshine" by Aqualung, one of my favorites. These song choices were perfect for the slideshow, which I have below, and you will see why.

Once the slideshow was completed, I started working on the main menu design with photoshop. Upon reading the book, I discovered that I could create my own menus and buttons in Photoshop and then simply import or drag them into Encore ready to go. Once the meny and buttons were completed, I added the ceremony and slideshow to Encore, but it still felt a little incomplete to me. I started designing a DVD cover to make it look a little more professional. I could have easily just left the DVD blank, the label that is, or written on it with a sharpie and put it in a plastic jewel case, but I wanted to make this perfect. I designed a front and back cover for the DVD case, and I also created a template for lightscribe, so that I could burn an image onto the lightscribe DVD that I used. I created a personal message from me and my wife and placed it on the back of the DVD cover, and while doing that I came up with another great idea. I decided that popping the DVD and having it go strait to the menu was boring, so I took that personal message and kind of flipped it a bit and made an introduction that plays before the main menu comes up. I have a little experience editing, very little, but I used Premier Pro CS5 to create the introduction that plays before the main menu comes up. I used Adobe Soundbooth CS5 to edit the music that I used for the slideshow, main menu and introduction, and I used Adobe InDesign CS5 to layout the design for the DVD cover. Below, you can view the finished product. I couldn't put the DVD in its original format on this site, so once you push play, the introduction will start, then the main menu will come up so that you can see how it turned out. After the main menu, it will automatically go to viewing of the ceremony. The 2nd flash video is of the slideshow. I decided to post this to not only show off a little more of my skills, but to share the most special day of my life. Enjoy.

DVD Cover

DVD Label Template

DVD Label burned on disc using lightscribe by HP

Wedding DVD part 1 (Introduction and Ceremony)

Wedding DVD part 2 (Slideshow)

New business card design

Here's another business card design I created for a close friend of mine. He's a guitar player in about 5 bands, and wanted a business card to promote himself as an artist and writer. He told me he wanted his picture on the card, but with a painted effect look to it. I told him I knew exactly what he was talking about and that I had already done something like it. I initially told him that I would make the "H" in Shelladelic look like a bow tie, but instead I decided to make the entire word of Shelladelic take the shape of a bow tie. When he performs, he usually wears this baggy red and black plaid pants and a white shirt with a bow tie and hat. The red color background was his idea. He had a picture of a red living room that he liked and wanted that red color from the image, so I sampled it as I created the design of the card. He was more than satisfied with the design and look of the card. Another satisfied customer!

Logo & Business Card Design

This past Friday, a really close friend contacted me and asked if I could do a quick logo for her company because she didn't have one and she needed one right away because it was going to be included in a photo background for a charity event. So, I made something simple and quick with her company name, Dezie Dez Productions, and created a simple looking logo using the font only. She wanted hot pink and black for her colors, and wanted some streaks thrown in sort of like the Los Angeles Lakers logo, so I made the top part of the name the hot pink color,  and the bottom part black, and added a few streaks on the D in Dezie and the D in Dez. Here's what it looked like.

She loved the font style and the way it looked overall. I threw some ideas out at her, like maybe make the D is Dezie look like a music note, and she loves to wear hats, so I suggested maybe making a stroke of a fedora hat as part of the D in Des. She said it sounded like good ideas and would consider.

The next, Saturday, she called and told me that she thought about the ideas that I gave some more and the more she thought about it the more she liked it. So, I created this rough sketch for her and sent it to her.

I sent it to her, and she responded right away saying that she loved it! I told her it was just a rough sketch, and that the final design would look much better, especially the hat, once done on the computer. I completed the design on the computer using Illustrator, and sent her a soft proof. The original one turned out like this.

She loved the way it turned out, but naturally had a couple minor suggestions. First off, she wanted the the hook of the music note in the D to be a little slimmer, and she wanted black business cards, so I told her I would reverse the look, meaning instead of black text it would be white. She loved the music note turned into and i, and absolutely loved the look of the hat, so the only other thing she wanted was for the i music note and the hat to be the only thing in pink. I sent her the final design with the changes, and was more than satisfied with the look of her new company logo. Here's how it turned out.

In addition to the logo, I decided to just go ahead and design a business card for her as well. I sent three different layouts, 2 horizontal layouts and 1 vertical. She loved the look of the vertical one, so here's how the business card turned out.

Project overall, including sketch, creating the logo, making changes, and then business card design, probably took somewhere around 4 to 5 hours to complete and perfect everything. Not a bad job in my opinion. The client (my friend) was extremely happy and satisfied with the work, and that's all that matters. 

PGSF Poster Design Contest

Here is the final design that I came up with for the Print and Graphics Scholarship Foundation poster design contest. The background, headline, and sub-headline was created in photoshop and the layout of the all the text below that including the PGSF banner was completed in InDesign. I used a watercolor brush to create the road and hillside. I made a brush out of a tree and placed the trees in the background. The leaves were also made into a brush by using the leaf from the PGSF logo. I scattered the leaves around the trees and on the ground to give it that autumn feel and then I made a water reflection in photoshop to make it appear it was lakeside. Hopefully I have as good as luck with this contest as I did with the RIFF poster contest.

Environmental Poster

Finished a poster design for a class today. The assignment actually had to do more about proofing than the design of the poster, however my instructor loved it as well as a few fellow classmates so I thought I'd post it to the blog.

Other poster designs from the RIFF contest

Here are the other designs that I came up with for the Riverside International Film Festival poster contest. A couple of the designs are the same overall but I made some minor changes to see how they would stand out from the initial design.

Riverside International Film Festival Poster Design Contest

For the first official posting to my blog, I decided to share some good news that I received a couple of days ago. In one of my classes at Riverside City College, I was given the opportunity to compete in a poster designing contest for the Riverside International Film Festival. Based on the winning posters from previous years, I decided to keep my design as simple as possible because I got the feeling that is what the committee was looking for. I made about 6 different designs total, the others I will share later, but this was the design I submitted for the contest. I was awarded 2nd place! Not bad for my first official contest with more to follow. Special Thanks to photographer Wojtek Kutyla, as he is the person who captured this fantastic image and made this design possible. More of his photography can be viewed at http://www.wojtekkutyla.com.