I've got three people to thank.
Firstly, a "thank you" to my mother. She really did all she could to help me find an externship. Life lately has been pretty busy and stressful, and I'm glad she didn't just leave me to rot. Nextly, a "thank you" to Jeremy, for recommending that I work for Patrick. It was just about the very last school day before this whole program started, and I still couldn't find someone to take me in. Jeremy's such a nice guy and we've really grown to like and care for each other, so I'm glad he helped me out. Finally, a "thank you" to Patrick, my mentor, for being so cool and helpful and letting me do this for the website. It's just a really cool opportunity as a young artist to get to do something like this! It's already opened some doors for me: I've already gotten two people saying they want something similar done on their websites.
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I am posting a video tonight. Apologies, it will be some few minutes late, as it is still rendering. This one must be a technical feat.
Hark! I have created a mind-map of the Pro's and Con's of this externship experience. I'll make a video about this map this week to go more in-depth on the little branches here.
Still hard at work finishing up the "Summer" HTH logo. Next one after that will be "Back To School." I don't think I'll have time for more than that. This externship program is really almost over, huh? I sort of overestimated how long this would feel. I'm going to be really honest here, I was not able to finish the video required for today. I almost did. I was about 80% done with it. But then my one hundred dollar tablet pen's tip broke and there's no way to get it out. Yes, they actually charge 100 dollars for these. So, yeah, I can't draw for now. I'm really upset about this so this is all I will say right now. Here's what I was able to get done, though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UZrI7EHZtc&feature=youtu.be The basic story is I learned how to use green screens to layer assets and animate them seperately. Ah-ha. youtu.be/slHZhSOirAw
Here is a video showing how I do my work. I expected to be more elegant on camera but my mind sort of blanked and I forgot some important things I wanted to bring up. The location I'm working from in that video is my mom's office at the UCSD Student Health Center. Usually when I go to UCSD I'm not in there, but it was easier to film. Usually I'm in the price center, which is this big public area with a food court and a bunch of desks with outlets so it's easy to set up my computer there. That's the basic setup I work with, though. I've got the screen to draw on and the keyboard on the side for additional actions bound to keys. I've been working on my animations using that setup. So far I've finished one. One challenge I faced pretty recently had to do with a file I was working on for the first logo design. This here is the design. It's an animation where the HTH logo is composed of gift boxes with toys that pop out. As I was finishing this up, it was a late Thursday night I believe, I closed my laptop for the day and went to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, my computer had restarted without my knowledge or consent. It was annoying, yes, but the worst part of it? I had apparently forgotten to save, so all the finished lines and colors I had added were gone. I had to do it all over again. Thankfully it only took a day! I've really learned my lesson though: Windows can restart at any moment and I have to be prepared. Granted, if you're a digital artist, that's kind of something you should always have in mind, but it helps to re-learn it every now and then. Oh, here's an image for the next logo idea I'm working on: It's going to be summer themed. I showed Patrick, my mentor, a short preview animation I was able to create. Patrick's been really great support for me on this. He voices if he likes an idea I have, and even provides suggestions as to how I can improve it. It really keeps me going, I think. The sand bucket thing was his idea and I knew I had to implement it. So yeah! The second logo I should be finished with sometime next week? It will definitely take longer than the first one, but I've been making good progress on it so far.
That's all for today! I conducted an interview with my mentor, Patrick:
youtu.be/kEd1w-A-4ZI I first met up with Patrick this past Monday. He taught me something I had heard of before but not yet truly understood: Vectors and Bitmaps. The difference? I'll try to explain. Vector images are made of complete code. You can zoom in as far as you want and they never get blurry since they are just purely generated directly onto the website. The logo on the High Tech High website is a vector: See that? No matter how far you zoom in, it never blurs out or anything. It's always crystal crisp, as if it's a "real" object as opposed to a digital projection of it. The logos I'm making will likely all be bitmaps, since I'm not proficient at animating coding stuff. So, if you zoom in really far... ...you start to see the pixels that make up the image. That would seem that it's kind of inferior in comparison, but the fact that mine will be animated seems like a good enough tradeoff. Besides, no one's going to be zooming in THAT far anyways.
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