This quarter, I had the pleasure of leading and preparing the graduation candidates for our school. Below is a link to view their digital web portfolios and demo reels. Also featured on this page, are the portfolios created from my Web Portfolio class.
http://www.randolfdimalanta.com/links/partners.html >>
Great job guys! We wish you all the success in the world, keep up the great work, keep in touch and be fierce in your work ethic. We're very proud of you!
Fire it Up!
It is difficult to design because students come with a large array of pieces, and so the student must find a way to narrow down his pieces to only the best, and in some cases, must group them so that a user can navigate through them easily. For example, all of the 3D renders could be grouped together, as well as all of the lifedrawings, paintings, photography, etc...
In the last year of teaching this class, the gallery of choice for many of my students is Lightbox. To make it easier to install this in someone's website, I've created a video tutorial that you can check out, and to see an example of it, click here. This usually eases the burden for the student to learn "code" as the tutorial explains things fairly easily and so far...no complaints. It actually makes me feel great when someone on their own, puts it together and tells me of their success.
But, if you are tired of Lightbox, be sure to check out the Easy Kiss 123 site. In it, you'll find many great examples of free photogalleries that are just plain sweet. But hold your horses....
There is a cost. The only cost to you is the learning curve. You have to spend time reading the instructions to learn the basics of how to put the gallery together. Its well worth the time and energy to find a nice gallery presentation for your precious drawings, paintings, designs and photographs.
If you have a favorite one, please let us know below so that other people can benefit as well. I like the Flash Photo Stack and Autoviewer
Thanks and Fire It Up!
Randolf
I often encourage my animation students, on the side, to begin and work on personal projects. Its best if they are simple and short and can be as simple as a compositing exercise, 3 - 5 second character animation, acting or lip sync exercise. Be sure that the exercise is fun for you, because it has to sustain you and so that in the end, your payoff/satisfaction is well worth it.
Once this personal clip is completed. It will stand out as being one of the best pieces in your demo reel/ portfolio. Simply, these pieces will stand out because we can tell that you had fun working on it, and the presentation will be better than anything else because we can sense the level of care you put into the overall display.
I've attached the above clip for inspiration. In a very short time it will give you ideas and concepts to build from, just remember to shoot your own footage. Begin by watching the clip and making note of shots that attract you. Narrow these down to the one or two that would be the easiest for you to create, storyboard it out and get to work. Don't give yourself a time limit (although some might think it may be a good idea, depending on how you work), you don't want it to be stressful - just fun.
Keep those personal projects flying to stay sharp, engaged and to enhance your demo reel.
Fire it up!
Randolf
Today, we were visited by former Art Institute of Seattle graduate Dean Zulich. A native of Bosnia and Herzogovina, Dean is a commercial photographer focusing on conceptual fashion, advertisement and celebrity photography and is most famous for his success as the runner up on Vh1 reality television show "The Shot".
In a short amount of time, Dean garnered success from his engaging photography. His compositions and subject matter are interesting and thoughtful, and we were very fortunate to have him share his road to success with us. His talk was quite inspiring.
What struck me about his talk today, was his feeling on the importance of continuing personal projects. Doing this "keeps the fire alive" and its what keeps him going, and he said that, I realized how much I missed that feeling, and will be putting together a personal project soon. Doing personal projects is an easy way to enhance your demo reel and or digital portfolio. Viewers will be able to sense your enjoyment in personal projects and they usually get more attention.
To learn more about Dean, visit his website, http://www.deanzulich.com His website is nice and clean and features his different portfolios (books).
Hey Dean, thanks again for your visit, for sharing and for inspiring. Keep up the outstanding work and best of luck in all you do.
Fire it Up!
Randolf
Now, back to Rodri, I came across his site as recommended by one of my animation instructors Ruel. In his site, you will also see a pretty nice HTML tutorial on how to create a run cycle. I'm finding that now, I refer that tutorial to many of students as they too try to create run cycles.
The main run cycle problems that I see my students encountering is that they are not referring to the main poses that one learns when first learning how to do the "walk cycle", which are the Contact Pose, Weight, Pass Pose and Break Pose. These poses are essentially the same but can be modified to create a convincing run.
Check out Rodri's running tutorial. His explanations and examples are clear, and he's also got Quicktime movies so you can actually see the application of his technique. After you're done with that, be sure to check out his website below to see his drawing and character designs.
http://rodritorres.com/
Overall, very nice work Rodri. If you ever come across this post during a Google search on yourself, go ahead and post a response to let us know how you are doing. Thanks for posting the tutorials and the work.
Fire It Up!
Randolf
Happy New Year Everyone....
I just created this as I know it will help most of you trying to place a video on to your HTML image...Lots of questions arise in class about how to insert the "embed" video code on to a static image in HTML. This tutorial shows you how to place an embed video code from sites like Youtube and Vimeo, and shows how to place the code on to an HTML image.
The tutorial covers how to slice an image in Photoshop, combine slices, generating an HTML page in Photoshop, and how to use an HTML editor like Dreamweaver, to insert the "embed" video code.
I hope it helps you out. You can check out the video tutorial by clicking the link below.
>> Adding Embed Video Code to an HTML image >>
Here is a collection of animated logos from back in the day. See how many you can recognize as most of them are from the 80's. We watched these in my beginning 3D Animation class to introduce our next assignment, and so I had the students pay attention to how they animate simple shapes, lights, glows and composition. Back in the day, these were all actually very good considering the tools they had.
After we watch the old logos, we watch new ones, and good examples are the ones produced by EA Games as seen below.
Conrad's demo reel is a good example of using transitions effectively. The concept of the "Demo Reel Parody" is simply genius Conrad, thanks for posting, and even though its comical, for those of us who are just starting, you could learn a lot simply by looking at his examples, all of them are well executed.
Came across two visual effects reels from Dstrukt. The reels exemplify good design, timing and creativity. I thought I'd put them on here for future reference. Don't mind the image of the creepy looking kid.
Videobox is a script which enables you to show videos in your page as an overlay. It was inspired the Lightbox portfolio, which became popular with many portfolio students once we figured out to install and activate it. The presentation was nice, clean and beautiful.
Okay, this site is amazing. Its called Kuler. As an art and design instructor, one of the most difficult things to teach is color. After you've done the traditional color wheel (by hand), the goal is to develop a personalized color sense. This means using color combinations that not only look good together (which is infinite), but that express who you are as an artist. This takes time and experimentation.
The site below can help speed up the process for you. If you ever need a quick recommendation for a particular color strategy, this is worth a try. I've also attached an image that I'm creating for a DJ friend, using the "watermelon" palette. The black line work and colors were executed in Painter
Hope it helps out. Thanks for the heads up Zach!
You can create this in a number of ways, one way is to use the automated web galleries in Photoshop, or you can use of the pre-existing applications available for free on the internet. In the digital web portfolio class that I teach, we have a long discussion about the pros and cons of each, and recently, there was a lot of interest among my students in wanting to use the "Ligthbox" Portfolio application.
The design and presentation is attractive and "sexy". When a user clicks an image, the entire page will darken and your image will be framed and cropped in a simple elegant animated style. From a usability standpoint, it keeps the user on your site, and will stay on the page as long as they wish...very very nice. Navigation is clean, simple and minimal just the way I like. I've added it to my portfolio and can viewed here.
The jury is still out if this can still be viewed on a majority of the machines, and for the most part, it does. No complaints yet. This is an alternative to using the Simpleviewer Portfolio, an attractive Flash Based portfolio, made by Airtight Interactive which can found by clicking here, is also very nice and easy to create.
The hard part is installing it in your webpage, especially if you are not used to Javascript, it may be a struggle, it took our class about a week to play and to search for a site that explained things well. It is however, easy to do. Simply follow Justin Lyric's instructions on his blog below. You are going to download the files from his blog and place these in your the main folder of your site, paste four lines of javascrip into your header and finally, you are going to add the "rel=" tags to each of your "href" link tags. Access Justin's site below.
http://www.codefidelity.com/blog/?page_id=7
"Lightbox" was created by Lokesh Dhakar. More information about the "Lightbox" portfolio can be found on his site here. Thanks Guys.
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