Wow, I am delirious right now. I have spent hours upon hours making this 10-second video. I both love that I have done this and am paying for it with shoulder and neck pain. I don’t know what else to say except here it is!
This is the title sequence for my Vig Vlack Vlog series of videos. Maybe next time I’ll actually make a video with some real substance. Only time will tell!
Oh yah! This is my first time ever rapping. Hah! And I made the beat! I just wanna be the next Da Vinci!
So I’m just putting the finishing touches right now (meaning, uploading the DVD to kunaki) on my first real professional design gig.
I got the job through VV and it was to design the cover, insert, disc face, and website for her project “Electric Aquarium,” which is this awesomely trippy ambient jellyfish video.
Check a preview here:
This was my first real well-paid professional design gig and I learned a lot from it:
If you are good at something, make sure to charge a lot for it, because being good takes a long time. I went into this job in a sort of just rush it through, no problem, no real time involved, very little effort, sure I can do it sort of way. This didn’t happen at all. I was dealing with professional people who expected professional results, the elimination of all minor errors, the best work I could do, and a lot of attention, because they were paying me.
All the talent in the world is only going to get me so far. It is just hitting me more and more everyday that (I’m loving percentages this post) it’s 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration. I had all these dreams about how talented I was and how the world was going to be blown away by all I was capable of. These days, I have all these dreams about OH MY GOD it’s going to be so much work to make something that is even halfway presentable!
Get really clear with a client at the very beginning of the job. I was kind of flying by the seat of my pants on this one and just kind of took things as they came. But dealing with email after email about little things and having to hold hands through different processes was both draining and made me realize why it’s important to charge a lot! In the future, I would get a very clear understanding of what exactly the job requires and will entail, in writing, and if the client was unable to give me such, I would add that to the price.
With all that said, experience is payment in itself. As my good friend Bashar says, the only thing SUBSTANTIVELY REAL about reality itself is your experience of it, and so the experience is its own reward. I learned so much from this project about what it means to be a professional, I got clarity on how I want to move forward in my life and my career, and I got the opportunity to work on something and forge bonds with people that could last a lifetime. Not to mention networking and referrals and before you know it, it seems like a pretty good deal indeed.
This feels like another step in my direction of growing up and being an adult and taking care of myself and handling my business, both literally and figuratively.
Sacred geometry is ridiculously amazing. Our whole universe is a bunch of perfectly interacting, perfectly symmetrical, perfectly formed, perfectly harmonized geometries. Fractals within fractals. Self-similarity on every beautiful scale. It’s a beautiful, beautiful world.
I made this one playing around with the Live Trace feature of Illustrator. I’m really enjoying this week, just really delving into Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects on a much deeper level than I ever have. It’s like going from a nerd kid who is like “yah I know that stuff” to an artist who actually *knows* that stuff. Anyway, that’s beside the point. The point is that this is a lot of fun. I’m really enjoying it. I got a freelance gig doing the DVD design for a jellyfish meditation DVD and I just realized that all of this studying is great preparation for the gig. Say word.
Photoshop is amazing! I am literally blown away by it. I have spent the past few days holed up at the bookstore taking books on After Effects and Photoshop off of the shelves and sitting there learning them. This is some of the stuff I learned today. It’s been a lot of fun. I really have a passion for this stuff.
Hi! I'm Brit! I love God sans religion, breakdancing, design, motion graphics, adobe, men and women both, my mac book pro, g funk music, glitchy tweaky electro house, writing, making videos, elastic illusion, photography, vv, fractals, and google. Life is my art school. I believe that creativity is the point.
I am learning about going it on my own. Taking control, taking charge. Claiming knowledge, claiming ability. Be willing to stand up and be counted and say yes, I know what I'm doing. Put me in the front row. With tears in my eyes and vulnerability in my heart.
