Month: January 2021

Assigned Today

Please complete this Photoshop tutorial after class today but before Thursday. It makes a lot more sense if we’ve already talked about and seen some Photoshop tools in action.

Today’s Content

Before we get into nuts and bolts in Photoshop, I want to talk about that NPR story and some basic communication ethics.

First off, if you are advertising a university campus to attract students to it, what are the ethics that constrain what actions you can take?

That is, ethics are defined by the ethos or community you are acting within. Ethics are always defined by the community, and they define what actions are acceptable to perform and the conditions we can perform them.

• Is it OK to lie? (General cultural community: United States)
• Is it OK to lie if you’re a college student? (Specific cultural community: College)
• Is it OK to lie if you’re a college student and you need to skip one class to work on a project for another class? (Action: Lying vs. Honesty)
• Who gets to decide whether it’s OK, and who punishes people who break the rules?

So, thinking about this brochure and other college brochures from the standpoint of marketing offices at universities…

• Was it unethical to edit the campus brochure images that way?
• The NPR story says that many universities choose photos for advertising based on campus demographics (making the school look more diverse than it actually is). Is that unethical, even if the photos aren’t altered?

More broadly, can we define some sort of professional communicator’s ethical code around image editing? What rules exist that we should never break?

* * *

Now that we’ve defined some ethical boundaries, I’ll teach you how to do the thing the NPR story is about, but hopefully for good instead of evil.

It’s another bit of watching Matt Click On Things, so I apologize up front.

Assigned Today

Before next Tuesday, please schedule enough time to watch this Adobe Tutorial introducing the basic layout and use of Photoshop. If you’ve used Photoshop in the past, you probably know all of these things.

Also, before next Tuesday, please read this NPR story from a few years ago about questionable uses of Photoshop.

Today’s Content

We’ll continue watching Matt Click On Stuff. If we got to the audio assets on Tuesday, we’ll pick up where we left off. If we didn’t get to audio on Tuesday, we will start with it.

We will take our three versions of the video from Tuesday and enhance the audio in them.

We will work with three kinds of audio:

• Diegetic sound. This is the sound that’s present inside the clip or scene itself. We will need to work with the volume and other audio issues of the original clip to clean it up and make it more professional.
• Non-diegetic sound: ambience. This is any continuous sound playing in the background of a clip or scene that isn’t present for your actors. Background music fits here, and many different TV shows and movies make use of nearly inaudible background hums and thrums to set the stage (think of every space-based sci-fi show and the constant hum in the background of every scene, or every cop procedural and the continual sound of sirens and honking horns in the city background).
• Foley sound: effects. Foley encompasses most of the sounds we hear in film and video. These are sound effects created in post-production and placed into a sequence to match the action they describe.

Along the way, we will talk about some of the things Premiere will let us do to explore our possible creative choices. Not sure if you need a Star Trek sliding door sound effect or a minivan sliding door sound effect? Premiere will let us test both options.

Assigned Today

Before next Tuesday, please schedule enough time to watch this Adobe Tutorial introducing the basic layout and use of Photoshop. If you’ve used Photoshop in the past, you probably know all of these things.

Also, before next Tuesday, please read this NPR story from a few years ago about questionable uses of Photoshop.

Today’s Content

There will be a lot of watching Matt Click On Stuff today, so I apologize in advance.

Also, if I’m doing this on my laptop in class, there will be a lot of filler time.

We are going to work through some techniques and tools for dealing with color in video. I’ll bring in a sample video to work on. To keep this from becoming a simple lecture (which isn’t any more helpful than our assigned viewing for today), I want you all to provide some recommendations to me.

I want to take this simple video and edit only the color to create three versions:

• A kid-friendly video about Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle that looks like it would be at home on the Disney Channel or Nick Jr.
• A gritty reboot of a basic lesson on Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle
• A lesson on Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle that was taken out of a science fiction movie

Along the way, we will talk about some basic techniques for managing assets, a term I’ve been using to refer to the additional files or objects you can use in producing a final project. In particular, we’ll manage

• A rhetorical triangle graphic that isn’t present in the original recording
• Some additional audio effects (as a link to Thursday)

Assigned Today

Before next Tuesday, please watch this Adobe Tutorial on color balancing with the Lumetri panel in Premiere.

Before Thursday, please watch this Adobe Tutorial on audio effects. Please note that the virtual desktop will not allow you to use your microphone, so we can’t do voice overs this way. (We will talk about more precise techniques for adding vocals to our work.)

Today’s Content

Film editing is hard. Doing editing well… That’s really what you learn in a filmmaking degree program. If you’re really interested in doing video and film work, what we’re doing here will get you started on the things you’ll need to practice, and these few skills will take you a long way.

As a case in point: the “Every Frame a Painting” episode we watched emphasizes the effect of a very simple editing technique: shot-reverse shot. This technique uses just uses simple clip juxtaposition to enhance the message and impact of your sequence. The technical skill required is limited to finding the right point to cut your clips, then dragging clips into a meaningful order. (At a more advanced level, we split the audio track off of the video, so we can use visual edits to hide audio edits.)

Today, we’ll look at a clip that uses shot-reverse shot well, and we’ll revisit our course concepts so far to unpack how the scene impacts us.

• Page design (that is, what’s the layout of the scene in each shot?)
• Color

If we have time, we will compare other editing techniques used in the videos below.

Assigned Today

Before Thursday, make sure to watch the “Every Frame a Painting” episode on Shot-Reverse Shot. We will start talking about basic filmmaking ideas and how such a simple editing technique can have profound effects.

Before Friday, watch this Adobe Tutorial on creating media in Premiere (about 20min). Please also watch this Adobe Tutorial on the various panels we will be using in our Workspace (about 15min).

Today’s Content

Today’s focus will be on reviewing each other’s ebook designs so far. Please have some means of sharing your work with others. (If you don’t have a device that can access the virtual desktop in class, you can open the PDF you created in the lab.)

We will review each other’s documents according to the traits we’ve discussed so far:

• Color choices
• Text Design
• Page design

Assigned Today

Before next Tuesday, please work in groups of 2-3 to complete your Children’s Book – First Draft.

Before next Thursday, please watch the “Every Frame a Painting” episode on Shot-Reverse Shot.

Today’s Content

We are talking about “Through the Door,” a chapter from Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics.

We’re a few weeks in, but we should really stop to talk about what we’re doing in this class. We are using modern tools to make creative works, that much is in the course description. But, how do those tools affect our design choices? Maybe more importantly, how do our design choices—and the medium we design for—affect our audiences?

McCloud’s chapter argues that comics creation is on the verge of changing pretty profoundly now that the newer generation has grown up with those tools always in existence. His argument hinges on categorizing creators into three groups:

• Traditional: Comics artists a little older than him who had always done their work as ink-on-paper. These artists did not adopt digital tools as they became available (whether because they cost too much or because they didn’t want to learn), so they stick to the Old Ways.
• Transitional: Comics artists McCloud’s age who were entering the field just as digital tools were becoming affordable (but still very expensive) to creators. Some of these artists adopted the tools, some did not.
• Contemporary: Comics artists younger than McCloud (really those born after 1990) who entered the field after digital tools became comparable in price and accessibility to ink-on-paper. (If you don’t believe that statement, compare the cost of a basic drawing tablet to a professional-sized drawing table.)

McCloud’s main argument is that the tools we consider normal shape what we think is possible, and the media we are exposed to shape our expectations of what we want to consume.

However, the book this chapter comes from (Reinventing Comics) was published in 2020. A consumer-grade computer cost about $1000, Adobe Creative Suite cost a few thousand dollars more if you bought the entire thing, or $500-700 per program if you bought individually. The creation software McCloud talks about was less powerful than the free, web-based image editor Photopea is today.

It’s safe to assume that his argument is true. So, how have we seen that manifest in our lives?

• What media do we choose to consume? What are our expectations of it?
• What media do we create? Do we even think of our actions as creating media?

Assigned Today

Before Thursday, please read “Through the Door,” a chapter from Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics. We will talk about how the digital shift in media production has affected our ability to create and the ways we consume.

Today’s Content

There is so much we can talk about with color, you guys.

Since our big projects are all focused on creating children’s books, we’ll talk about kid-friendly and clearly-adult coloring. For instance, we might compare these two videos on more than just a content level:

What color words would we use to describe these two sequences?

• Hue is the actual color (magenta, yellow, cyan…)
• Lightness is how close to white the hue is on the spectrum from black to white
• Saturation is the “fullness” of the color compared to the amount of grey “mixed in.”

Assigned Today

No new assignments.

Today’s Content

We will look at some common children’s books and other image-heavy works and try to figure out what makes them children’s books besides the content.

Our goal today is to think about how these kinds of documents are constructed as a way of getting into our big final project.

We will discuss that project and how tomorrow’s lab fits in.

Assigned Today

By 1/15: check out Adobe Tutorials page for Illustrator and watch the videos (about 20 minutes) for creating shapes

By 1/19: check out Adobe Color, read Color Theory 101: Deconstructing 7 Famous Brands’ Color Palettes by Erik Devaney, and read all three parts of Smash Magazine’s Meaning of Color.[/due_date_printer]

Before Thursday, head to Storytime Online and watch at least three videos of children’s books. If you have any children’s books at home, maybe read a few?

Before Friday, please check out Adobe Tutorials page for Illustrator and watch the videos (about 20 minutes) for creating shapes.

Before next Monday, please check out these three things:

• Adobe Color. In particular, try the Extract Theme tool.
• Color Theory 101: Deconstructing 7 Famous Brands’ Color Palettes by Erik Devaney about color design on common websites. It’s useful for the quick overview of color language it provides.
• Parts 1, 2 and 3 of Smash Magazine’s Meaning of Color. It’s a much deeper look at the language Devaney provides.

Today’s Content

We will look at a few documents as a group and talk about the way font affects our reading.

Some key issues we’ll try to address:

• Why does everyone hate comic sans?
• Why are academic assignments always in Times New Roman?
• Why does APA want its headings styled that way?
• Why does every operating system have its own internal font?

We are starting this term with font discussions because font face tends to be one of the most innocuous parts of a document, unless its something that’s really out of place.

But, even though we don’t always consciously notice it, it affects the way we read a document, and it can affect where our attention goes on a screen.

Assigned Today

Before tomorrow, make sure you know how to open and click around in InDesign.

Before Monday, please read this chapter from an old version of Robin Williams’ Non-Designer’s Design Book. We will use those definitions and refer back to the Apostel prezi from today.

Today’s Content

The best way to differentiate digital media from “traditional media” (a term I don’t like because “digital” and other forms of new media are now over a century old) is to look at the user/reader/viewer, a person I’ll just call the “audience” throughout the term. In traditional media, the audience typically has all of the control. Not only can they flip the pages of a book to wherever they want to go, they can hold the book at whatever angle or distance suits them. Hold it closer to the light, hold it further away. Highlight it or mark it with a pen. Hand the book to a friend without getting slapped with a copyright infringement fine.

Traditional media gave all control to the audience.

Digital media, not so much. Sure, you could change your zoom settings, maybe turn up the brightness on your monitor. But, ultimately, you’re looking at this screen in front of you. You can change some features, but you are ultimately just looking at a glowing rectangle for as long as you want to pay attention to this webpage.

As designers, we need to take advantage of this fact. Until our audience decides they want to click somewhere else, change the channel or (heaven forbid) go outside, we control what they’re looking at.

The fun part is that we can control how they look at it too.

We will use Bradley’s reading patterns explanation to better understand eye movements. We’ll use Apostel today to talk through the things that control readers’ eyes when they aren’t moving from page to page.

Key takeaways for today:

• How does our audience actually use what we produce?