Week 14

This week, I continued to work on the website by uploading images from and the Virginia Film Festival. I reached out to the class and asked them to upload any personal photos that they had gathered at these events (only ones they wanted to share, which is only fair). I think that it's really important to make sure and gather film/photos of our events so that next years Visions (or even ours) can use them for promotional need. We could have really used some previous footage of Visions past when we were struggling to find time to create the Indiegogo video. While we have footage from panels, I think that we need more candid and personal footage that better reflects the atmosphere of Visions. 
Also, after reading the Op Ed Piece, I talked with Zoë about maybe making a promotional video at the end that featured her writing. As I was reading it, I got the sense that it would sound great read out-loud with emphasis. While this is just an idea and something that we would not be able to work on until after the festival, it's still something to consider.  

Week 13

(this gif is how I feel about everyone in the class...but mostly Zoë...)

This week was a bit of a doozy. Adrienne, Zoë, Devin, and I all met on Monday to discuss how to handle the Indiegogo shoot. We all went through the script and tried to figure out how many people from the class we would need and how soon we could do the shoot without being super unrealistic with the last-minute informing the class of our plan. Zoë and I reworked the script and I came up with a shot list which Zoë made a schedule for. We then met at King 104 on Friday and spent a majority of the day filming the video. I worked the camera and directed for the most part, with Rebecca and Chris assisting me when necessary. Zoë kept up with the schedule as well as recording which audio files correlated with the shots we took (this was really smart especially since the persons editing were not present at the shoot). The whole class was really good about how last-minute they were informed about the shoot and people who couldn't make it were eager to help in different ways. Everyone was also really positive on set and willing to help and comment with how to improve our filming. We had a lot of extenuating circumstances, but, in the end, I think that we really came together.

Week 12 Website Updates

Above you can see a picture of me, as I have slowly become a Sqaurespace Techno Wizard. But all jokes aside, I am really becoming more comfortable with the website and how to design it. Just recently, I added a Gallery to the website. Here we will be able to store photos from events as well as posters and other printables. This arrangement also makes more sense as far as where to locate graphics; originally, posters were under "Support Us," but by making a gallery, there is one location for all graphic-related information. As for gathering more photos, I made photo folders in the Art Department Drive so that the class can go on the drive and upload any photos they snapped during any of our events. I think that this method will be more effective than sending all the photos to be directly, as that can getting a bit iffy with sending mass photos via emails. I also arranged the Staff page by department priority which proved to be a bit of a challenge. Squarespace offers a wide arrangement of detailing options, but when you want to swap the order of objects on a page, you basically have to reconstruct the page. Squarespace is fairly easy to use, but it still requires a lot of time to construct and finalize the site. 

This week I looked at the Cucalorus Website for inspiration: http://www.cucalorus.org/

To begin with, I love the imperfect feel of this website's design. It reflects the silly and weird vibes of Cucalorus and also manages to look clean and interesting. I really have very little to complain about with the layout, seeing how everything is fairly easy to find.

Cucalorus Write Up

Cucalorus gave me a lot of insight about what the Art Department could do for this years festival. While there, I spoke with one of the staff members involved with the graphics for this years festival. He told me that they didn't have an Art Director and that they outsourced the bumpers and designs such as the monsters. This surprised me that they at least did not have someone focused on the art and making sure that it was consistent and together. I'm sure they had a department head doing this, but, in some aspects, it shows a lack of emphasis on Art.  I noticed how the different badges used size to help differentiate the types of passes. Personally, I found the design to be minimalistic, which is fine but it makes it more difficult to clear distinguish between them. I think they used size to fix this, but the drastic changes in size (the pegasaurus pass was significantly bigger) makes for inconsistency in printing (which just makes things unnecessarily harder). The difference should be graphic and stylized to make the badges feel more thought out and professional. While at Cucalorus, I attended several screenings and parties. No matter what you were doing, there was always some downtime integrated into the schedule, allowing ample time to network and socialize. The films I watched became the gateway for starting a conversation with attendees. This was especially true at the parties. There is a system at festivals and at times it feels like the idea that you go to festivals for the film portion is just one big pretense. This is not necessarily bad, but it's definently something to consider. What films will be good for sparking conversation? What type of people will this film bring to our festival? Is that our audience? These are questions better suited for Kevin and Zoë, but they are still something everyone in our class should consider.

Virginia Film Festival and Week 11

Virginia Film Festival was an amazing experience. The festival was incredibly accommodating and offered a interesting selections of films. From the perspective of Art Director, there were a lot of graphic and animation designs to take in. For one thing, they animated all of their sponsor slides. To me, this seems like a smart idea as it makes the slides more interesting to look at. It also shows another level of professionalism, so V6 will have animated slides. As far as their program went, the used magazine paper for the program's construction. I found this to be relatively flimsy and a bit obnoxious due to it's huge size. Also, the schedule was located in the middle of the program, rather the front or back. I would recommend a back-page location for the schedule for easy access as well as keeping it on the pass like years previous. The festival logo features a flock of geese, often shown flying in a "v" formation. These birds were placed all throughout the festival, via posters, logo projections, and even balloons. I like the idea of integrating the logo in interesting ways and am interested in designing a projection screen that would outline the logo or Cosmo.

As for the Art Department's status, this week Grace and I worked on securing Tyler's animation schedule. We now have it that the animations are shown Tuesday, edited Wednesday, submitted to Aaron and ACE Thursday, and given to Jack for social media on Friday. We will still have to make sure that Tyler is keeping to this schedule. Devin and I worked on making the logo more graphic using the information we learned from Andre in our design meeting. Devin fine-tuned putting a nice gradient onto the logo to give it dimension and to help it feel more vibrant. We also went with an orbish star design, despite originally thinking of making the stars in the 1950s style. The orb stars still had the old-school space feel and looked more cohesive with the original design. I am also continuing to work on the website. After looking at the offline version of the site, I have a better idea of what else needs to be added to the site.  I am also working with Devin at editing the party pictures so that they can be uploaded to the website as well as Facebook. There are a lot of photos to go through, so it is proving to be a process. Next semester, we will integrate the photo editing better into the Art Schedule so that it will be accomplished in a more timely manner.

Week 10 Blog Review and Indigogo Ideas

Halloween came and went and we actually made money?!?!! So this past week as been a blast of activity with preparing for both the Bake Sale and Halloween. We managed to get the posters approved and hung up before the events so I found that to be a pretty successful moment. Looking back, I would have done a lot of things differently...which is why Grace and I worked on putting that into the manual for next year! In preparation for the party, I picked up equipment for the "Step and Repeat" and went to work with Tyler and Kevin constructing and making sure it was legit. I also think that there was a lot of uncertainty surrounding this process as well and I want to make sure to enter it into the manual too. This week has also taught me a lot as a director. I'm slowly learning not to take people's bullshit and how to be more assertive in how I task my team.

For Indigogo, I found this field guide to better my understanding of the site and process. One idea this guide shared was to create hype around your fundraiser. They suggested throwing a party and using social media to build "suspense and intrigue." While this is vague, I agree with it! We have to make our Indigogo stand out and I think that using a quirky humorous tone/stance will draw people in. We could accomplish this with weird prizes or by maybe revealing secret prizes or something along those lines. I look forward to working with Adrienne on this assignment.