Being that I grew up in a musical family, I love to play and record music and unusually had a producer / studio project going. From Ska to Industrial Metal, I had played around with whatever style interested me at the time. Now, here is my latest project, Skipbridge.

It’s electronic music combining elements of drum and bass, new wave with a chill vibe. Check out this remix of Nume:Ra’s Soulbrotha under the name Skipbridge on SoundCloud for your listening pleasure. I’ll be posting more tracks as I finish them. Hope you like it!

‘Till Next Time,
Frank Flitton

Vimeo On Demand

Vimeo On Demand is a new service they launch specifically for their pro members. With this service a filmmaker can distribute their film easily to people and get a few dollars back when people view it. It’s a pretty cool idea because it builds upon Vimeo’s reputation for having high quality content and it makes it easier for film makers to market their work. The Vimeo On Demand also provides them with a customizable page which they can use to market the film to people with. This page features a trailer, description, comments and a payment gateway. Speaking of payment, did I mention the 90/10 split plus tips? Seems like a pretty good platform toto inch your release! Check it out when you have the chance, it’s a pretty interesting. See all the benefits here.

Video Enhancer

For the consumer that likes to post videos but doesn’t have knowledge of editing software Vimeo has also just launched an enhancer service where you can put a fancy filter on your video as well as put some music in the background. The enhancer is powered by vivoom and free for a limited time. Not sure what either of those mean exactly but there are hundreds of great filters so, if you into that sort of thing, you should defiantly take advantage of it.

‘Till next time,
Frank Flitton

If you wander around the net for a bit it’s easy to spot Soundcloud music players and you should get ready to see a lot more of them.

Recently, Soundcloud announced that they are changing their pro system from a multi-tiered system to a more simple pro and unlimited model which are much more affordable (under $10 USD a month for the pro plan). Their new pro system will allow bands and brands to promote them served in the “who to follow” sidebar as well as allow them to get access to the extra features of premium accounts (like analytics) for less than before.

They’re also working on a new widget which will allow you to change graphics and text as the song plays sideshow-style. It would feature its iconic waveform player set against an image spanning the frame. They hope that this will make the sounds more of an experience for the listener. Their logic is that music is unique among other art forms because of the emotions that it can bring out in us. Making the sound more expressive visually will help improve that. Personally, I hope this feature gets used for the increasingly popular and bandwidth reaping lyric-videos. I never understood how or why YouTube’s video quality related to audio quality as well. So to get that 3MB of audio you also have to get that 7MB (or more) of a still image of an album cover or a few slides of lyrics. I imagine Soundcloud’s new widget may bridge this gap nicely.

For more on this, please check out this Fast Company article as well as SoundCloud.com

‘Till next time,
Frank Flitton

Pinterest

Pinterest is great for putting in a word or two into the search and getting streams of relevant high quality content. If you click on the wee thumbnails you can see the pages that the images link from which often contain large galleries, tutorials and videos.

Niice

This site is fantastic for finding great, inspiring design work that will get you thinking. It’s very spiffy.

Stumbleupon

This service delivers content that is specifically geared to you and only gets better as you give pages thumbs up or down. Stumbleupon provides a very great way to find a massive range of amazing stuff that you never would have found otherwise – as well as share it with others.

SoundCloud

If visual inspiration isn’t cutting it for me then I’ll listen to some new tunes. By checking out profiles that musicians I like follow then I can find and share music pretty easily. A lot of musicians have pretty cool artwork too as an added bonus.

Twitter

Of course, Twitter had to make this list. By following local design agencies and other designers abroad you can keep up with what’s happening in the industry in your spare time by glancing over the short quips of information often with very relevant links to great work and new resources.

‘Till next time,
Frank Flitton

With this picture I wanted to tell a story. Something along the lines of three girls gets lost in the woods and befriend some tree guardians, like in Lord of The Rings, tree ents(?)… whatever. Not the most concrete plot but it sounds like a movie abstract from Netflix so it was enough of a concept for me for this more artsy project. The emphasis was more of our ability to shade objects and recolor things than write a novel. Check out the original sketch, it’s loose and “inspired”. Thank God for pintrest so the Andrea, the stylist, and Ana, the model, didn’t think I was insane.

As a side note, most of my sketches for photo projects look like this.

Visually, for this project, I had a lot of inspiration of the game LIMBO (I have a Steam problem), wonderfully dark but with a sense cartoony excitement. Not uncommon with the work of Genevieve Gauckler, a very well established French artist. My characters aren’t as crazy as hers tend to be however the simple shape of the cartoons allowed me to shade them well and adds some comic relief to the otherwise dark composition. For how simple they look, it took a longer than I expected to blend them into the picture and then shade them.

This is such a stunning game. Buy it.

Ana and I spent a lot of time picking out outfits for the triplets and developing them into well-defined characters (more like vague personalities). I photographed the outfits with my iPhone and sent them to Andrea. They was a great resource to keep everyone on the same page for the shoot. It also sped up change times ten fold.

Ana and I bought a fair bit of stuff from Ardene to get the look I wanted. We were quite thrifty by using cloths she already had but we needed some more cloths to create the three distinct characters.

When we want to shoot I could only book the photo studio for a two-hour chunk of time so I had to be quick to set up the lighting and establish a workflow between myself Ana and Andrea. It’s not that it was an especially complicated shoot but we had to keep things moving to get through all the different hair, makeup and wardrobe changes then clean up the studio at the end. In addition, I had to think of a way to successfully line up all the images in post if I was going to sell the triplet angle and make it look good. That’s why there’s the wee chair. That good old chair saved me a lot of messing around with scale serving as a reference better than a mark on the floor would. It was also a great prop for Ana to work with.

Doesn’t she look comfy? I didn’t end up using this shot but it shows how I had the studio set up as far as lighting goes. I used the real shadow she cast in the final illustration (with a few adjustments of course). I achieved this by making a clipping path around her as a layer mask then detailing on the mask with the eraser/brush tool. I didn’t have her off to the side to avoid lens distortion. I tried to have Ana’s place(s) as true to the end product as possible, that includes using the same angle I shot the background image at. Also, because she’s going to be in a foggy place I had my brother, William, my younger brother, to my right holding a bounce board to light her up a bit more. I brightened up her face up in Photoshop to make her eyes more striking. It’s the little details that make things easier on yourself when your composting photos.

If you’ll look at Ana’s make up, you’ll notice clear inspiration from old films and theater in an effort to keep with the theme and give the photo a retro vibe. Andrea did such a great job with the hair and make up, I can’t stress this enough. Andrea was able to quickly give Ana three different hair and make up treatments between outfit changes in the studio. She made Ana look very confident as well as innocent in her different roles. I know next to nothing about doing women’s hair and make up (I’m useless) so to work with her was a great experience that really pushed the project to the next level.

That being said, with the help of the team, I tried to get the photos as close as possible to the end product on camera with only minor Photoshop work. It’s okay to be picky.

After 20ish hours of photography and Photoshop work (total) I brought the image into Aftereffects to add the light rays and other detailing. Then it want back into Photoshop where I applied some subtle lens distortion, a touch of noise and the vignette to give it that retro photo vibe and a bit more depth. Those last finishing touches in Photoshop help it look more like an actual photograph as opposed to a photo composition.

In the end, this portrait was successful in my opinion. Technically, the studio lighting matched the original photo I took. The model successfully got shaded into the picture as well as the characters. The finishing touches in Aftereffects look pretty tight too if I do say so myself. Upon a first glance you can identify three distinct characters and three cartoons watching over them. A story of what could be comes into your head much like how a movie poster would. Ana did a great job getting into the characters and working on the set especially considering her age, thirteen, and her lack of any modeling experience, she is a great little sister.

This portrait successfully met the project requirements for school and is a great final composition. It’s was a real team effort and paid off.

‘Till next time,
Frank Flitton

BUY THE FRAMED ART PRINT + STRETCHED CANVAS

It seems that recycling, which is alive and well in the print world, is hardly present in the digital technology scene. Often times computers and mobile phones are swiftly disposed of in the trash as opposed to recycled and their materials reused in other devices. It’s a lot easier to recycle materials then mine new ones. Recycling more of our electronics would also provide more jobs in that industry which could help make the working conditions more hospitable.

There are a lot of materials to be mined from our dead electronics, if only we’d recycle them. One million mobile phones can yield 9 kilograms of palladium, 24 kilograms of gold, 250 kilograms of silver, and 9,000 kilograms of copper. Recycling all those materials have an added benefit: It’s much less energy-intensive to recycle metals than to mine new ones. Plus, recycling creates new jobs (in the recycling industry).

source: Co.Exist

This infographic does a grate job of visualizing the e-waste recycling, or lack there of.

That’s not to say that good ol’ fashioned printing is any better than its digital successor. With print production, the problem lies more so with the disposal of the paper products and mass quantities of paper used for tasks that could easily be replaced by digital documents as opposed to the (sometimes hazerdous) waste of the machinery (computers, phones) used in the process of displaying and creating which become obsolete pretty fast. I’ve often heard people say that with the advent and mass consumption of computers that we would be using less and less paper but sadly, we use more then ever before. This could be because of people reluctancy to change their ways of doing things, like printing off a user manual for example. However, I think that its a collision people growing up in a more digital age as opposed to the print age of the (immediate) past. It’s been my experience the people under 30-or-so prefer ebooks or videos compared to 30-or-so or older who would rather have a printed manual.

Here’s another info graphic with the stats on paper waste, not saying paper is evil but we, as a society, should cut back.

This being said, I’m not anti-book or anything—God knows we design enough of them in my program—but printing and manufacturing books as well as other print media can (and does) get costly compared to its digital counterpart. Especially considering you can carry your entire library in your bag with an e-reader opposed to a mobile storage unit that you use your neighbour’s little kid brother to haul around. I like the smell of old books and stuff but in terms of environmental impact, for the actual reading material, digital formats is the clear winner. That being said, as this next infographic will remind us, walking to the library is still the most ecofriendly way to read.

Remember to recycle your phones!

‘Till next time,

Frank Flitton

infographics from visual.ly

As a designer I think it’s important to have some self-reflection from time to time. I think it’s healthy for me to recognize what I do well and to see what I need to build upon. I think the Winterlude poster project I worked on in November shows both what I do well as a designer and what I need to approve on well.

As you can see, I’m good at Photoshopping images together, decent with composition and pretty good at vector drawing and mixing styles. I’m especially proud of the coloring treatment. Long story short, I know my way around the adobe programs.

You can also see my Photoshopping skills with my “Emerge From the Depths” and “Lost In the Trees” pieces.

The back side, however, isn’t bad. Not great though. The typography feels so uninspired. I didn’t worry about it too much though because the front of the poster was pretty avant-garde already for a church and Knights of Columbus hosted event. But still, I should work on my typography skills and type control more.

I have worked on it though. I think I’m getting better. Perhaps. My Wicked Hard Lemonade redesign was an attempt for me to try to not suck too badly at type anymore by doing a pure typographic treatment. I think I did well but I need to keep working on it.

‘Till next time,
Frank Flitton

The layout of the spreads was the hardest part for me. I initially wanted the illustrations to cross the entire spread with the stanzas placed about in a way that compliments the illustration but that proved to look too messy in the end. It also required double page illustrations which were not time efficient considering all the other assignments I have to balance on top of my freelance work and part-time job. I adopted this ink and Photoshop based illustration style (similar to my Squid Men series) which I felt was a better fit for the project anyways.  The album was written by Kamelot in Norway and recorded in Germany so the more Swiss/European inspired layout alludes to this as opposed to the littered stanzas concept. Also, symphonic music is more or less math, the grid based layout visually represents this.

I submitted it to my Illustration Prof. and I’m waiting to hear back from him before I make the final hardcover mock-up at the end of the semester.

Here are some of my favorite spreads:

Til’ next time,
Frank Flitton

Geneviève Gauckler Graduated from ENSAD (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs) in 1991 in Paris.

She has had a broad experience in the field of graphic design, illustration and art direction after college. Her career started with French record label F Communications. She later worked with directors Kuntzel & Deygas on promos for Dimitri from Paris, Pierre Henry and Sparks, as well as commercials like Yves Saint Laurent’s Live Jazz, titles for French/German cultural TV-channel Arte and some short movies. She has also art-directed the franco-nippon fanzine « Minimix ». In 1999, she was hired by the Internet company boo.com to create their online fashion magazine. While in London, she worked for the design agency Me Company, developing a number of projects for the web.

Since 2001 she has focused on some experimental videos and working on a range of art, magazines (Flaunt, Beaux-Arts Magazine, Le Figaro Japan, IDN, Form, Vogue UK) as well as advertising for companies like Coca-Cola, Skype, PlayStation and Adobe. Geneviève has also worked on many books, objects, toys & Tshirts. Three books have been published about her work, in Japan by Gas Book and in France by Pyramyd. Apart from working on a regular basis on some advertising jobs (Adobe, Orange, o2 Germany), her next projects is to create an experimental video with Pleix and starting working on her next comic book.

These pictures are more can be found at http://www.genevievegauckler.com/Welcome.

‘Till next time,
Frank Flitton

]]> http://flittonmedia.com/profile-genevieve-gauckler/feed/ 0 http://flittonmedia.com/3d-pen-lets-you-draw-sculptures/ http://flittonmedia.com/3d-pen-lets-you-draw-sculptures/#comments Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:47:30 +0000 Frank http://flittonmedia.com/?p=1388 I’ve been following the development of 3D printing for the past year or so off and on. It’s amazing what we can do now with this technology and what is currently being researched, like printing organs with stem cells! From my perspective though, the technology seems beyond me because I can’t 3D model to save my soul. I’m leaning but I’m not as good as I’d like to be… to say the least.

To my surprise, there’s a 3D printing pen! It’s called the 3Doodler and – as you can guess – it lets you doodle in 3D space.

Check out these pictures of how awesome it is.

The 3Doodler was designed by Boston-based company WobbleWorks who recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to sell the miraculous little devices that utilizes a special plastic which is heated and instantly cooled to form solid structures as you draw.

‘Til next time,
Frank Flitton

source: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/02/the-worlds-first-3d-printing-pen-that-lets-you-draw-sculptures-in-real-time/