I Don't Know What's Going On...

So I found a bunch of posts sitting as drafts? Apparently they hadn't been posted in the last however many weeks so...that's fun. Um, I'll post them like once a day I guess? I don't know if that's better than just a mass of posts at once.

Book Designs

For this project we are doing some page layouts for a book on a specific artist (graphic designer, illustrator, animator, photographer, etc.) I think that this is a really cool project and a neat way for us to learn about successful people in the fields that we want to go into. 

The person that I chose to do my little part of the book over is Annie Leibovitz. I had heard about her beforehand and then I also heard a lot about her from my vis comm teacher who worked for her while he was living in New York. I thought she sounded like an interesting person and I am really fond of her photographs and wanted to do my part of the book on her.

This is the information that I have written on her and will go (most of it anyway) into the book. 

"Annie Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949 in Waterbury Connecticut. She is Jewish, but nonobservant, saying “I’m not a practicing Jew, but I feel very Jewish” .She originally attended the San Francisco Art Institute to study painting, but then found photography. She lived for a short time on a kibbutz where she explored her photographic skills.

In 1970 she started working for the Rolling Stones. Leibovitz approached the founding editor, Jann Wenner who gave Leibovitz her first assignment to photograph John Lennon. Within a short time she was the chief photographer.  

During the Rolling Stones’ 1975 international tour she accompanied the band. Her favourite photograph being one that she took of Mick Jagger in an elevator.

On December 8, 1980 Leibovitz photographed John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The photograph was of Ono completely clothed and Lennon wrapped around her disrobed. Leibovtiz promised that the photograph would be on the cover and it was. She was the last person to professionally photograph Lennon before he was killed.

After working for Rolling Stones Leibovitz began working for the magazine, Vanity Fair. The same year that she began working for the magazine her first book was published. Leibovitz became known for her “wildly lit, staged, and provocative portraits of celebrities”. Some of her most famous are of Whoopi Goldberg and Demi Moore. She has also photographed celebrities such as Brad Pitt, Ellen DeGeneres, Scarlett Johannson and Kiera Knightly. Her photographs have appeared in Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker as well as other ad campaigns.

In 1991 she had an exhibit at the National Portrait gallery and was the second living portraitist and the first woman to be there. In 1999 she published a book entitled Women that was accompanied by Susan Sontag. In the book Leibovitz showed females in images from the Supreme Court to coal miners. Her most recent book, A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005, shows her celebrity portraits as well as personal photographs from her life. These photographs are of her parents and children and Susan Sontag. She calls them “a memoir in photographs”. The idea was brought about by the deaths of Sontag and her father, which happened close together.

Recently she was hired by Disney to do a series for the “Year of a Million Dreams” and photograph celebrities in different scenes. She also took the photograph of Miley Cyrus that caused a commotion from parents due to the fact that the photograph suggested that she was naked and Cyrus was still involved with Disney.

Leibovitz is the mother of three children, Sarah, and twins Susan, and Samuelle named after Susan Sontag and Leibovitz’s father."

I think that she is a very interesting person and personally I like what she says about being Jewish because I identify with that a lot. 

Project Between 5 & 6

For this project in vis comm we were supposed to recreate a snapshot that was on the page, take a picture of the sun, strangers holding hands, the view once you've climbed a tree, and a video of someone dancing. These were mine.

My take on the sun. It's from behind the clouds. You can still technically see the sun. It was cloudy and rainy that day so it was the best shot that I could get. 

Two very nice ladies from the Tollhouse Cookie place in the mall let me take their picture. I thought they'd say no because they were in their uniform. I won't post the picture because I told them that it wouldn't go on the internet. 

I'm afraid of heights so I took a different meaning to the tree photo. I got on my stomach and took one from the lowest angle instead of the highest.

We went to Crown Center for my friend's birthday and they started doing this. I needed a video and it was entertaining so I took it. 

NASA's Golden Record

For my vis comm class the record that I chose to do from the list was NASA's Golden Record. It was sent into space with music, greetings in 55 different languages, and different sounds of the Earth.

My original idea was to do something with a gold hand and possibly a person so on Friday night I turned one of my friends gold. My friends are always eager to be photographed and do whatever odd ideas I may have.

Around her eyes is eye shadow, not the paint and the same with her lips. It looks bronzer than the paint in different light, but it works. Her hair was gold hairspray that also looked a little more yellow, but ultimately did work well.

In the end the photographs that I took that I had her hand in, I didn't like so much so those did not make the final cut of pictures. The second one down is the one that I went with for the final album cover.

Final Box...sorta.

So, these are pictures of my final box.
Sort of.
Because of my class schedule and work schedule I could only work on it when we had class so I didn't finish it. I know everyone else finished theirs, but I'm still mad that I didn't have enough time and it was a mix of my own fault and the fact that I can't miss class to work on another class's project (which I did do last Thursday to do some gluing).
I'm mostly finished with it though. I just would have needed to sand it really. It wasn't so bad working with the bandsaw? I'm just not good with...tactile projects, like actually having to put things together with my hands. I am incredibly excited to start our next project because we finally have a photography thing for the first time in the BDS class! I am so very very excited!!!

Box Updates

Today (though, not really since this post is scheduled for a different day) we cut our boxes out of cardboard. It wasn't bad and I'm really glad that I made my box small and like easy so I don't have to figure out a lot of sides and cutting and whatever else. I like my time with the bandsaw to be at a minimum. Though I am pretty excited because it's a cute little box, I think anyway.

One of the side pieces went flying, so I don't have pictures of that because I have no idea where it went.

Now...onto album covers!

Our new project in vis comm is designing an album cover for one of the musical items on the list. The two that I liked the most were John Cage's 4'33" and NASA's Golden Record. I liked them because they are both unusual ideas. The idea that a piece is just silence and that a record was sent into space to explain the human race.

These were some of the original ideas that I had for the album cover. I really wanted to do something with photography though, even though not really any of my ideas used that. For the first one Tim suggested that if I wanted to use photography I could do something with someone's hand for it. That gave me some ideas and I will probably do that one. I want to use my film camera for it, because it will give it a different feel than using my digital one.