Day 11

The summary of my week

I spent almost my entire week working on my own designs, and it was raining every single day of this week--and the rain is heavy up in Miramar. Of course, we didn't have work on Monday, since school didn't require it and the office was closed.

On Tuesday John came in late, so when I got there at 9:00, I kind of just went in and got straight to work. I finished my Cherry Blossoms design, as I posted in an earlier blog, and I dragged them all onto templates. I got some critiques from my coworkers and mentor, which led me to adding scan lines to the original image before dragging them. After I got the first three templates done, I started doing color variations (which I also posted in the other blog), and dragged those onto templates too. When I got home I created another color variation on the Cherry Blossom design that I called "Jacaranda" after my sister suggested it.

A screen shot of my design on the three archetype templates (laptop, MP3 player, and cell phone) in my design folder, organized in Bridge.

On Wednesday, I actually tried to do more color variations on Jacaranda, but I decided I didn't like it so I stuck to the original green and purple colors and dragged those onto the templates. Then I used the purple from Jacaranda to make a 9th Cherry Blossom color variation, which I think turned out very nicely (I edited my earlier blog post to add that in too). I worked on a few dailies, created my own folder in the database to keep my templates, and started my second design, which for some reason I named "COFFEE". I have a strange way of seeing and naming things, I think, but this design was in my head and for some reason I got the feeling that it was inspired by a coffee cup. I honestly don't know where it came from. The computer was being really slow so I couldn't work too much on it, so I worked on more dailies instead. Also, an interesting tidbit of the day was that Matt, the guy who makes all the templates for the skins, came in with a paddle. Like, a boat oar or something. I heard it was going to be a broomstick or something of the sort. And yes, it was skinned (scrap skin prints though, I guess they figure it out first before they send it to be live on the website).

Matt with the skinned paddle. It's just a test though.

On Thursday I got there late because of the rain, and a guy in a white truck was swerving and almost hit us when my mom and I were at the corner near Ashley's Furniture Store (it was a pyramid) that was a few blocks away and it scared me. Anyway, I was going to transfer a lot of files today (raw assets that I didn't need to keep on the desktop) so I brought 10GB worth of storage devices (A 2GB and a 4GB flashdrive, and a 4GB memory card)... and I ended up using it all. I worked on my COFFEE design, but the computer froze and stuff so I had to restart it. I made 4 drafts of COFFEE because the design I wanted wouldn't come out right with big dots or small dots and I ended up having to place every single dot I wanted in its specific place. It took forever. There wasn't enough RAM to render all the filters either, and I had to get Michael to help me a few times. After I while I got tired of waiting 5 minutes each time I wanted to save something so I worked on dailies. Before I left I conducted my mentor interview, which I then transcribed when I got home (stayed up till 11:00 doing that, by the way). At the end of the day I had all of my Cherry Blossom files on my flashdrive and my COFFEE draft files on my memory card. I cleaned them out when I got home.

A screen shot of the dots I placed with a path to help me, and a screen shot of the layout before I rendered any filters on it.

Friday was almost the same at Thursday--I got there late, it hailed, and I used a different computer than my station to see if the RAM would work for COFFEE to render the last two layers. It worked on ONE. After about an hour I moved back to my regular station and found an alternative to the Spherize filter--the Fisheye warp transform. I was satisfied. Randy came at around 11:00, he talked to John about a lot of the things I talked to him about yesterday, and I walked him out at around 11:30. I continued to work on COFFEE, trying to make the color variation look good. By now it was more of "Chocolate Swirls" than "Coffee", since I was trying to color it to look like vanilla chocolate, and the original file looked like orange chocolate. I tried various techniques, decided the original file looked more vivid, and only made one file unique to be able to be colored "vanilla". The others I used to original file plus a hue/saturation change. This is not only because it's easier, but also because the grayscaled Vanilla file was over 2GB in size. I couldn't even fit that on my regular flashdrive! The rest of the files were fine though--they were about 450MB average. Still pretty big, but hey, the assets have to be high quality (the bigger the better in my opinion, but I think I'll size it down a bit to take home...). I finished the design, but I wasn't quite as satisfied with it as I thought, since it looked different in my head, but that was okay. It wouldn't save a lot of the time, it took 10 minutes to render and save, and it was so huge... it was so annoying! I hope it'll be worth it. I made 14 color variations, dragged them onto the templates, and I named the series "Spiral Dots". I had to stay overtime to wait for the whole HOUR it took to save and transfer. Geez louise.

A somewhat blurry picture of my really temporary work station.

 A screen shot of the Vanilla spiral dots file. See at the bottom it says 2.48G? It used to be bigger.

 Oh and by the way, here's the sample sheet for COFFEE. Fourteen colors: Vanilla Milk, Orange Chocolate, Apple Cherry, Sunflower Seed, Green Lime, Forest Leaves, Turquoise Idol, Aqua Idol, Cyan Rain, Sunset Pink, Evening Magenta, Midnight Purple, Space Void, Blue Huckleberry. More on the way.