Presentation <———- 8)

This week I walked into internship and continued working on the posters for the fitness center in the school. I had thought that the last two were going to be it for this project, but Al told me to continue the third poster and complete it by the following day. It seemed like a lot of work and I explained that it would take me a couple of hours but he gave me the green light. I was excited at the same time because of a continuation and completion of the project kind of told me that he liked the first two and he possibly wanted to use my work for the school if he was asking me to complete the third one.  I got to it right away and it was the same process as the first two, the only difference was the color used. I used a black for the shadow and a icy blue for the mid tones.

Once I was done with the project he asked me to walk with him to the back of the studio, I stood above an “x” he had marked on the floor and just stood there. He was using this opportunity to put together some reference shots. Also this technique lets him adjust the lighting before a big shoot. In shorter words he won’t have to adjust the day of the shoot because he did it the day before. this process took about ten minutes which was neat because i finally got to stand up from my desk.

Once we finished, he asked me to return to my desk and bring him all the poster files, he asked me what I thought if we used the posters next semester. I simply said “it’s a smart idea”. We use them at the beginning of the semester and we can play around with them all through out the semester until December. Al didn’t give me any more projects for the day, even to take home which made me kind of happy, I can finally catch up on my work.

I still had about two hours to kill so I decided to use the time to cut a project I had in my portfolio, eat and look at poster inspiration on the internet. Just in case Al got the idea to give me another project.

Here’s an example of the project I completed for Al last week.

Last weeks internship was a tough one. I was going through financial difficulties and transitions from an old job to a new job. This is only relevant because it’s truly difficult to juggle full time employment and part time internship. Non the less I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to work from home. Al understood the hardships I was facing and provided me with the opportunity to record my hours and work from the comfort of my home.

Similar to if I was headed to internship that morning I woke up at 7A.M. and got dressed and ready to head out. I brewed my morning coffee except that day I was going to work from home. Why get dressed then? I feel I work better if I treat my home like a personal studio. I rummaged through old videos turned on my Spotify to my favorite Hip-Hop album and started bumping it heavy.

The process started I grabbed the image of a model holding the barbell behind his head and dropped the file into Photoshop. I then proceeded to saturate the image, intensify the shadows and lighten up the mid tones. After I was satisfied with the way the image looked I then placed a gradient map using the colors black and transparent, and what this technique does is further intensify the shadows without affecting the highlights and only affecting the mid tones slightly. Pleased with the outcome i then posterized the image using only four colors. Explaining it is very fast but the entire process took about an hour to execute.

While running photoshop I opened up illustrator and dragged the photoshop file into the illustrator program. I then proceeded to trace the shadows of the posterized image using the pen tool. This process alone, you won’t believe, took a day and a half. The following step was adding the shadow spread. To explain what this looks like , they are the triangle lines at the end of the shadow. The mid tones were next for pen tool process and it was similar to the shadowing of the illustration, but instead of a black color I chose a tint of pink.

I chose impact as the font family because of it’s strength and masculinity. I kerned them closer because when you think of someone thats fit you think of “tight”, “in shape”, and I wanted to show that through the type. All and all working from home is difficult because theirs a lot of motivation at work, but I was pleased with the outcome and the poster in its entirety took me about 16 hours.

This weeks internship consisted of a continuation of last weeks project. I kept researching the memes and executed three ideas for Al to look at . We looked at all the ideas Id execute and Al said to give him some more poster ideas . I told him I wanted to try and execute an illustration with the images kind of resembling Russian constructivism . I wanted the poster to be strong so I transferred the image into photoshop and created a duplicate of the image , not to touch the original. The copy was the. Made into a black and white image, not permanently but with a filter so I don’t touch the original color . Then the copy image was give. A gradient map overlay with a black and clear color tint . What this did was create really strong black and whites . Once this was achieved and i was happy with the results i posterized and threshold the image . I then only made the image have three solid colors to compose the original and then transferred it over to adobe illustrator. I used the pen tool to trace over the shadows in black and created lines pointing to the right to give it a sleek appearance. Then I traced over the mid tones and gave it a slightly off white fill. I left the highlights completely blank . I haven’t done anything with typography yet because I’m still researching strong typography but I’m playing around with the fonts Impact and Stencil font.

Heres an example of the work I finished and then direction I wanted to take the poster:

This weeks internship was rather brief , I only went in for about four hours. Usually i’d finish eight hours on Wednesday and Thursday. I walked in and set up my laptop and sketch book. I was greeted by Richie, an illustrator who was also at the internship site with me . He had already started on the project Al had assigned him. Al called me to the back office and handed me the next assignment . It was a poster campaign for the fitness center at the school. The images he gave me were from the photoshoot we took about a week ago. His idea were for the images to be placed on a 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper with a sort of meme theme to it. Now this wasn’t the actual size of the poster, but for preflight purposes I created the concept on 8.5 x 11.

In case you didn’t know what a meme was, heres en example:

By the time I had finished researching good memes, which was a pretty entertaining task, it was time for me to head out for the day.

Coming in to the internship I was met with a brief, “hello”. I was met by Al by the door and he asked me to walk to his office . He asked for the files to preflight the invitation then preceded to tell me that we needed a second rendering of the invitation. No problem ! I could do it . Al already had some sketches of how the second invitation should look so my duties were just to render it . The only problem with initializing this second project was the laptop I was using . Extremely slow and counter productive . I made the best of the situation and had the back and front of the invitation completed in about fifteen minutes .
Next Al walked up and told me we we were headed back to namm for another photoshoot . Which was neat because photoshoots make time fly by ! We ended up in the dentistry department of the Pearl building . We started setting up right away , but Al noticed that he was missing a piece of equipment I knew to be valuable to the shoot. The reflector was back at the studio. I offered right away to head there and pick it up for him.
I got there and back in about ten , twelve minutes. Al was already done setting up and all he was doing now was looking at the surroundings and setting up the right shot . We were shooting the chair of the department first . Like many of the chairs she was also nervous which is a little funny , it just reminded me that we’re all just people and even high titled personnel get nervous from time to time .
The shoot with her took about an hour , it felt a lot shorter , but she was extremely pleasant and photogenic. The set up was very simple, the set up was one a photographer would set up for a portrait shot. We had a Fill light , a snoot light and the reflector to redirect light as a third source . The pictures came out amazing and she loved them.
Afterwards we went into the laboratory were there were at least thirty stations all like the ones you would see at an actual dentist office. We had one of the students get fully dressed in the outfit she would be wearing if she was in the field . Then we asked one of the professors to sit down in the chair as a patient. This shoot took about two hours. And the set up was fairly simple as well . We had the light from the camera which had a sensor attached so the light can be flashed not from the camera itself but from the flash I was holding about 3 feet away. My flash had a small reflector attached to the back of it so it can act as a smaller source of fill light . Once the shoot was done which again was about two hours later we ended up walking back to the studio where I finished the rest of my day there working on the invitation, printing , and cutting it with an exacto-knife.

This week coming into the internship site was an interesting one, I was asked to come in on a day I would otherwise not be interning. When I get to the site Al was already gone. The receptionist greets me and confirms what I already knew. She says, “Al told me to tell you to head to the Namm building”. So without hesitation I drop my bag and head on down. Getting there I wasn’t to sure what to expect the last couple of shoots were at the radiology lab at city tech. This one shoot was at the new workout room they have by the cafeteria, it was nothing like the other photo shoot Al’s conducted. He’s always professional but the atmosphere at this photo shoot was a bit more laid back. Everyone was laughing and music is playing in the background. It was all around a neat experience.

To explain how the shoot went, Al asked the students to stand at a predetermined spot he had marked ion the floor. He the asked the students to face 45 degrees from the torso up and keep the lower half facing straight. To many, even the students, this posture feels extremely uncomfortable. When you see the outcome you understand that sometimes the most uncomfortable position give any artist the best results.

The set up was as follows, excuse me I still haven’t learned the names of all the camera lighting equipment. Theres a fill light right in front of the model. and then theres the snoot lighting right behind the model pointing at his head. The reason being, the fill light obviously gives the model lighting in the face and body and  the snoot lighting adds a rim of light behind the model. My job in this shoot was to grab the reflective circle and stand next to the model opposite the fill light. What this giant, lightweight contraption does, is reflect the light from the fill light on the left of the model, to the right side of the models face. The final being light being positioned on both sides of the models face with the light only coming from one source.

The entire project took about two hours, which I loved. It just makes the day go a lot faster. We packed up and headed back to the studio, where Al asked me to finish the remainder of the event and print it out. Luckily I had done it the night before. Al then asked me to do A 17′  cutout saying #CITYTECHNEWS. After the corporate school colors were picked I completed the project using the type font, Trade Gothic Condensed Oblique, and went to go show it to Al, but he was gone for the day on another project.

This week coming in to my internship i was greeted by Al. I didn’t even have time to take off my jacket before we were out the door on this weeks project. Like the week prior we had a second photoshoot at the same location , Namm building 5th floor the radiology department . This time not with the students but with the chairman for the department . Her name escapes me right now but she was a very sweet and intelligent lady and very photogenic at that. Al tasked me with setting up the lighting equipment and unlike last weeks shoot i breezed through this time . The lighting equipment was set up in less then 5 minutes . Afterwards Al asked me to grab the snoot i described last week , which is basically a long tunnel material you wrap around the light to direct it towards the model direction. When in the snoot form it forms a halo behind the model . We were in her office and it seemed to fly by but we were in there for about an hour . Always tells his models , ” I’m not going to tell you to smile, but I want you to think of something funny.” They always end up smiling naturally . The model thought the pictures didn’t come out that well but al and myself knew they came out Amazing .
After the shoot in her office was done we ended up going to one of the classrooms to take picture in a secluded room with the radiology machine . Same room we photographed all the female students last week . This time al instructed me to open the snoot to have the light bounce around the room. Al also instructed to have a blue filter added to the flash to give it a medical look . All and all the if the pictures in the office looked amazing. The pictures in this small room came out fantastic. The pictures looked like they could have been in an ad . All and all again time flew by but When we looked at our watches , we’d spend 2 hours in total doing the shoot . Al and i packed everything up and told the chairman for the department that we’d be back tomorrow,Thursday, for the photoshoot featuring the male students for the department .
We get back to the studio and i immediately take out my laptop and get to finishing the events in invitation for Al . We print it out and make som corrections . Al also asks me to add an additional leaf to the inside bottom section of the invitation. The reason , there is one more company we need to feature . We also needed to change the inside typography from Trade Gothic to ITC franklin Gothic . Just to give it a little variation and hierarchy. The green that i was originally using was not the pantone color Al and myself originally picked out, so it had to be picked out . The last thing Al noticed was that the final was to big by about an inch on the length and the width. He also realized that it was done in illustrator. Now officially there is nothing wrong with preflight in illustrator but to really get a crisp preflight underway the final should really be produced in Indesign. Which wasn’t. problem for me .
The following day I call Al early and ask if he wants m to come in or go ahead and start working from home . Al is not ok with me working from home but he’s not against it either .Plus we were expecting to get at least 8″ of snow . Al gave me the green light , so i went ahead and finished the final at home . Which ended up being 100% times easier then Working from my laptop. Once the file was transferred over to indesign i saved it as a pdf with all the color bar and trim marks and s sent him a screenshot . We were finally in the final steps of production

This week coming in for internship was an interesting one. I knew all the work for the invitation was done the weekend prior. I walked in and at this point the receptionists already know me so they greet me with a warm , “good morning.” They’re getting a lot more comfortable around me. I have to admit, it’s a nice feeling. I walk straight to the desk Al assigned to me and quickly take out my laptop and start working. Even though I previously said a lot of the work was done over the weekend , Al can always spot something that can be improved, for design purposes and overall functionality. In this case i’d miss a very crucial otherwise unnoticeable mistake, one of the title lines were the type, “trade gothic- regular” and had to be, “trade gothic- bold”, but thats what preflights are for.

After the typographical errors were corrected, very minimal i might add, Al requested the files for the invitation , but not before I added one more photoshopped element to the inside of the invitation. Just to explain a little more what it was I did on the inside of the invitation, Al and I had discussed a plant growing from the bottom of the page with multiple extensions with leaves at the end of stems to add the company names to the leaves. We were having a tough time with the idea of it being illustrated or photoshopped. I took initiative told Al to give me about 30 minutes and I’ll come back and show him what I’ve got. Long story short I went with the photoshopped version, I have to admit i was shocked at how well it printed. Al loved it because it’s the version we’re using.

By now its about 12:30pm and Al walks up to me and says,” we’re heading out.”. At 1 pm I pack up my things and put it in his office. we head out with a ton of photography equipment. Now that I think about it, its pretty amazing two people carried all that, regardless Al is very organized. The photo shoot was taking place right in school in the dental office. I can’t give you specifics because the truth is I don’t ask questions, I just do , if that makes sense. I didn’t really know what it was for, or maybe I forgot. Regardless Al hands me a lighting equipment to put together. The purpose for it was to obviously light the room but we were taking portrait shots, so it made sense as to why it was there. he handed me lighting equipment which i actually do remember the name for , it was a “snout”. If i had to compare it to something it looked like your a sniper but with a light. My job with the “snout” was to aim the light trajectory right at the models face. All together there were 5 models, all women, all very nervous. But unbiased they all looked very beautiful. We left the shoot with a predetermined appointment for the following Thursday.

Leaving the office for the day Al leaves me a few final words for the following week. He says I’ll be working with another intern animating the plant I photoshopped. Im excited for the weeks to come honestly. Every week is something new!