Amdocs

Here is a short video I animated for Amdocs while interning at Render this summer.

Another One Down

Design internship number 3 is officially complete. Almost two months at Render in which I animated a commercial for Amdocs, made a power point template for Oridion, edited a video for Itizu and worked on Render's own soon to be released new website. I worked insane hours, learned a lot and generally had a good time. For a while there I had almost given up the idea of a large agency (the really bad billboards they have in this country were part of that as well), but now that it is all over I am back to thinking that for me at least a bigger company is better.

In other design related news, it turns out one can study design management here in Israel. Bezalel's masters of industrial design program has a design management stream. Here's hoping they won't reject me again, because after visiting their general MFA end of the year exhibit my belief in design's supremacy over art was reaffirmed. It was not a very good exhibit. As it stands Mdes in design management is plan A, film and television (at TAU) is plan B and a job would be plan C. Then again I could always marry rich...

Also, actually I can't think of much else to write. I guess there is only so much to say about my life in regards to design when I am not actually designing anything.

Waiting for this post to finish Rendering

Ok, so maybe I am not as good a blogger as I thought. I have been working at Render here in Tel Aviv for just over two weeks now. I have improved my photoshop skills by about 100% and animated a commercial for amdocs using my new found After Effects skills. Render is a great place to work- tiny studio made up of three women (Yael, Hofit and Karin) and two dogs (a lab named Uma and a mutt named Loco). Located in the Florentine area of Tel Aviv they moved into this studio about a week before I showed up. As nice as the studio is that is how sketchy the neighborhood is. I am very close to the central bus station and anyone who knows Tel Aviv will know what that means. Render does great work and already in two weeks I have learned so much. One thing I have come to notice though is every studio is only as technologically advanced as the year the principal designers graduated. At 52 Pick-Up they still used Quark, here they like Freehand and Photoshop CS. I wonder if I will be stuck using CS3 forever...?
In other Tel Aviv design news, in my internship application binge I applied to intern at Gitam BBDO (the Tel Aviv branch of BBDO) when I got they had done a massive ad campaign for one of the major banks here in conjunction with Israel's 60th anniversary. It was horrible! I guess being one of the biggest agencys in the world doesn't mean you are the best. Maybe I should rethink my desire to work at a huge agency- maybe it is just that particular one. Maybe, I shouldn't worry about this now and instead find myself a MFA program in this country so I don't have to worry about this for a long time...

I'm Back!

So, I decided to stick with the blogging at least for now. Being that I am out of school for summer and don't have all my YSDN friends to talk design with I will need it more than ever. I guess I do have all my co-workers at the studio I am interning at, 52 Pick-Up Inc., but they are all very print oriented and this blog is all about motion graphics.

GCI is a massive PR agency that is part of the WPP group. WPP includes companies such as Y&R Olgivy and Mather and many other amazing communications companies. I love the motion graphic sequence on GCI's website! It is so cool! Check it out.

Course Reflection

In general I really liked Time Based Comm. I feel like in third and fourth year there are two kinds of courses. The courses that just kind of repeat what you have learned in first and second year class, but have more sophisticated projects, or the kind that completely deviate from everything you have done before and really widen you visual communications horizons. This was definitely one of those courses. I have always really enjoyed working with video (I am considering doing an MFA in film) so learning Final Cut, After Effects and DVD studio was really fun. In addition so many design studios do motion graphics in addition to just print and web work so learning all of this stuff really gives you a leg up in the industry. I still have a lot to learn when it comes to creating motion graphics, but this class gave me a great start. The only thing I regret is never actually having worked with video in the course- next time.

Surprisingly, I actually enjoyed keeping the blog. It made it really easy to share my work with other people in the class and out, plus I am always talking about design and most people I talk to don't really care what I have to say. This whole blog thing didn't exactly shut me up, but it did give a place to write about what I am interested in without annoying anyone. I can actually see myself continuing with this blog. I mean where else am I going to get to talk about 3 months worth of design interning work?

Motion graphics and design in general. There is a lot of amazing stuff out there, but being that motion graphics are so closely linked with technology I can only see it as a growing field. It is also interesting to be able to watch TV of movies and be more conscience of the work that went into what I am watching. It is really exciting to think that something I am involved with has really permeated pretty much every level of society. Go design!

Have a great summer!

Project 3- storyboards and other important things like that

As mentioned in a previous post, I decided to make my DVD menu Tetris themed. Here you can find the basic structure of the menu and storyboards/screen shots of the project.

Everything Comes Together

Don't you just love it when everything comes together so nicely in the end? This week I finally managed to secure an internship for May and June in Tel Aviv- yeay! They are a studio called Render that does pretty much everything: print, web, video and animation. One thing I really like about their video work is how they layer different videos and animations together in a really interesting way.
One of their featured videos was for a company called called Magink. Magink display technologies, Inc. is the world's first developer and provider of full color digital ink displays. While I really liked the video itself and how it went back and forth between hightech 3D animation and pencil like sketchy animation I was even more interested in the content of the video. In infoarch back in the fall my partner Adrienne and I created a system called the digital graffiti project. It would have been really cool to see this video in the fall and maybe it would have influenced the direction of our project. It was also interesting to see how in the video the product is featured in various urban environments and one of the points of our project was to look at how these kinds of technologies work in a suburban environment.
If that doesn't wrap things up nicely what does?