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| Well, it looks like a new year is upon us. Some view it as a chance to renew yourself, a second chance you might say. 2007 is more a blur to me because there really wasn’t a dominate action or event that happen. The year felt like it slipped away. Granted 2007 was an opening of my ideals, a major growth in my computer system, my openness to MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, Webshots, Flickr and blogging, but the best accidental surprise was discovering and listening to Podcasts on iTunes. So I look at 2008 as in getting things done, my projects that is. Which I can see turning into something else soon after. For my friends that have been affected by the writer’s strike I hope you can find a new job. Let’s hope the writers and producers settle this strike thing quickly in the new year, and that SAG & DGA don’t draw out the strike pass June 2008 – for this surely will affect production, post production and visual effect companies. |
Happy New Year 2008 0
Projects for 2008 0
| Okay, with so many projects in my head. I thought I would try and organize them, break them down into media categories. So it will be easier to get these projects done. Some of these projects could be really cool – if I would just do them! So I am setting a goal to get these projects done in 2008 as I update on them. | ||
| Title or concept | Media | |
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Beach destroyed or Futuristic beach Image | matte painting/Photoshop |
| concept idea: always wanted to try my hand at matte painting especially after watching the works of Ryan Church, Dylan Cole, Eric Hanson, & Stephan Martinier at the Gnomon Workshop live weekend event. Wow, these guys are good! Why the beach – because I live right by the beach – why not keep that theme . | ||
| (initial idea – Nov 2005) | ||
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Bride from Hell | sculpture (type of Clay) |
| concept idea: to sculpt a creature in a wedding dress. To show the true colors of a typical bridezilla really should look like. | ||
| (initial idea – Jan 2006) | ||
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Water Creature | sculpture (type of Clay) |
| concept idea: some kind of creature that I can adapt to my silly water fountain thing. | ||
| (initial idea – Feb 2006) | ||
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Ariel shot of LA | Shake composite |
| concept idea: I found some footage of an ariel shot moving over downtown LA on the Gnomon server while in class. Thought I would take out the building signs or replace some, and change the time of date for my compositor reel. | ||
| (initial idea – Nov 2006) | ||
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Princess March | Drawing/Photoshop |
| concept idea: vision I saw in a dream like state. Now I just need to draw it out, since I haven’t pick up a pencil in so long I thought I would sketch it out then ink it. Followed by scanning it into the computer to colorize it. Especially after seeing the art of Feng Zhu, Dave Dorman, Ian McCaig, Steven Stahlberg & Brom first hand at the Gnomon Workshop live weekend events. Which brought a ton admiration for these artist. They make it look so easy. So let’s see if I can brush off some rusty talent to get this project done. Besides I thought maybe adding a little fantasy art to my collection would be fun. |
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| (initial idea – Jan 2007) | ||
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Safari Girl (with tiger) | sculpture (type of Clay) |
| concept idea: idea came from working on Megan’s Big Cat Foundation calendar | ||
| (initial idea – Jan 2007) | ||
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Comic Life of Erotica or HIN | video (after effects composite) |
| concept idea: I found this program called Comic life and thought how cool would it be to place some still shot with video in a comic book fashion | ||
| (initial idea – April 2006) | ||
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a Day at the Beach | video/ Final Cut Pro & Motion compositing |
| concept idea: a video that shows a typical day of my life during the summer | ||
| (initial idea – Aug 2007) | ||
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Larson Creations company ID trailer | video/ After Effects composite |
| concept idea: I need some kind of bumper to end or start my personal videos | ||
| (initial idea – Nov 2007) | ||
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Sign on bus moving (tracking | Shake composite |
| concept idea: a simple compositing training for tracking objects and something for my compositing reel | ||
| (initial idea – Sept 2007) | ||
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Venice Drum circle | video editing Final Cut Pro |
| concept idea: I have a tone of drum circle footage | ||
| (initial idea – Sept 2007) | ||
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Pin-up Fantasy Girls | advanced Photoshop manipulated |
| concept idea: I haven’t really pushed my Photoshop talent in the last couple years. I could use some of the pictures I took at HIN or LA Erotica for this, and it could give me a chance to try new things out – a kind of trail and error process, but could yield some interesting images | ||
| (initial idea – Nov 2007) | ||
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Old Photography ‘art source’ Girls Revised | Photoshop |
| concept idea: I have all these images I took as a kid for reference source material for my art projects. Thought it might be fun to revisit them in the 21st century with my new found computer skills and see if I could yield some interesting images. | ||
| (initial idea – Nov 2007) | ||
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Digital Infrared | Photoshop |
| concept idea: taking some of my digital camera images and manipulating them so they look like they were from infrared film. | ||
| (initial idea Dec 2007) | ||
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Animal Rescue Video | video/ Final Cut Pro & Motion compositing |
| concept idea: taking some of the footage I took while volunteering in the animal rescue community, and creating a video to show what is being done. | ||
| (initial idea Sept 2005) | ||
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True Larson Stories | video/ Final Cut Pro & Motion compositing |
| concept idea: a large undertaking of organizing all my home video footage and putting together a biography of my life. Edit the footage and place a voice over during the entire show. | ||
| (initial idea Sometime in 2002) | ||
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HDR Photography | Photoshop |
| concept idea: I heard about HDR a couple of years ago, but haven’t taken the time to create some pieces. | ||
| (initial idea Sometime in 2006) | ||
Back to the Drawing Board 0
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Is it me or does every year seem to go by faster as you get older? Late 2005 I decided to move on with my career. I took a couple of classes in 2006 which were great – I was learning and getting stuff done. Then late 2006 I was bought out to stay on with a company I had been with, till 2008. I planned out stuff for me to do and learn during that ‘year’. Even wrote it out and had it hanging up by my door so I would have to look at it each day. Well, I looked at it today, and I only did ONE thing on that list – I had an entire year to do these things. What a bone head I am… But instead of getting quite mad and upset at myself, which I usually do. I thought, maybe I need to plan out my projects better. |
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Now that next year’s episodic television is pretty much gone because of the writer’s strike. Let’s assign projects per days. Photoshop Monday: This always sounds better on paper — or text on a screen, in this case. Though if I make it so I have to report to this blog, maybe — maybeee, I can make up a GTD (getting things done) for myself. Well, a new year is approaching and it’s a better time as any to start something new. I just have to remember that I have to take summer off this coming year. It’s a part of me and because I live right on the beach. Summer vacation is going to happen whether I want it or not, as the summer weather calls me to the beach each morning. |
Building My Site 0
| Well, it looks like my website is finally rounding up. Of course it is ‘something‘ that is never finished, but I did finally finish up the foundation where I can update my material and enter my blog stuff. If you have been following this whole ordeal you know it was the code that tripped me up. So I thought I would explain how I designed the site if anyone is interested. |
| First up I am not a ‘web 2.0′ designer. I learned html the old fashion way over 10 years ago and am not a programer/code writer. But if I mess code I can figure out what it is doing. |
| Over all design: I wanted something that showed off my artist side, but also wanted it to be dynamic. A static table based website seemed out of date, and I wanted more. Which meant creating a site with CSS. I don’t know CSS, so I went looking for a design on the web that appealed to me. |
| I had recently installed the WordPress blogging software on my site and went looking through there free templates. I found a designer named miloIIIIVII that really appealed to me, but it needed some major code adjusting to make it look more to what I wanted. |
| The template I found was this: |
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| But I didn’t like it as my blog page, I know I’m picky, anyway I found this template for that: |
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| So now my main page needed serious re-construction and the blog need some adjusting. Then I found a program that was a life saver for someone that doesn’t understand CSS that well — CSSedit, it has a simple interface that makes it so simple to edit CSS code, and is affordable. |
| in no time I figured a way to make my site look the way I wanted it to. Except the navigation bar has been driving me crazy for the PC Internet Explore side. |
| Next I wanted a gallery that could showcase my work. I installed Copper-Mine Gallery, but it looked to goofy. I then watched Steve Jobs in a promo for the new iWeb 08. That’s cool I thought, but it is sooooo hard to manipulate the code – in fact it is almost impossible if you want that ‘skimming‘ feature. So I decided to get an .mac account and built the gallery site there. I noticed now with iWeb 08 you can set your own domain address. So I pickup www.larsoncreationsgallery.com to fit more in with my personal site. |
| I purchased the domain through GoDaddy and found this article that gives you step by step instructions on how to point an iWeb site to your domain. I was finally up and running. Keeping the iWeb site on the .mac account makes it very easy to update, and having WordPress for my blogging software is very robust and easy to use – I am finally happy with the foundation I set for my site, and it only took me a year to do it. hahaha |
Frustration At Work 0
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Examples of why I get so frustrated at work: I would think most office computer systems have a central server. A computer with a lot of hard drive space to hold all the files and information for all the work stations. Which can be quite complex. |
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| Well, we got a kiosk ordering station back in August where it has it’s own server, and the employees were trained that to process the kiosk order they had to this server to do so.Today I walk in and one of the employees says to me that the kiosk says it can not connect to the server. I asked him if the server was on. He looked all puzzled and said that the printer (that is connected to the server) was not on. Sorry but to me that is like, well, if your car wouldn’t turn over in the morning and you saying ‘this tire is flat, could that cause the engine not to turn over?’ Of course I walked over and hit the power button to the server to start up and walked away. |
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| For the holidays we had these paper folded cards that I made a big display of the three types of paper we printed on. An HP glossy white card stock, an 80lb brilliant white stock and a sort of metallic cream stock. One of the customer service employees brings a metallic cream stock test print card to me and asks ‘do we have these types of cards in plain white?’, I walked him over to the 30″ x 40″ display that he was just by, and he goes ‘Oh, I was wondering what that was.’ — I just had to walk away. |
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| Now that winter is upon us, I began growing my beard (which I call my face warmer) back at the end of October. With a full two month growth on my entire face. I had one employee most recently say ‘Hey, I just realized you are growing a beard.’ I had to reply ‘Nothing gets pass you.’ |
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| On a Mac by simply pressing the command – F buttons is the shortcut to the ‘Find’ feature, after that you do have to select which drive or server you want to select. But after that it’s simply a matter of typing in the last name or order number of a client to see if it is on our server. I have tried over and over to train this – yet everyday some employee has to stop me from working to ask if an order is on the server. |
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| Our new HP kiosk systems we recently got do album book and calendars. Also a service of ours is that if a clients has a print they want flatbed scanned, we can scan it up to 5″x 7″, 8″x 10″ or 12″x 17″ depending on how large they want to print it after the scan is complete. Again one of the customer service employees pulls me away from work and my desk to show me that he has these 50some prints that need to be scanned so that he can create a calendar. After he shows me all this he asks ‘how should I scan them in?’ I look at him like you are kidding right, then ask him how big our they going to be printed out on the calendar. He replies ‘no more than 5″x 7″ . I then ask him ‘…these will be flatbed scans right?’ he replies ‘well, yes’ — As I turned away upset that I just wasted all this time with them I say ‘You answered your own question’ as I walked back to my computer station. |
Christmas Story 0
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| Okay there is one thing I enjoy about Christmas. It’s the ‘Christmas Story‘ marathon they play on TBS. |
Xmas Eve 0
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I had to go to work today, though we only had a half day and I ended up leaving around 1:30pm. Stopped over at Blick Art Supplies to pick up an inking pen for a project of mine. then went home. It was christmas eve so I decided to treat myself to lunch and went over to Sidewalk cafe. it was busy when I got there and a couple beers and a sandwich. Sidewalk was closing early, so I decide to wander off and walked over to Nikki’s for happy hour with there upside down xmas trees. |
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| I sat in front of Cat, a half naked surfer girl, that was easy on the eyes, Maybe it was the owner’s girlfriend as I am still wondering why there is a huge half naked girl photo behind the bar. | |
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| Since it was happy hour I got a tastey appetizer, some kind of shrimp and scallops cocktail. I watched a John Brown sculpting training video on my iPhone as I slowly got drunk… | |
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| then came home in the early afternoon and pasted out! | |
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Winter is Here 0
Venice-Holidays01.jpg, originally uploaded by LarsonCreations.
Well, looks like winter is here as today is the winter solstice and the shortest day of the year as the sun’s position in the sky is at it’s greatest angular distance to the northern hemisphere. In other words, I snapped this shot at 4:30pm in the afternoon at Venice Beach.
Doing Rudolph 0
Okay I am seriously NOT a Ashton Kutcher fan at all! He has always seemed like a goofy, dorky, asinine blockhead to me, but this dude owns two successful restaurants and his production company signed a deal with CBS this summer, so maybe this guy isn’t dumb. Plus he’s also banging Demi Moore. Even though she’s ancient, she looks pretty good as the slutty Rudolph in this video – which made me chuckle a little bit.
Holidays in Hollywood 0
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| The Holidays in Hollywood. The craziness slowed down today, so I took a walk over to Hollywood Blvd to see how it dressses up for the holidays. Oh, and it seems my bonus wasn’t a banana after all. My bosses gave us employees a real nice breakfast and lunch, to follow up with gifts and a bonus check that was appreciated. |
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