For this assignment I thought the most fitting choice for a blog to showcase would be the first blog I ever remember reading, blazersedge.com. Back when it was created it was just an independent blog started by a couple of Portland Trail Blazer fans. It lead to a long running blog that is linked up with the prominent sports blogging site sbnation.com. Ben Golliver who was one of the original writers for the blog ended up getting hired by sports illustrated which is every sports writers dream.

My dad is a sports writer, and I remember when this blog first came out he discounted the credibility of blogs. As time has gone on he has been forced to accept blogs based off of the success of them. Especially with blazersedge.com. It is the official blog linked with the team now. I think that they have made a lot of progress since the blog has started.

I do think at times in the past the writing has been a little rushed, but for what it is I think they have done a good job at getting material out quickly for the fans to respond to. A huge part of blogs is the ability for the reader to make comments and observations quickly about the reading . With sports timing is very important, and the quicker you can get your audience the info the better. The tricky part is still giving them legitimate info and not trying to rush things.

Blazersedge I feel is a great example of something that did not happen over the night. They did not have any credibility when they started and they created it with just by giving people a platform to talk about the Blazers on. I am a huge sports fan myself and hope someday to start my own podcast, so they way they are pioneers for blogging in Portland sports has inspired me.

By Drew Eggers

Word Count: 320

blazersedge.com

http://www.blazersedge.com

THE BOOM BOX

http://theboombox.com/

The BoomBox.com is a blog site keeping you up to date with current Hip-Hop and R&B news. From the latest video’s to the hottest fashion, the information keeps uploading. You’ll never fall behind  on the hottest artist and what there’re up to. If you are wanting to know whats new for your favorite hip-hop song, look no further. It can be a strong resource when trying to find new inspiration for songs. With a simple white background and a few places to click, this site is simple to navigate and well made. With links that bring you to credible sources, I feel confident when coming to this site for accurate news. Whether you want to know about your favorite artists next video shoot, or what they are wearing you can find it on the boombox.com If you need a little fun for the day be sure to click on the list tab. Here you can find fun lists of things for example, top ten things to do while listening to your favorite artist. If you consider yourself a fan of Hip-Hop or R&B, be sure to keep the theboombox.com in your mind when looking for blogs. You can be sure when using this site that the information will be fun and informative.

Craig Jones Wildlife Photography

http://www.craigjoneswildlifephotography.co.uk/blog/

After searching the wonderful world-wide web for a professional blog that seemed to fit my interests. I end up finding “Craig Jones Wildlife Photography” blog that had amazing photos of wildlife ranging from small birds up to a talented whale doing a back flip out of the water.

From what I can tell the site looks professionally done, instead of a WordPress like website. I don’t know if there are other websites that can make it look professional as Craig’s blog does.

The quality from Craig’s blog is excellent because, he talk about his time going into the jungle to search for wildlife in their natural environment. Some of the wonderful pictures he took of wildlife were that of the Bengal Tiger. He went to “Ranthambhore National Park” and got some amazing shots of Monkeys, Birds, Deer, and other wildlife.

Craig went to the zoo on his trip and shot pictures of wildlife in a unhappy unnatural environment, some of the shots were of birds that had their feathers falling out due to stress. Others were of the caged tigers, which looked in pain and uncomfortable. As he was taking the picture from “behind the scenes” he had to hold himself back because he felt bad for the mistreatment of the animals and he got those pain and misery in the tigers eyes via the pictures.

As I read and saw more pictures from Craig’s blog, I hope that when I start to get in the same area Craig was in I won’t have to experience the same pain as he did.

After some searching and a little frustration, I finally came across a site that caught my eye and seemed promising called The [DIY] Musician. Since my area of interest is audio and I would like to someday make soundtracks for independent films this site seemed like a great place to get some information. Here is the link: http://diymusician.cdbaby.com/2012/05/how-to-get-your-music-placed-in-film-and-tv/

Basically, the site is a do-it-yourself guide on how to submit your music so it can get placed into film, tv, or video. The layout is nicely designed and the site is easy to navigate. There are tabs for musician blogs, podcasts, and music discovery podcasts; you can also sign up with CD Baby to help get your music exposed on a global level. I think the site is produced well. It has resources on how to contact music supervisors, find out what projects are in production, and musician advice, among an abundance of other information.

The video on the the homepage with Joe Solo is a little cheesy but it has some valuable information. For example, Joe S gives tips on the importance of targeting projects that need the music you create by doing research and pitching only material that is suited to the story or genre of the film. Also, he talks about the importance of finding out who the music supervisor for a film is and tells you how to do it. Another tip I found to be valuable in the video is to always make sure you send in a quality master of your music, never a demo.

The great thing about doing this project was finding a site that I didn’t know existed. I know I’m only scratching the surface of the site but I will be doing more digging and hopefully submit some music too.

Initially I had a hard time finding a blog site that I found credible, useful, and most importantly, not riddled with advertisement fodder.  After quite a bit of hopping around, I finally found a site that was extremely visually appealing, well organized, easy to navigate, and chock full of great information.  My chosen site represents the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is located at http://www.walkerart.org/.

The Walker Art Center is an Institution of Education and exhibits all different forms of art ranging from music, dance, theater, film, paintings, sculptures, photography, and others.  My specific area of interest and focus for my search was blogs about film and directing.  I found the related information I sought more specifically at http://blogs.walkerart.org/filmvideo/.

What a beautiful website!  The homepage launched a really awesome video when I landed on it and all of the different buttons that link you to blogs and articles have animations and pictures.  I tried my best to detach from my love of shiny things and approach this website with some scrutiny but it was very difficult.  There is just so much cool stuff to read and learn about.  The Walker Center constantly has events going on as the calendar on the website shows.  The film blog has some great posts on it, all with attached images and video.  Some posts were very brief blips about a new independent film being shown, and others were extensive college level conversations discussing a films deeper meanings and complex natures (whatever I just said).  All of the blog authors are noted and most of their names are direct links to Bio’s on each of them.  The websites entire blog section is very expansive and well organized (as shown in the image above).  Some blogs have direct titles that are self explanatory of the content, while others have titles that are not immediately recognizable without giving some thought or clicking and exploring.  I believe the website itself to be an excellent resource and source of inspiration as well, however some exceptional resources worth noting are it’s library database link, thousands of high quality images, and plethora of historical art information.

This Week’s Topic:  Blog Search 2015.  Another great assignment for my Intro to Media Arts class. This week we’ve been asked to find a professional blog and comment on it.  Seems like a pretty straightforward task, right?  Not so fast.  There are a large number of not-so-great blogs out there.  Thankfully, I found one of the elusive good ones for my area of focus.

One area of media that I’m very interested in is voice-over.  I’d really like to narrate audiobooks and provide voice-over narration for documentary films.  The blog I found most interesting and most useful for this goal is Vox Daily, found at: http://blogs.voices.com/voxdaily.

There are a few things I like about this blog.

1.  I like the way the blog is set-up.  It’s a combination of industry professional interviews, industry news, and thoughts on the industry (for example, is honey good for your throat before performing?).  With the opportunity for readers to post comments to the individual blog entries, you get a very nice cross-section of comments from those who have been in the industry for some time and those, like me, who are just starting out.

2.  Vox Daily has a Resources tab that I found very useful.  There are a number of sections available and the two I found most helpful are Podcasts (to which I’ll be subscribing via iTune) and Tools (which includes libraries for free music and sound effects).

3.  How easy the site is to navigate in.  There is no undue hunting around to find the information I’m looking for because they’ve set-up a Browse This Blog by Topic section, so I could quickly get to blog entries about Audiobooks and Narration.

I’m glad I found this site.  I know I’ll be coming back often and will learn something new that will continue to spark my interest in this field.

Indie Tips

The blog Indie Tips is exactly what you think, tips for indie film makers. I had no idea about this site until I searched “cinematography blogs” and found a article with “the top 10 film sites you should visit every day”. Now that I found Indie Tips, I honestly probably will visit the site everyday. Indie sites has everything you could think of, it has tips on directing, editing, writing and DSLR cameras with example from large production movies you may love or hate. Not only is there tips on producing but they have reviews on trending movies just released and a page called “Film Talk” where they talk about history, behind the scenes facts, rumors, rants and other random articles like “Lord of the Rings explained in four minutes” that are well worth the read.

The site does a very good job of categorizing their different topics which is very helpful if your not good with navigating a website or if your not familiar with cinematography terms. The site is very clean and simply laid out which also makes it easier to navigate. at the bottom of each page is has a “About the author” post, which is a brief overview of who wrote the article. Below the “About the Author”post they have a “You may also like” section showing different articles that you may be interested in. The site looks fairly new because in all of the different categories there aren’t that many posts. For example when you click on the directing tap a drop down menu appears with “Acting” and “Producing”. The acting page only has one post, and the producing page only has three. I know I said I would probably be on there everyday, but it wont be more than one or two videos a day before I have watched them all.

Overall this is a great site with great information.

The Iron Clown Studios
http://ironclownstudios.tumblr.com/

I am so very honored to say that I am friends with this magnificent artist! Illustrator, designer, concepts – Danny Hirajeta does it all. He’s worked on album covers for bands (CD artwork/album books), made his own tarot card decks, journal covers, comics, and has been selling his own prints for as long as I can remember.

His site is simple & basic. It’s beautifully framed by some of his work and his logo and studio name stand clear and visible for you to see when you first enter the site. Tumblr is his blog server of choice, though I also happen to know he has a Facebook page as well. Unfortunately the only way to find this out is if you google it, as the goober doesn’t have any external links and/or contact information for people who are interested. I would say that is a huge benefit lost for him — many people who look at it might want to get in touch with him and not know how, especially if they don’t have a Tumblr on their own.

Despite the lack of artist information on there I’d say there are several other informative qualities about his blog. It’s an excellent place to see examples of exquisite rules of design and color put into practice. His line work is gorgeous, his composition equally complimentary, and the shading beautifully done. It’s a great site to come see examples of professional design & illustration!

There isn’t much text involved but he does put little blog excerpts into every art post he makes. Sometimes they contain links or relevant information about the piece, but overall I wouldn’t say this is a life-story blog with lots of text. Instead it functions more like a portfolio where his blog is told in pictures and stories, and though it may not give you an insight into every personal thing he’s up to these days it always keeps you coming back wanting more! Eye candy. Beautiful, morbid eye candy. Who doesn’t want that, right?

Brand New

http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/#.VSxMZWa8AUs

The blog post that caught my eye and the post I was the moist interested in was:

Man Against Continent

The first image in this post is from that post.  How they created this (amazing) logo was very interesting.  In the post they talked about combining the images of Mark Beaumont and a map of Africa.  I thought it was extremely clever and blew my mind.  How they used negative and positive space is amazing.  My eye keeps being drawn back to the glasses on the logo.

The site covers brand identity and logo design mostly. The website for the blog itself I felt looks very clean and professional. The site is very well done.  It’s easy to read and easy to navigate (very user friendly). As you can see from the second image i provided shows exactly how clean and professional the site looks.  I think the color scheme provides a sense of professionalism (using black, grey, white, and a little red). They use red to draw your eye to important information through out the site, which gives the whole site a nice eye flow. The information seems very accurate and credible i saw a lot of the same topics and information on other sites also.

http://onanimation.com/

This is crazy after searching for an animation site for long while I find a great one, and guess what it was made by WordPress. On this site, made by Daniel, where he and a few others post different content. The content ranges from movie reviews, classic art style, simple drawing, and animations. I really enjoy going thought the blogs and watching and reading them. The content doesn’t look like it gets update every day, but the blogs are well made for what they are. A lot of the blogs are about big name companies and some indie companies.

Probably my favorite thing to do is to watch the videos. Most of the video revolves around animation. But they also throw some interesting videos here and there. I really like the content so I don’t just get stuck with just animations blogs. I also get behind the scenes and posts about new or old techniques are being used today. In short the content that they post changes so you don’t get board of them. The quality is a 9.5/10 and the variety of videos is a 9/10

I recently watched David Gibson-Evolve Animation+Game Development Reel it is about 11 minutes of how the game’s Evolve monster and character where made. It was so cool to the depth of all of the character made, from some geometric shape to full blown character.