Here is my final project. The song was written, performed, and recorded by me using Sony Acid Pro. Thank you for taking the time to view it.

Character Design: The making of a shrew

I wanted to document the design and process for sculpting a character for animation.

This process includes
Sketching
– Sillohuette sketches
– Thumbnail sketches
– Refined Sketches

Character details
Back story
– life
– job
– house
– real life inspiration
– scale & size

Sculpture
Armature
Bulk Clay
2nd clay layer
Details
– hands
– feet
– face
Redo/corrections
Texture testing
Final clay designs

Mold & Cast
Silicone
Plastic

Credits
Produced by Jessica Duff
Directed by Jessica Duff
Edited by Jessica Duff
Music by David Szesztay, Crowander – “Acoustic Romance”
Camera Jessica Duff
Assistant Camera Kathy Duff
Sculpter Jessica Duff
Sculpting Adviser Lee C. Imonen
Crew 1 Jonathan Duff
Crew 2 Kathy Duff
Screen Proofer Jonathan Duff

Special thanks to my family for putting up with the mess and for all the tea and assistance.

I had a lot of fun with this project, I wasn’t certain what to focus on until walking downtown one day the idea for a graffiti short came to me. Street art has always been an intrigue of mine, its another world in a sense. When I was little my dad and I would bike down to the train yard and watch the art pass on the trains.

I think I unpacked some good information considering the time requirement and how limited my source options were; most people in the graffiti scenes don’t want themselves on record talking about it because of the legality.

This is hands-down the most detailed animation I’ve ever done, in terms of the constant movement and action occuring. It took me about a week per minute of animation, which is a lot slower than I usually operate. (To be fair, I was also doing a 3-minute animation final in my FA-250 class, which resulted in both of them taking a ridiculously long time)

This is an animation of an old Transformers comic! “Whatever Happened to Whatisname?” was written by Marty Isenberg and illustrated by Marcelo Matere as a part of Transformers Animated: The Arrival #2. In animating it, I put movement to every last shot and it was remarkably challenging but I’m pretty proud of how it turned out.

This project was another opportunity for me to try something new.

A few days before I started this project, I was gifted a drum set. We have many instruments in my home—multiple guitars, mbira, cello, hand drums, looper, etc. But the drum set was new, and I wanted to incorporate it.

I have no idea how to play, so a good friend of mine, Brian Yoder, came over and gave me a crash course. I am, without a doubt, terrible at it, but it’s super fun. If you ever get a chance to bang on a drum, do it.
My wife and I are always looking for fun ways to create via many different forms of art. Music comes the easiest, as she is a musician. So that is what we do more often than now.

We chose the song because it’s one of my favorite songs. Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino, is an incredibly talented artist and paying homage to such a cultural icon is something I always look for excuses to do. The drum solo is a lot more complicated than it sounds, as is the guitar sections, so it was a challenge.

The reality is the song uses multiple drums and numerous guitars to get the sound. Also, while using different effects on the drums to get a hard to duplicate sound. I also have an electric drum set in my garage, but that’s not mine, and I don’t know how to use it. So I didn’t.

He is walking around and pretty much every current famous Black artist is in it, just having fun and chilling in the video. In the end, you see Michelle Obama hugging Kanye West, and we all know he needs a lot of them. It’s a great video with a beautiful message. So often were portrayed in a negative light, so I always appreciated the video.

Eugene Weekly (EW) is a place that changed my life. In 2019 I was awarded a grant funded by Google to write for Eugene Weekly. It is a very prestigious award, given to a very selective group of people. I was one of 10,000 applicants.

Writing has changed my professional trajectory and I now have multiple freelance gigs that keep me afloat. I’m not about to buy a sports car or anything, but my wife and I are in the process of buying our first home.

EW is my place to learn and grow as a human. When I am in my office, I can use my brain in a way I often cannot. I can either boost a person to new heights or expose them to the vile creatures they are in those walls. I love it more than anything I have ever known, other than my wife.

This project is a culmination of all the things I love. My wife’s music, my new drum set, my beautiful Black face, with accompanying grey beard, and of course my puppy (who was being surprisingly well mannered.)

An opportunity to show what I love is something I cherish, and I’m fortunate to have the skills and machinery to do so. This project was fun. I’m rather sad this class is ending. I hope you all like my song. I got myself some online drum lessons so that you will hear more from me.

Music By:

Clear Waters by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3516-clear-waters

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

For this assignment, I took videos of moments I shared with my best friend Paige on our journey of experiencing a Covid-19 Quarantine. I remember Professor Hughes going through the syllabus in class the day after we got to the beach and reviewed all the projects we would have to complete this term. As she was talking about this one, it hit me that I had already begun working on mine because we had started filming a day before. I have always wanted to create a video project on capturing experiences and memories with my friends, and Paige and  I have always taken clips on all of our adventures in hopes to somehow find the motivation to start a vlog, however we never ended up getting to compiling all of them and making it a masterpiece. I used this as motivation to help complete  this assignment as well as to finally finish a project that captures crazy memories of our friendship. 

For this project, I had the vision of compiling videos of our true selves. What you experience during my film is who we really are, which is something I usually don’t see on the big social media platforms. Big influences worry about the content and their media persona, which alters their egos and personalities on camera to someone they are not. That is why this project touches a very personal goal I have been putting a lot of self work into to accomplish. Being content with my true self and knowing that I am enough. With Covid and everything going on in our world, I find it difficult to cope with the anxiety and stressors that come with it. Having a visual of recorded memories of experiencing life, good or bad, helps me awklodge how important it  is to be grateful for each and every experience. Even if it is a Covid-19 quarantine, we still made the best of every second. I hope you enjoy it!

This particular video is a bit different from what I had initially pitched. It was meant to feature multiple people with multiple locations; an ambitious undertaking considering the amount time I had to work with. Oregon Memories is a video series I thought of about a year ago. Each video would feature a person familiar with the outdoors of Oregon and talk about what makes a specific area a special place for them. Oregon Memories: Mt. Pisgah could be considered a pilot episode in that regard. In this one, I visit Mt. Pisgah with my girlfriend, Emmareighn. She speaks on the times she’s experienced and the emotions she associates with the area, both good and bittersweet.

With this project, I really wanted to make people smile. The ultimate goal was to create something that could distract others from whatever negativity is surrounding them, if any, or to simply make you laugh because it’s funny. I wanted to emulate a “typical make-up tutorial” that you might find on YouTube. In the video, you can clearly see the person behind myself acting as “The Arms.” This was as intentional as it gets. I wanted the parody to be obvious, but not overbearing, so I told a story to keep the attention of my audience’s ears, and the silliness of the arms and (mostly) bad make-up to keep their eyes focused on the video. I’ve had my make-up done a lot as a dancer, so this wasn’t out of my realm by any means. The way the make-up was applied from someone who couldn’t really see me well made it extra funny and I didn’t get poked in the eye too many times. The lighting and general set-up for the video was pretty difficult. I don’t have an actual stand for my phone, which is what the video was recorded on, so that made it difficult to get a decent angle. The final cut was actually taken from just one take, because the angle changed too drastically in other takes and I didn’t want that lack of continuity in the video. During the editing process, which was actually very fun, I found so many useful tools in Premiere Pro. This was only my second attempt at editing video on my own, and I think it went much better than the first time. What I am most proud of in regards to this video is not the editing or animations or anything that came from post production. It was that I remembered to take the video with my phone turned on it’s side. I am also proud of the editing I did, because even if no one else does, I think it’s funny and clever and really reaches the outcome I was looking for in this project.

Cast & Crew
Creator, Director, Editor, Face-Cole Brown
Make-up Artist, Arms, Emotional Support-Maya Auld
Music from Epidemic Sounds
Graphic elements and SFX from Premiere Pro’s Free content.

By: Cole Brown

I had a lot of fun making this video. I had about 40 short clips/shots that I captured at Mt. Pisgah. I had a hard time choosing my favorites but I am overall very happy with how this video looks. I think the lighting as well as the selective focus in some of these shots creates a fun and interesting view.  It was nice to use homework as an excuse to go outside and get some fresh air. I usually find myself confined at my desk or in my bed starting at my laptop like a robot. It was so refreshing and wonderful to spend time with my mom and doggie is such a beautiful place. I had a hard time lining up beats in the song with clip transitions, but i am pretty satisfied with how they turned out. I also felt like all the transitions on premiere pro were really cheesy looking so I opted to just have the clips follow each other without fancy transitions. The only transitions I added were from the title in the beginning to the first clip, then the last clip to the credits, and I am really happy with how that turned out. 

I did have a hard time with the audio, and listening to it I felt like it sounded unnatural at times. I talk rather fast and I couldn’t record audio while watching the video so I ended up breaking the audio into pieces and spreading it throughout the video. This allowed more time for the music to shine and just allow a break in narration. 

I think I am pretty proud of the final product and excited about how much I have learned about video/audio production. This was only my second video I have ever made so i am pretty happy with it.

By Morgan Murphy