Big news everyone! As I’ve been going through my courses at Drexel, I’ve been learning the basic coding skills required to make a functional website. As such, I will be putting the majority of my attention there instead, as it continues to grow with my knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Take a peek for yourself!
After 5 weeks of work, my team in my Overview of Computer Gaming class was able to make an awesome game about a demon cat trying to escape from Hell by taking the elevator and tearing up anything that tries to stop him. I was in charge of making the music and the sounds, and we thought it would be cool if we had a nice and happy elevator theme for the menu, but it turns into metal as you start the game. It was quite the challenge for me, because in my past experience, trying to make metal music with MIDI instruments usually does not go well. However, I discovered an important feature inside of Garageband that made it all possible: Automation. This would allow me to change the dynamics of the guitar sounds down to the individual note, and as such I really took the pitch bend modifier to heart to make it sound like somebody was actually adding their finesse to the notes they play. Now I can’t wait to make more metal music in the future, and chart it for Clone Hero as well.
Game credits:
Main idea / cover artist: Alex Hernandez (xanderquo)
Programmer: Ryan Dixon
Enemy design / animations: Elizabeth G.
Management / enemy design: Jack Heyen
Elevator design: Irving Fenochio
Music and sounds: Yours truly 😉
Download and play the game
The URBN center at Drexel, the main building for the majority of my classes, is just about one of the most complicated buildings I’ve been in. There are a number of twists and turns and dips on every floor, making it very easy to get lost. However, that’s exactly what you want if you’re getting lost in the world of photography. I explored all four floors before my Monday class looking for the coolest color shots I could find, and captured quite a few great ones.
Enjoy.
This is a collection of my first photos within my photography class, using my Cannon Rebel T7 for the first time. These are all of my favorite photos from the class that focus on contrast and volume.
Enjoy
In my photography class, we were often instructed to take a total of 72 shots that we could put on a singular sheet, then choose our favorite 6 out of all those. Each assignment had a different focus to it; contrast, volume, portraiture, and while I was very fond of the first two aspects, I simply did not feel very comfortable taking pictures of myself or others. I pushed through it eventually out of necessity, but the Covid setting made it difficult to find others that would be a part of my project, and I did not like how I looked in my own photographs. As such, I was rarely the focus of my pictures, but if I was, my face was obscured our out of focus in some way. After applying that theme to the project, I was able to capture some interesting shots. Here are a select few of my favorites.
Enjoy.
In addition to creating one of my favorite art pieces ever, this song of mine, that had been started over a year ago, finally came together with a push of inspiration. I was only really missing an ending that would properly wrap up the song, and once I had that, I took to making the video. The pastel rainbow color scheme of the artwork worked so well with the hue change keyframes in After Effects, along with this super cool hexagonal audio visualizer I made. As far as production value goes, this is the best video I’ve made on my channel, in every aspect.
(BE ADVISED: This video contains some intense themes and a frame that may be sensitive for some viewers)
This was my final animation project for my Design for Media class, the requirements being very simple: just make it mostly black and white and be creative with your designs. I took it as an opportunity to take a deep dive into my emotions again, making something of it to perhaps portray it in a more tangible way. I was in a pretty bad mental state in my first term, feeling the all imposing isolation of Covid restrictions and my fears of inadequacy amongst my peers. By the end though, I was feeling quite a bit better, the quality of this project partially giving me a boost in confidence.
Drawn in Firealpaca, animated in Krita.
This is by far my favorite piece of digital art I’ve ever created. Ani is my main character that I use for personal drawings, so I wanted to try a different way of depicting him. The end result was a giant headshot formed from polygonal stain-glass looking panels of all sorts of pastel colors. This was originally intended to be an album cover for a song I made called “Plastic Planet,” so I did end up using it for that, but it just looks so phenomenal on its own that I think I may use it as a logo in the future. The geometry looks as though it is actually a 3D image and it only took me about 4 hours to put together in Firealpaca. I ended up getting a poster of it and hanging it in my room too.
The major difference between User Interface Design I and II was that our choice of site to redesign was much more limited. While before we could choose whatever site we wanted, we had to pick a type of site that was very content heavy, specifically a news site, as directed by our instructor. Since I rarely pay attention to the news, I was a bit reluctant to get started, but soon realized that it’s essential that I need to be open to all types of sites and configurations, since there are sites for almost anything, and I could be working for any one of them someday as a user experience designer. It was a necessary pull out of my comfort zone, and it gave me a huge confidence boost when the ideas started flowing in.
In my search for a news site that I would be interested in working with, I came across ARTnews, which is dedicated to updating the art connoisseurs of the world on what’s happening in the art world. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for me), there were quite a number of issues I ran into while exploring the site that could be innovated on. The search bar gives you two categories to search from, but neither of them are clickable, and the navigation of the site is incredibly confusing, some heading tabs leading you to other sites entirely. While I was not able to address the search issue, since I hadn’t learned coding at the time, I was able to greatly simplify the site navigation by prioritizing the main interests of the company (gaining more subscriptions, since they advertised it heavily throughout their own pages), while putting the other specifications in the menu. The rest of the page displays the leading articles, editor picks, most recent uploads and top stories, taking up the majority of the screen space with large and attention-grabbing pictures.
This was also the first project in which I had to consider responsive design, and I ended up creating three different page layouts for the website: mobile first, then tablet, and lastly desktop. While it’s structured in such a way to give more breathing room, rather than needing to remove items that wouldn’t fit in smaller designs, filling in the open space was also relatively difficult. However, I felt it was important to do so, since the site had a lot of white space at the time, but it felt somewhat contradictory to the nature of museum art as a whole. Some of the images were nice and big, like a large painting on display, while others were more subtle and less visible. I aimed to treat each image like it was a painting, with large blown up pictures in a gallery view with “museum placards” beneath to display the article title. I also amped up the immersion further within the mobile designs, as the images contained in the articles, once just thrown between large text walls in white space, became one with the article itself. Each image was placed in the background behind the text, as though you are looking into the framework of the painting itself. If you wanted to get a closer look at the painting itself, you could click on the title of the painting, or the “view image” link if it was not listed, and it would bring you into an isolated space with a dark background and an overhead light, as if you were actually in an art gallery to divert your full attention to it. The desktop space, however, was too wide to display the whole images in the background, so I placed it along the sides of the paragraphs for people to view while reading, rather than after reading the section. This prevents readers from having to go back if they forgot some details about the piece that were already written.
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