Finding the ‘official’ website for the parade, however, was really difficult. It showed up like 6th when I googled ‘chinese new year parade dc.’

http://www.chineseparadedc.com/index.html

I wonder if it was because of the metatags: “Chinese Parade, Lunar New Year, Washington DC, CCBA, The AD Agency.” Really? I wonder if this site was done in a hurry. It’s lovely to look at, but these metatags seem counter to common-sense searches. I would think that the majority of the non-AsianAmerican population would look first for ‘Chinese New Year’ rather than ‘Lunar New Year.’ The Post refers to it as ‘Chinese New Year,’ so…

Also, this site is obviously looking at the donor audience http://www.chineseparadedc.com/sponsorships.html (saw that the parade committee contracted with the Ad Agency to promote and grow this event). BUT I think an ‘Average Joe’ site is needed. It’s all well and good to have such narrow metatags for a donor site, to which the Ad Agency would directly refer potential sponsors. HOWEVER, it would be great to have a user-friendly site for parade attendees with more broad metatags applicable to most metro area residents.

Anyhoo, it was a great time. Here’s looking at you, kid!

MacDonalds Healthy Breakfasts

Love, love the animation!

My main concern is what to cull from my short story, a 10-page stream-of-consciousness tale. It’s not exactly proving easy to create a linear narrative—which is what I think the 2nd chapter should cover. The intro and the first chapter do the following: establish that there has been a gruesome murder and that the victim’s surname is Kelly; and, show that the story is being told by a woman, Marie, who claims to have seen and ‘knows’ the killer, but also demonstrates that our narrator MAY be wholly unreliable. So my inclination is to use Chapter 2 to relate the canonical details that are the back story for Marie’s claims.

OK, so how to do this in 60-120 seconds? My initial visualization is this: open with a fly-over of London, heavy clouds, sounds of thunder/rain. Zoom into a single raindrop and ride it all the way down from cloud to city gutter where the raindrop splats on a discarded newspaper. As the trashed paper flutters from wind/gutter flow, we see the actual headline/reportage of the murder of Marie Kelly by Jack, with a reproduction of the illustration of Marie from the London Times (I think).

Words in the newspaper shimmer and then lift off the page to form a comment from Marie as the center illustration shows (somehow!) her experience of her murder. Just easy-peasy. RIIIIGGHHTT! Well it might be, realizing that film title sequences do exactly this and are an art form in and of themselves.

So searching I went. Immediately thought of Saul Bass (the best of graphic designer and film-maker), but in searching some of his videos, tripped on this opening sequence from Carnivale, and realized this was, for me, when I realized THIS was what I wanted to create one day.

But aside from my drooling over it, this sequence does exactly what I was seeing in my head: introduces the carnival as the setting, and then establishes the story’s place in history (the Great Depression) and even foreshadows the social forces that prove as evil as any supernatural beast.

I am humbled.

Here’s the first stab (again, 10/30/2009):

Suffice to say, the final brochure took an entirely different direction, the least detail being a horizontal layout:

So now the inside. First, I wanted to use the Satin pattern fill (Edit > Fill > Pattern—can’t remember which pre-loaded pattern palette this one was on), and stretched it to fit the mechanical. But ultimately it started being more about the suitcase then the destination, so I used a London map and ran a Fiber filter on it for the interior.

Leather: 11/2/2009; Lining: 10/30/2009

But again, after some sage critique from classmates and colleagues, the final:

Original: 10/30/2009; Final: 11/4/2009

I found a tutorial online that told you how to create leather in Photoshop. Basically, fill a new doc with your color. Then go to Filter > Texture > Texturizer, and pick your texture from the drop-down menu. I had to navigate to my choice using the fly-out menu option of ‘Load Texture’—the tut recommended ‘Rust Flakes,’ but I liked ‘Snake Skin’—in the CS3 app folder under Presets >Textures. Once I got the first layer looking like I wanted, I duplicated it and used Layer Blending to achieve the right look. For these examples, it was Color at 50%.

Next, I wanted to emboss. Added my text and worked with Layer Effects (Bevel and Emboss; Pillow Emboss and Emboss) to make the leather looked stamped.

Originally done: 10/16/2009