rāv design is the new home of ravings. Update your links, rss feeds, bookmarks etc… In addition to the blog you can view our portfolio and more fun stuff.

Jeff Lew posted yesterday on CGSociety that he is nearing completion on Killer Bean Forever, his third Killer Bean film. I greatly enjoyed Killer Bean 2: The Party which i saw 5 or 6 years ago when the “high res” (640×360 with stereo sound!) version came out.

Killer Bean Forever is a roughly 85 minute, HD 24p, completely animated film which has taken nearly 4 years to finish. By comparison KB2 was a 7:21 minute short that took Jeff 3 years to complete.

The look of the new film is light years ahead of KB2, and about a million billion times better looking than the original Killer Bean short. While this won’t have the the most amazing visuals or animation ever, Jeff admits that he took a lot of shortcuts so he could finish, it is an amazing feat to single handedly complete such an ambitious project. We’ll see if the characters and story can hold up for 85 minutes—I hope they can and I’m eagerly awaiting the full release.

For the uninitiated the characters are all coffee beans…

These little guys have been my playtime project for the last couple days. They started off as the happy orange character (with legs) for the sleepless dream project. A day or two ago I started to wonder how a rounded character might look like in a more nightmarish capacity.

Playtime is the part of the day that you spend exploring and not “working”. Used properly this time can be some of the best and most productive of your day.

Inspiration
Part of playtime is spent looking at and watching what other graphic/motion designers and film makers are doing. I subscribe to magazines, podcasts and a host of RSS feeds to stay current with the latest trends and techniques. The point isn’t just to stay up to date but also to stay inspired and to keep my mind and ideas fresh.

Creation
The rest of playtime is spent making things, trying new ideas, dissecting what someone else has done, and learning new tools or techniques. Sometimes I start with no idea what I’m going to make and other times I have a fairly solid goal. Three or four years ago as I was learning Illustrator I decided to make a vector robot. It took a couple weeks to pull off (remember this was during playtime) but at the end I had learned a host of new tricks and had a pretty kicking robot to boot.

Conflagration
Playtime fuels a constant curiosity and a burning desire to create things that were thought to be beyond your scope. Its also important to be immersed in unfamiliar mediums from time to time; if you work digitally all the time pick up some clay or try letterpress for a change of pace and fresh insights. Without time to play, work become drudgery.

Everything carries a cost, even things touted as free. I visited a company’s site this morning to view their latest, very cool, commercial. Unfortunately they chose to use YouTube as a platform for distribution, unfortunate because every time their video ends a menu of “relevant” YouTube videos pop up. In this case some very explicit material became available on their site, simply because the clip names were similar. In exchange for no bandwidth or storage costs related to hosting their commercials they gave up control of the media that can be accessed on their site. I might even have been able to watch a competitor’s commercial right there. In this case the costs aren’t monetary but they certainly outweigh the benefits.

Actual Action
Recently I’ve had the incredibly good fortune to work on a couple projects that contained no oversight of the creative process. Up front the communication goals were determined leaving the execution of the project up to my team. The results far exceeded the initial expectations for the project and, in one case, spawned additional valuable pieces that naturally flowed from the uninhibited freedom we were given.

Pandemic
I’m thrilled about this because there is a disease circulating where ideas are discussed to death rather than just being done. Committees hold meetings to determine the “right” way to accomplish tasks that would have taken less time to do than the meeting took to set up. Sometimes meetings can be useful (in a purely theoretical sense, based upon a yet unfounded utopian society…) but 99% of the time they are a huge waste of air. Meetings require people to have an agenda which in turn forces them to have a position to defend rather than being free to agree with solutions that will work.

Movement
While other people are busy talking about doing something, go out and actually do it (and sometimes while they are still scheduling the room and voting on who will bring snacks). There is a huge release in doing something big with out all the bureaucratic nonsense. If that requires being too much of a rebel for you, go out and do a project for the heck of it, no strings attached. You’ll be glad you did.

Goals
I love working with creative people. This past weekend I took the opportunity to work on a series of wacky promotional videos for Central Avenue promoting a new Saturday night service with a bunch of my friends. The goal was to start Friday night at 8PM and finish one of the videos by 8AM Sunday so it could be played at the early service. Though there was very little sleep to be had (we scripted, shot and edited 3 videos in 36 hours) I felt very charged up at the end of it.

Deadlines
Despite the tight timeline the creative juices were flowing and we kicked though the creative process remarkably quickly. Props to everyone who worked on the project. Friday night, starting at 8PM, the group came up with the main story idea during a couple hours of brainstorming. We then spit up into small groups each responsible for one of the three story lines, the deadline for that phase was 45 minutes which each group met. By 1:30 or 2 AM the scripts were finished and the crew headed off for a couple hours of rest. Just 24 hours later we were finished, easily beating the 8 AM Sunday morning delivery for the first video.

Collateral
Even now that the project is nearly wrapped there is a flurry of new activity, brainstorming additional promotional materials that could hook into the videos and encourage attendance. Including a dedicated webpage which will provide downloads of desktop wallpapers and the three finished videos. The very cool thing is this project quickly morphed into a mini, local, viral campaign.

Curiously
I’ve always been shocked at the low production values, and usually writing, that goes into local advertising. Market size doesn’t seem to matter, local ads in major metro areas are just as poorly conceived and executed as ones in small town markets. Consider the difference between a national car ad and a local car dealer. Essentially they are selling the same product but the local dealer ads generally rely on corny gimmicks, screaming about their low prices and flashing giant blocks of text (in 14 fonts) across the entire screen. Obviously there is a large cost associated with the slick well produced national car ads featuring stunt driving on a closed course, but I’ll take that any day over a guy squinting into the sun “slashing” prices with a chain-saw.

Opposite Day
There is something about being perceived as local that is appeals to a lot of people. So much so that Sonic’s (drive-in restaurants in 34 states) current ads look more like locally produced pieces than national spots, in fact when they first started airing I was convinced that the Sonic in town was buying local air and making their own commercials. Like a typical local spot the acting appeared mediocre, the dialog seemed stilted and the images were poorly exposed with no color correction. Far from hastily tossed together the Sonic ads were actually carefully planned and constructed to resemble local spots as a way to reach their target audience. It quickly became apparent that the actors were only acting like poor actors, the writing was tight and successive viewings didn’t diminish the jokes.

New Trend
Better script writing, higher production values and clever planning are slightly more expensive than run-and-gun productions, but they pay off big time when it comes to communicating the message. And at the end of the day that’s the goal.

Recently we were asked to create an icon for an small holiday show. There was no giant budget or timeline just a simple request for an elegant icon. Designing small straightforward things is a lot of fun, especially when there is leeway to play.

The fonts used are Adobe Jenson Pro, Adobe Wood Type Ornaments Std and Type Embellishments One LET Plain:1.0.

Complete Physical
In the post desktop challenge I talked about cleaning off your digital desktop, this time I’m going to extend the concept to the entire computer filing system. I’ll be basing this around projects and clients, but will a little imagination you can port this over to your heaps of photos and that downloaded collection of kitten wallpapers.

Hard drives are huge so partition that sucker into two parts to separate the programs from the data*. Name them something that is easy to associate with (e.g. Software and Data) not your favorite sci-fi star-cruiser. Partitioning has the added benefit of making backups easier to do.

Folder Friends
If you are the kind of person that stores all you dishes in heaps on your kitchen floor, then this probabiliy won’t help you. Otherwise dig in and learn to use folders in a consistent hierarchy. My Data drive has several root folders encompassing everything.

The Clients folder holds everything relating to client’s and their projects. Each project gets a unique name consisting of three letters and three numbers identifying the Client and which project number this is. For example the 5th project for Uber Metal Casting, a marketing brochure, would be UMC005 Marketing Brochure. All folders within that project folder bear the main ID in front of the contents (e.g. UMC005 RAW Photos).
Downloads is the default place for anything downloaded from a browser.
House contains our firms internal projects.
The Library contains articles, scripts, templates and stock assets.

Breakable Rules
Don’t mix folders and files, any level with a folder should contain only folders.
Don’t ever name a folder Misc. (actually this is an unbreakable rule).
Use clear concise names for folders and files.
Use colored or custom folder icons for faster recognition.

*I don’t recommend attempting to partition a HD that is already in use, best to do it before you load anything.