Base14

My work in apparel design has been culminating toward one huge final project; the senior collection. We practically just started school and yet the madness has already begun. All of my designs are planned and nearly all of the fabrics have been sourced. All that remains for the next seven months is to construct the garments. But here for your Base14 enjoyment is a sneaky little peak at some of my sketches. Tantalized yet?

You didn’t think “Duck Heart Teslacoil” was done yet, did you? Well, not quite. The plucky little film was just featured in this month’s issue of Animation Magazine, as the second place winner of the magazine’s annual Student Reel Awards!

The write-up uses some highly laudatory language that left Alysha and myself more than flattered. “It takes a lot of finesse and graphical know-how to really work Flash/After Effects.” Animag writes, “The flat, impactful characters are imbued with a kitchy liveliness all their own, and the humor is spot-on. Duck is the ultimate evolution of the animated webisode and we truly hope to see more of these adorable, violent critters.”

Well, thank you, Animation Magazine! We appreciate both the kind words and the fabulous prize pack you sent us. Hopefully we’ll find ourselves gracing your pages again, someday.

And as for the suggestion about seeing more of the characters from “Duck Heart Teslacoil,” what do our loyal readers think? Would you like to see more of Duck and Monster, or something totally new?

I am proud to announce that I now have my own website! Tyler was awesome enough to get me the domain name and to lay down the html structure. I like to think I’ve got enough know-how to keep it updated, but you know how we designers are. I recommend you take a stroll over to it and check out my online portfolio. I will be updating it as I finish garments from my current collection. Enjoy!

www.alyshakupferer.com

Earlier this year I was in a motion media theory class where, for a final project, I decided to examine the way that digital tools are designed to emulate old-fashioned physical tools. For example, Microsoft Word is a typewriter emulator. iTunes is a jukebox emulator. Skype is a telephone emulator, etc.

So I set my sights on Adobe Photoshop, which is an emulator of a darkroom and an art table, and ended up with the above video art piece. You can view the YouTube page for the full description and theory discussion, but just to summarize, I used a combination live-action video and stop motion animation to simulate Photoshop occurring in the physical world. Whereas the digital usually imitates the physical, by inverting the process I call attention to its strengths and weakness as a user interface design methodology.

Heavy stuff, huh? Well, if you don’t like all the theory you can just watch it and laugh at how funny looking Windows 95 is by today’s standards. Haha! Look at that copy of Norton.

Ah, there’s nothing quite like a bit of a makeover when things are beginning to feel stagnant. And thanks for the fine folks over at WordPress, the Base14 Blog got just that sort of new infusion with a fresh installation of WordPress 3.0! (We had been running on 2.6 for some time.) Of course, you folks on the outside won’t notice much of a change just yet, but the tools we use to publish blog posts and manage content just got a lot slicker.

June was a relatively quiet time for Base14, I realize. We were recouping from production on “The Girl and the Fox” and have been preparing for the launch of the Base14 Store later this year. This upgrade to our content management system is just the first step in making a new, full-fledged storefront that will finally make our lovely creative products easily accessible and available to purchase!

Sorry everyone, but it turns out that I am very bad at maintaining a life/blog balance. I have been so busy working on cool things that I forgot to share them with you!

Since Tyler has started to release character designs, I can finally post pictures of my favorite new ring.  Based on a character from The Girl and the Fox, this clay figurine is a loveable little scamp that is sure to charm his way into your heart and attract attention. Seriously, what’s better than having a little snow fox friend with you all day?

What do you think? Want to see him for sale on Base14 merch?

This was the question everyone was asking me last night. Well, in a pretty tragic turn of events, “The Girl and the Fox” was not screened last night at the SCAD Animation Graduate Show. There were so many submission that the programmers had to limit it to only graduating filmmakers, and thus TGTF got axed. This is sad since we lost that opportunity to see how a large audience responds to the film, which might of helped prioritizing production retakes next month.

Still, we did get the film finished to a presentable degree, and soon I’ll be sending out a test screener to people I know and trust to give me valuable feedback before the final cut of the film is sent to festivals. It’s good to have the extra time to finesse.

Next week I’ll give a run-down of all the films I work on this quarter. It was a pretty interesting variety!