Jan 27

VBS 2013 Development Diary: #8: Logo


This is a pretty graphic-heavy post.

When I first start working on a logo, I trial several fonts in Linotype FontExplorer, then I try them out  in Illustrator to see which ones I like best, looking for things like readability, tone, and flavor. This lets me see which fonts I might want:

001

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

—as well as ones I absolutely don’t want—specifically fonts that have that cheezy, clichéd ‘rikki tikki’ Chinese feel to them:

002

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once I have selected a few possibilities, I make a text box with the title in Adobe Illustrator and then copy it about a dozen times, then apply the different fonts to the text.

003

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My first logo concept, like almost all first logo concepts, stunk. It looked like a very boring book:

Black Mantis1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Going back to the desk I decided on my favorite font: KingThings Conundrum. It looks amazing, just like it was drawn with a Chinese calligraphy brush.

005

 

 

 

 

However, it has a major problem: it’s not very readable. First I converted the font to outlines so that Illustrator sees it as a series of objects instead of type. My next step was to clean it up, getting rid of most of the ornaments:

006

007

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here is the font all cleaned up. Notice something, however: the kerning. My friend Brenton taught me to use Illustrator. Back when I was first learning to use it, one of the first things he taught me was one of those tricks that separates the noobs from the pros–-kerning.

Kerning is the horizontal space between the letters. Notice how the spacing between the letters is uneven and crummy looking. The vertical space between the lines of letters called leading (pronounced LED-ing), is pretty bad too.

008

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now you can see the comparison between the cleaned up version and the original unkerned, unleaded, unreadable font.

009

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have applied a stroke effect to the letters to look for any problems. Notice on the crook of the L part of the stroke has not applied, meaning I have a break in the shape of the letter.

010

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I apply the stroke, I actually group the entire logo, copy it, and then past it behind, then apply the stroke to the behind-most copy. Below you can see how it looks when composited, next you can see the unstroked copy, and then the copy with the stroke applied.

011

There are still some tweaks to do. As you can see below, the default corner type looks kind of lame on certain points. You can adjust them to be sharper or more blunt, but in the end I just went with a rounded corner.

013014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wanted to go with a gradient for this logo (I usually don’t) to give it more of an action/adventure feel. However, it still looks kind of flat, so I applied a thin, bright stroke to the front-most objects, which really made it pop out more:

015017

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next I made a  drop shadow behind the logo by making a copy, pasting it behind the original, filling it with black, and shrinking it by ~2%.

018

 

 

 

 

 

 

I decided to bring back my kind of Chinese brushstroke mantis from my early design, to give kind kind of an ominous shadow to our heroic logo.

020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also wanted to incorporate some sword iconography, since it’s the story’s MacGuffin.

The mantis and the sword are just lines with a brush effect applied. You can see them below, as well as a box with a few more brush-effect lines added.

021

024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here is the completed logo with bonus background (OK, so it’s not totally complete–the Chinese inside the green ribbons is just placeholder text):

final

Jan 26

I just woke up from a dream

I was at the ball field in Corder, the tiny town I lived in in my late teens. It must have been work related, because B was there. I was driving a Camero, which is ridiculous, as I have never owned anything sporty or wasteful nor desired to, not since I was like 9 or 1o anyway (but that’s a different story). So B and I go to a little food stand and I order a big slice of pizza and some chips. As we’re walking back to my car, B’s like, “Way to not order what you don’t want to eat, man.” He’s being Mr. Older Fatherly Educator, and I’m being Mr. Young And Irresponsible. He’s criticizing me for my lack of choosing to order vegetables–as apparently there was broccoli available.

I’m kind of offended and convicted by this, as I have heard that B likes to imbibe certain beverages–a lot. So continuing to be irresponsible and sounding kind of like I’m 19 instead of almost 41, I’m like, “If I want to die early, so what?” And B continues to be cool and mature, and he’s like, “Whoa, whatever man.” Since he doesn’t bite back, I’m all, “I’m sorry, man. I mean, how many times have I made jokes about your liver?” (The correct answer is that I frequently make jokes that involve the intersection of B and cirrhosis of the liver).

So we–me, B,pizza, and Camaro–pull up the fence at the ball field fence (apparently I was so lazy I drove 15 feet south from the ball field fence to the fairground to get the pizza). We get out and sit with a bunch of other people from work. We are just kind of chewing the fat,and I am still feeling guilty about not ordering vegetables, so I start explaining to B, and everyone else, that when I eat stir fry I eat loads of vegetables, but just not all the time. Everyone is bored by this (understandably). I end up working on my Camero, and someone comments on the giant jug of water in the floor of my car, which is for the radiator. I can hear my wife in the distance talking to someone higher up the chain of command above me.

“Great, my wife’s talking to so-and-so,” I say. Then one of the other guys from work is like, “I just set so-and-so up with a new app for the iPhone that does…” and he tells me what it does. “Why’d you do that?” I ask. At the time it seemed dumb for them to do. So before my wife comes over, I leave (I have no idea why) and walk home. By home, I mean the home I lived in when I was a late teen, as I mentioned. The house is just a block down the street.

As I am walking down the street, I see a billboard that towers above everything else in town. On it it lists several bullet points with reasons for owning and playing Nintendo. Apparently I had rented this billboard as kind of a passive aggressive way to express to Heather my justification for my video game habit. As I’m walking past it, I think, I should rent that billboard for Valentine’s Day and put something like, “It’s easy to treat you like a queen when you are a princess,” on it, as a giant card for Heather. Even in my dream it sounded cheezy. But then I was, “that will cost so much money,” and then I was, “but you spent that much money to justify your gaming habit.” Finally I just decided not to think about it.

So I walk up to the house, put the key in the lock, turn the key, and enter the enclosed back porch. It is completely dark. I can feel a cool, dry hand, just resting lightly on the back of my neck. I check all of my hands–left hand, hanging in usual spot at side. Right hand–still holding key. Cool dry hand on back of neck–nope, not mine. I turn my head slowly, terror creeping up my spine, and in the dark I can see the face belonging to the hand just inches from mine–a skull with human eyes looking straight at me, saying nothing.

Completely terrified, I edge my way outside so that I can scream for help. I inhale as deep as I can, and just as I go to scream, I wake up. But instead of waking up screaming, I just let out this, stupid seal noise, like “Arp!”

And so children, let that be a lesson to you. If you come home and just waste time playing video games your creativity will find a way out.

No–wait–I came home and did like three hours of graphic design.

Stupid brain.

Jan 24

I’ve found my new favorite epithet

Putzmeister!

Jan 21

R.I.P. Jim Richey

I remember the first time I heard of Jim Richey; knowing my weakness for the blues, my friend The Celt told me about him. “Imagine there’s this amazing blues guitarist, and he’s an older middle-aged white guy who lives out here in the sticks and works out at the Hab Center as a janitor.”

I couldn’t imagine it. He introduced me to Jim and the rest of his band, The Mojo Dogs, when I went over to sit in on some of the recording sessions at Galactic Celt Studios. Jim was pretty much ordinary looking like The Celt said–older middle-aged white guy, button up shirt, gray push-broom mustache, baseball cap. But the guy played blues guitar like a freakin’ king.

I ended up going to see him whenever I could—downtown Higginsville in a hall that usually hosted square dancing, a 1970s-furnished motel lounge in Warrensburg that I dragged Heather with me to see them, despite the fact she was getting over foot surgery.

My all time favorite time was when The Celt and I decided to go see him play at the Palace in Concordia. As we were fueling up at BreakTime, the January north wind cut through us, piercing our coats and our souls. We did eventually make it to Concordia, where we sat with our coats on the entire time, as the Palace’s aluminum and glass door closed about as well as it insulated. That was when we coined the term, ‘Jim Richey cold.’

I ended up doing a CD design for Jim and the Dogs. I didn’t care for  the title, but still felt I did a decent job with it:mojocd1-400w

 

I saw Jim a few years ago when we were at the hospital to see my mother-in-law. He told me that he wasn’t able to play any more. Still, I hadn’t realized he was that sick until The Celt posted his death yesterday.

Goodbye, Jim.

Jan 17

Sooo…I’m all Skyrim’d out

Am I even allowed to say that? I’m afraid Kaleb, Todd Howard, and Mr. T are going to come to my house and I’ll find out firsthand that they all pity da foo.

Anyway, as I was saying, I think I’m done with Skyrim. For a while anyway. Compared to writing and producing VBS skits, the rush of sneakybowing bad guys is kinda weak. Maybe once I am done or at least have all of my major story problems solved I will indulge myself in some more Bethesda goodness–maybe even pick up all the DLCs.

Until then, I have work to do!

And I love it.

Jan 16

Overheard: 35 yr old female

“Oh you have a headache? Lets ultrasound that head.”

Jan 15

VBS 2013 Development Diary: #7: Title

It can be tough picking a good title. You want something that communicates the overall theme of your production, and it needs to be able to reach kids who have only been reading for a year. Plus, while you, as the writer and director, have been steeping yourself in Chinese food, language, culture, and movies, your audience likely has not. You might think the title Enter the Legend of the Savage Iron Monkey Fist is hilarious—and it is—but the kids, their parents, and even your fellow workers aren’t going to get it.

It also needs to communicate the right tone. Enter the Dragon has quite a different tone than Kung Fu Hustle. When I first started on this year’s VBS I liked the title Curse of the Black Mantis. However, the focus was all wrong in what it told the audience. I made a list of words in every kung fu movie title, and tried them out against words and names in my VBS:

Shadow
Saga
Wind
Mantis
Legend
Drunken
Fist
Sword
Fierce
Savage
Death
Dragon
Bamboo
Jade Wind, Black Mantis
Shadow/Legend of the Jade Wind
Wrath/Fury of the Black Mantis
Shadow of the Black Mantis

I eventually settled on Legend of the Jade Wind, which I felt said everything I wanted to about the skit.

Once you have a title, you can proceed to logo design.

Jan 13

VBS 2013 Development Diary: #6: Sound

Starting in 2009 with The Quest for the Lost City of Gold we started incorporating a digital soundboard into our VBS skit. I downloaded a program for my Mac called Sound Byte that lets you set up virtual racks of sounds, customize options for each sound, and assign them to keyboard commands. I needed someone to run the sound board, which I had just trialed and tested myself.

I chose Rahne, my then 12 year old. She was fairly tech savvy, and I didn’t know who else to hand it to. She has run the sound board every year since then, except last year when she had a part in the skit. After the skit she told me she wanted her sound board back.

Anyway when we get close to time to begin rehearsals I search around online for sounds to download. There are several sites that have royalty-free sounds free for download, and you can find sound effects CDs at pretty much any decent music store. Then you take a sound, drag it onto a button, and then assign options for it–looping, volume, when to start or stop the sound, whether or not to play it over the top of other sounds vs. being stopped by other sounds. This was incredibly handy when we had to have an ancient Mayan temple set collapse; we layered three different sounds—a low rumble, a stone-scraping-on-stone sound, and a second rumble—to give us a really colossal crash.

We also use sound effects to help pull off some of our special effects—but that’s another post.

Jan 11

VBS 2013 Development Diary: #5: Music

For the past two years Rahne has composed the theme music. For Law of the West, our wild west VBS, I was looking for music that would fit in with a John Ford / John Wayne / Roy Rogers good guy kind of western—not a spaghetti western. When she was working on it, we listened to a lot of music from classic westerns—both what I wanted and what I didn’t want.

The best example of what I didn’t want for our VBS, despite my love for the music, was the theme from For a Few Dollars More. Ennio Morricone’s haunting theme really conveyed the grit and dirt and decay and moral landscape from the movie perfectly—it just didn’t suit the tone of our Bible school skit.

We listened to a number of good pieces, including Red River and Silverado, but the best example of what we did want was Elmer Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven. It wasn’t that I wanted, ‘Hey, can you rip of The Magnificent Seven, without sounding like you ripped off The Magnificent Seven? What I did want was something that, like The Magnificent Seven, conveyed a sense of good, morality, heroism, and triumph.  A wild west where men are men, women are women, and good guys wear white hats and never cheat or shoot anyone in the back.

And I think she nailed it. When she composed her first theme song in 2011 for Adventure on the High Seas, our pirate themed VBS, her music definitely sounded nice and piratey, but the overall composition was fairly rudimentary. Last year’s theme was more of an overture with four distinct movements, with the fourth movement a variation of the first.

Again, we have spent a lot of time listening to music. We have found some decent traditional music, as well as a lot of stuff that sounds more suited for a Chinese restaurant. One shining star however is Tan Dun, composer for Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

A couple of weeks ago Rahne, Elsa, and I had kind of a jam session–both of the girls on piano and me on djembe drum and pennywhistle. Last Wednesday Rahne and Amelia got together to go over it some more with Rahne on piano and Amelia on violin.

We aren’t there yet, but the music is getting there. I am looking into buying an erhu, aka Chinese fiddle, so that we can get a more authentic sound once composition is complete.

 

Jan 09

VBS 2013 Development Diary: #4: Immersion

Whenever I start work on a new VBS, I try to immerse myself in in the theme, especially if I feel I am not sufficiently familiar with it to do it justice. Last year when working on our Wild West themed VBS we watched a lot of westerns. Not just any westerns–since we were going for more of a classic, white hat, western we watched a lot of Roy Rogers and an old John Wayne movie where he and a couple other cowboys wore tall hats and big scarves. One of the cowboys was nicknamed ‘Lullaby.’ No-one got hurt on-screen, but in the course of the story an old man and a little girl got killed in a wagon wreck.

This year in order to get a better flavor for he story we want to communicate I have been immersing myself in Chinese culture: I’ve watched a lot of kung fu / wuxia movies, I’m learning to eat with chopsticks, watching documentaries about China, and looked at hundreds of pictures of clothing, hairstyles, armor, architecture, and the Chinese countryside. I’ve also tried to look up some cultural taboos to watch for.

I don’t have any illusions of becoming Ang Lee before August, but I at least don’t want to make something offensive to Chinese people and/or do a sloppy job for having based a VBS story on what i have learned from American pop culture.

I’m really enjoying it. I’ve seen a lot of terrible movies (Butterfly Swords, World of Drunken Master), discovered a couple of excellent ones (Red Cliff, Little Big Soldier), and seen a couple that were kind of a mixed bag (House of Flying Daggers, Wing Chun).

Anyway, one day I discovered wushu, a Chinese sport derived from martial arts. I was watching a video describing the different styles, and saw an athlete perform a demonstration of Drunken Style Kung Fu, and it gave me an idea. I changed the master tinkerer/archer to a swordsman, gave him a motivation, and came up with a character that I believe will be both interesting and humorous.