Slow Progress

It’s been a few days since I’ve posted, I was happily visiting my family in Texas. I haven’t seen most of them in two years and it was great to be able to have time to relax with them all this summer.

A small portion of my time was spent working on a new page for The Lighted Bridge. This is a website I’ve been developing with Kristin Cato, a theatre major who works at Berkeley Rep. The project is an episodic radio drama that will be released as podcasts, a new way to use our new technology in a clever/different approach.

We started with two pages to introduce the radio drama—a home page to give a synopsis and information about the director and a bio/informational page to introduce the cast and crew. Neither page has very obvious links, something most people enjoy and some people are annoyed with. Due to the nature of the story, we both agree that these hidden “easter eggs” (as they call them in the film industry, hint: put Big Fish in your DVD drive and arrow all around the opening page where you start the movie) are the best way to have people navigate for now.

Episode I is going to be released by the middle of July, so we are working together to create another atmosphere for this episode to be played. After talking with Kristin, I was left with some piecey ideas of how she would like it to look. “Art deco, rainbows, French flags, frame for the player, black and white photos, and the title”. Kristin also did an image search and found quite a few art deco images she was attracted to. This was what really helped me. She was very interested in architecture and the photography of the time, so I drew an image that was very heavy on art deco line-work and architecture.

Episode 1, Rough Sketch

Thankfully, with Kristin’s and my history, she doesn’t mind that my quick sketch looks like chicken scratch. She gets it.

She loved and agreed on this layout with a few changes and additions. One important idea was to take the obvious rainbows out of the sky and replace them with the colors of the French flag. I decided to leave the flag white completely because of this, which delighted Kristin because it seems like a surrender flag. The whole image is completely out of perspective on purpose, I was testing the waters with this idea, hoping that it works, so far no comment on that. I got this idea from a restaurant in Venice, called Casablanca (my favorite Mexican food in the city!). It’s a very strange place, Mexican food with a Casablanca theme. Someone was obsessed with the movie. Anyways, one wall has a scene from the movie painted on it and the whole perspective is totally out of whack but I can’t stop staring at it, I love the painting for the “mistake” (?).

Episode I, Halfway Point in Round 1

This first round still has a little ways to go, but I had a deadline to make for Kristin so she could show her work-in-progress group. So far so good, I’ll keep updating this project as it moves along.