Imaging.
Websites.
Motion.
Digital Illustration
Digital Illustration was a 1-semester course I taught at length ... and with great pleasure. This gallery includes samples of the Robotics, Dreams, Secrets, and Violence projects. The students were typically first year Graphic Design majors with no prior formal experience of illustration – and no prior experience using Adobe Illusrator. The class pursued the subject as an essential part of communication design, with an ever evolving legacy and similarly evolving tool-set.
Photo Manipulation
Image Manipulation was largely a Photoshop 1 class, yet it was also an excellent opportunity to further communication and design concepts as well as to promote a larger purview of what imaging can be. The works I've included resulted from the "Cyborg Project," where students created self-portraits of themselves cybernetically altered.
Websites
The Native American Project is a four page assignment featuring the 3 largest surviving native tribes. I generally assign it to entry level web design or multimedia classes. At Borough of Manhattan Community College, students are required to include a minimum of two out of three additional media; selecting from video, motion graphics and sound.
Other assignments feature a wide range of techniques and subjects. In an entry level class, html, css and imaging skills take the lead. In more advanced classes, technical elements include jQuery, Fancybox and Bootstrap. Subjects cover presidential candidates, desert, and the history of graffiti.
Microsites
Here's a recent student microsite made with Adobe Animate. Going forward I hope to have more opportunity for projects like this one that move forward from where Flash left the scene; Animate has inherited many of its ancestor's best features while adding deal-breaking responsivity. And since Animate uses javaScript in a way similar to Flash's use of ActionScript, there is no need to stop at mere motion.
Here are earlier student microsites built with Flash. I include these only as a reference point to what I can offer as a teacher of Adobe Animate. I certainly wouldn't recommend backstepping into older (and less stable) technology, but I do advocate the leveraging of past experience as we move ahead. Animate isn't Flash; its current assets have added real stability, responsivity, and safety. I'm confident about what could be done with this truly evolved, reborn program.
Ad Banners
These ad banners were assigned to multimedia students at the Art Institute of New York City. Our goals included practical output – we used Adobe Animate to produce clean "canvas" html that works on any kind of device without any need for a plug-in. The program's 2-D animation features come quite ready for responsive design and javaScript-driven interactivity.
Kinetic Type
The Kinetic Type Project was given to pre-portfolio multimedia students. Each student would select a suitable audio source that they would then augment through the use of moving type and motion graphics. The assignment allowed students to consider kinetic type's value as a powerful communicator and storyteller capable of eliciting emotion and empathy.
Video Editing / Experimental Video
I had been teaching a basic Video Editing class when I was invited to teach Experimental Video to the the same student body. It was very exciting; the students had already taken classes in lighting, usage of the camera, some film appreciation, and most often they took my class simultaneously with a fine sound design course taught by a close colleague. My job was to expose them to a very different way of seeing, one where an extreme shorthand approach (movies were typically about 4 minutes long) invited experimentation with symbolism and open-ended stortelling.
*** I'd Like to Teach at Your School! ***
Let me know what I can do for your department. If you have an idea of where and how I can best fit in, send me a message at iraepst@gmail.com and we'll take it from there. Hope to hear from you soon!
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