Thursday, October 29, 2009

Brilliant imagery — slime videos — well done Nic!

I can't exactly put my finger on why, but these new station identification advertisements from Nickelodeon definitely amuse me. I find the organic shapes created by the flying slime, the timing, and the erratic adjustments in motion very successful!




And it is painless to watch them when they are inevitably shown again and again. So I have to ask why? Most ads annoy me enough to make me change the channel. Either I'm easily amused at the moment or there is some genius juxtaposition happening here that is grabbing my attention.



Maybe the overall success has something to do with the contrasting elements: the way the shiny, heavy, opaque slime slams against the clean, alert, bright faces of Nic's current TV stars.

The repetition of phonics in the audio also helps the success in entirety.



Funny thing is... the actors know the slime is coming... yet they open their mouths and smile — great additional components! The white background of the scenes echo the clean/dirty contrast too. I'm curious how many takes it took to complete the ads?

Whatever the answer, simple or not, the fact is that these are really well done advertisements for the station. Very memorable, maybe even nostalgic; back to the original days of getting slimmed on Double Dare (side-note: Marc Summers, host of Double Dare had OCD).

Well done Nickelodeon! And it looks like you all had fun creating these ads.

Friday, October 23, 2009

Costs of making Giclée prints from your Fine Art? Benefit of Giclée printing?

There are costs associated with just about everything. That is no different when it comes to making a Giclée print of your fine art?

Click here if you don't fully understand what a Giclée print is?

Where the costs come in is mostly in the upfront process of art reproduction.

The upfront process = cost to digitally capture the artwork via scanners or by professional photography. Now this scan is not done by your typical, crappy all-in-one scanner from HP. Or the photo is not taken by the digital camera you just bought at Walmart. These scanners are big, high quality, sometimes roller scanners. And the photos are taken with what are usually 4" x 5" professional grade cameras with scanner backs (essentially a large format camera that takes a scanned picture).

And then, of course, you have the costs associated with the inkjet print process, the stretching of canvas onto the stretcher bars, framing (if necessary) and shipping of the reproduction. These costs can range depending on the printer you choose and by the size of the work being reproduced. My recommendation -- shop a few printers to price compare! But use common sense, and ask for references or testimonials also. The resulting print quality from various printers can vary as much as the price.

Now if your are gonna print thousands of copies of your original artwork it will be more economically feasible to go the route of four-color offset lithography -- in a run of the 1000s.

See... Giclée allows you to have more control on a limited print run. Usually these quantities are around 1 - 15. The brilliant part is you as the artist can have your digital scan and proof stored at a friendly neighborhood printer, and then just call them up and tell them to run 1 or 2 off and ship to here or there when needed. This way you have no inventory, no overhead and no associated storage costs.

What is a typical benefit of making prints of your fine art?

A huge benefit of reproducing via this process is that you open you fine art availability to a broader audience, not only by more pieces being available, but by shear entry-level price alone. Giclée prints are typically sold for a fraction, 1/10th, of what the original fine art would cost.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

R U a Twitter Quitter?

Even for a fine artist, social media and social networking are important. With that said, I find that traditional fine artists -- the ones that still know how to hold a paint brush -- are the slowest to climb aboard a newer technology like twitter.com

But why? You CAN teach an old dog new tricks! And I recommend you do, because now is the BEST time to be a fine artist. Now is the most favorable time to have your art seen by huge audiences across the world. I challenge you to find a better time in history when an artist's artwork could be seen so quickly, by so many, on a global scale! And Twitter is just one way to help it happen. For more on social media for fine artists.

With respect to Twitter, which is essentially a micro blog, it mostly comes down to fame. I find there are at least 5 types of users:
  1. The famous ones... you know the "Ashtons" of the world that want to stay in the public eye at all costs, so they now need to tweet. They tweet about huge happenings like when their famous wife bends over in a white bikini. It evidently works though -- he leads the pack with millions of followers.

  2. Of course, if you have leaders (as in famous tweeters) then you will have followers. The followers are the people that have the time in their day to actually look at tweets about a famous wife bent over in a white bikini. This type of user usually has more follows than followers.

  3. Then you have the people that want to be famous. [Mostly they are the "me" followers - explained here: Most Twitter Users Tweet Only About Themselves -- But Few Follow] They are embracing the said social media craze. They sometimes play the numbers game and just follow people in hopes of getting followers in return. They tweet about miscellaneous things like what they are eating, working too much, jokes, horoscopes and once and a while they will actually tweet about the relevant information they want to be followed or famous for.

  4. Oh, and then there are those that use twitter.com as another gear in the big resyndication machine of social media. For example, it is pretty simple, yet effective, to set up an automated option to take a blog post (such as this) and automatically post a link to Twitter, Facebook, etc., on "publish".

  5. Then you have the Twitter Quitters, or should I say "Twitter Qwitters". They are the ones that may be initially in one of the categories above, but then they just quit. I know... how dare they!

  6. Read about a Nielsen study here (with nice charts and everything): Twitter Quitters Post Roadblock to Long-Term Growth: over 60% join then quit

    They quit as they realize it actually takes thought and effort to fill a field of 140 characters, time and time again. They quit as they realize it takes time to maintain a micro blog with a growing fan base. They quit because the rewards for their efforts are usually not instantaneous. They quit because their tweets seem to fall on deaf ears at times; their fans don't always reply and sometimes even unfollow -- gasp, not that!!

    But Alas, not all is lost on the Twitter Quitters' efforts... as they have the benefit of squatting on their "twitter.com/name" -- and space in Twitter history.