Well last year I was able to design my first billboard. I am an animator for the most part, so I had never been asked to do this type of thing before. We needed to promote our morning shows and corporate gave the thumbs up for billboards. It is pretty expensive to these things and our company doesn’t think it is worth the money most of the time. This year they did, so I designed a couple focusing on our traffic reporters/real SAPD officers, and one focusing on our anchors.
In the end the traffic ones didn’t make it. The SAPD thought it wasn’t in their interests to appear to be promoting a specific news outlet or promoting the fame of 2 of its officers. The GMSA anchor one did make it, and it sat above the highways around town for a few months. In retrospect I should have taken a photo of the actual billboards just for fun. Let’s just say it is weird to see something you did printed up so huge.
Working the high resolution files for this was a painful task. Everything I did in photoshop was tedious. Just opening the file took 5-10 minutes. Also since we were spending so much money I had all of the bosses staring over my shoulder. I am glad I got to do this at least once though.
When I lived in Baltimore and D.C. I used to make a weekly trek to a West Baltimore basement to record with the amazing SKURJ! I played guitar and recorded while Allen played bass and Dan and Malcolm rapped off the top of their heads. I would hit the record button and hope whatever happened would be awesome. I would then tweak the tracks over the next week and mix everything down before the next session. After a month or two we would have a compilation to duplicate and hand out to our small but loyal group of fans. Aside from from our Baltimore base, Dan says we were big with some high school kids in Jersey.
We were never a big deal and we never even tried to be. All of us just loved trying make the other guy laugh. So the music reflects that. We never took ourselves too seriously, and that is why Skurj still exists after more than 10 years. The fact that we respected the humor and we couldn’t wait to hear what was next kept us going. Get us in a room with some party favors and hit record. We will give you an album with at least one good song.
When I first started playing with Skurj, I approached the situation from the perspective of being a big fan of Ween, Beck and Sebadoh. I was way into the whole 90’s D.I.Y. recording thing. Skurj was just the right situation to actually do that. I started out recording on a 4 track and graduated up to a Roland VS-880EX. Technically it was a huge pain in the ass by current standards, but I captured the sound. Now Allen has a roided-out PC with numerous recording programs and I only record on my computer. Anyway, that means there is a bunch of SKURJ sitting around on tape. We did our first 2 years analog, and none of that is online….Watchout!
Well here is a classic that captures our late 90’s early 00’s sound. I guess this was recorded eight years ago? I can’t really remember. I’m sure Dan or Allen might. I miss those guys on Sunday afternoons.
This is only my first Skurj post. In the future I will be posting rare tracks from the past.
Here is a song by my band The Fadge. We wrote and recorded this in April 2008. It was inspired by my talkative and sometimes nosey neighbor Janet who was moving out at the time. I couldn’t walk out of my apartment without hearing, “Hey Kurt.” This would be followed by at least a half hour of Janet talking at me about whatever was bugging her that day. She was a nice lady, but man could she talk. She showed up one afternoon while the Fadge was relaxing and barbequing on the back porch. I think she hung out until 10pm talking about nursing and rodent problems etc.. She made a big impression on the other guys, and we had to write a song about her.
Here is a picture of Juan Croucier (Billy) during the six hour Janet Fest. He came up with the first guitar chords the next day. Enjoy.
Since it is that time again I thought I would dust off these animations. In 2004 I art directed these vote animations at News in Motion. Some of the modeling was done by my coworkers. We did these over a period of a week I guess. The pacing feels a bit slow now, but for web explanation videos they work. The voice over you hear is a dummy track we sent with our feeds. Pete Daniels is not voice over talent. He does play the hell out of a blues fiddle though. Catch him at The Zoo Bar in D.C. sometime. Violin blues riffs work.
Remember Puffy Daddy with his “Vote or Die!” slogan. Boy that worked didn’t it.
At my current job I don’t get to do much explaining with my graphics. At my last job that is all I did. This assignment let me delve back into some of those skills. These graphics were created for a spec website my station is currently trying to find a sponsor for. San Antonio has one of the highest rates of diabetes in the country, and my station thought a website where we tell people about diabetes would be a good idea. I agree.
In retrospect I spent more time on these than I should have, but after spending 4 years at Knight Ridder/ Tribune ,sitting next to guys who do these kinds of graphics so well, the bar in my mind was set pretty high. I was given some graphics from other medical sites as references. I’m not bragging, but I think these came out better visually. I did all of the modeling for these except for the torso skeleton and the heart further down the page. I turned these out in about 4 KSAT days. At a job a where this was my only assignment, it would have been 2 days or less.
Whenever I do medical graphics I think about Peter Kohama. He was the guy in my old department who always did excellent medical animations. He actually read medical journals and could probably operate on someone if he had to. I always wonder, “Would Dr. Kohama approve?” I guess he was my Yoda for medical graphics.
One more. Like I said, I did not model the heart. Someday maybe I’ll model a heart, but if you have a great one in your model library there isn’t any reason to. This assignment let me make a kidney, a stomach, a pancreas, and some blood vessels. Those I didn’t have. Look on turbosquid.com in the near future. I’m selling these guys.
