The TREE Body Art Project was created by talented masters:
Anna Kovalkova
Elena Fokina
Photography:
Sergey Sobolev
Model:
Yasenka Gaika
Assistants:
Rena Garashova
Raya Petrovskaya
Eye-Lenses:
Adria Cats
vk.com/adriacats
Directed, Shot and Edited: Ali Wonder
Music by Two Steps From Hell “Deadzone Five”
Pabst Street Jam 2015
Snowboard Rail Jam x Block Party located in Toronto, ON
Ring in spring with a last hurrah to winter.
Directed, Shot and Edited: Ali Wonder
Music by Yellow Claw & Tropkillaz “Assets”
Here is my One Minute Short Film project for the Video class. We had to create a short film, which is exactly one minute long. The hardest parts of doing it was to figure out the story, and, during the editing process, make sure that a title, story and credits do actually fit into time limits.
On the one hand, one minute film can be shot on any theme. Pick any topic, and go with a flow. The idea behind it is “We don’t need a thousands ideas. We don’t need a perfect idea. Just take a good idea, and work on it.” But I had a huge trouble with it. The Three-act structure requires the set-up, confrontation and resolution. Buy how to tell a full story in one minute?
At the starting point, I had an idea to shoot a fun video about different signs of luck. But after talking to my friend, and joking around with this, I came to the point of showing that there is no absolute happiness, luck, or carefreeness, when people think that nothing matters, but their own comfort zone. All the people around still have an influence on your life, in one way or another. Apathy is able to ruin a spirit of community and the feel of belonging; the most powerful force in the history of society. As long as people care about each other, they can be called humans. As Donald Sutherland claimed in his interview, “I’m convinced that only united, people can make the world better”
Here is a link to the assignment.
https://senema.senecac.on.ca/videos/2937/alisa_maltseva_viceversa
However, I had issues with uploading the project to seneca “youtube.” So there is a different, one and a half minute version of the film, that was edited in Premiere Pro, which in the post down below.
One Minute Short Film
Directed, Shot and Edited: Ali Wonder
Music: “I Just Wanna Live” by Good Charlotte
For this project I had to recreate the photo asset attached below by using the gradient mesh tool in Adobe Illustrator. To say that it was hard is to say nothing. Gradient mesh tool requires discipline, accuracy and enormous amount of patience. It took me around 24 hours of continuous sitting in front of computer screen.
To begin with, the hardest part was to actually start the project, when you have no idea what to start with. Especially, if it is the first time you use the mesh tool. Which pepper to start with? To make one gradient for each pepper or separate each part of the pepper and create different gradients? How many lines to use? Less is more?
Later on, I created grid for each pepper. That’s the time when everything looks chaotically and you are terrified of the upcoming coloring process.
However, after couple of more hours, when you start understanding the basic principles of gradient mesh and my efforts started to pay off, you catch the second wind. Also, I’ve never realized how amazing the mesh tool is. Who knows, maybe in a year or two I will be able to recreate people portraits.
Usefulness of this tool is definitely not exaggerated. I will try to grow as a professional and keep working on the gradient mesh tool skill.
Final Version:
Comparison:
Before: After:
Here is my Character Vector Illustration project for the New Media Tools ll class. First of all I had to find a professional sketches form deviantart web-site. Then contact the artists to get an authorization from him or her. Thirdly, the course instructor needed to approve the chosen sketch from, and finally trace it down in Illustrator and color it. After doing some search, I desided to choose “Avengers” by Marcio Abreu.
This is an original sketch, which I had to work on.
The first step was tracing down various parts of the characters’ bodies. This was the most comlicated and monatonous exercise. Mostly because the sketch had lots of details in it. Also, it was difficult to make decisions about picking tiny parts of the sketch and tracing rough areas, which are the toughest to work with.
After significant ammount of time I hit the point where my efforts started to pay off. That was one for the most exciting and inspiering moments throughout the working process. Seeing the half-way done sketch forced me to work harder.
Next step would be a colouring part. We’re not looking for an easy way out, right? So I decided to colour the sketch using a mesh tool for the first time. It was quite a challenge. Firstly, I figured that It would be much easier to have some kind of reference in front of me. Therefore, I found couple of pictures with suitable colour pallete. Then I created colour swatches for specific characters. These steps made my life much easier.
All the other actions that were involved in a colouring process were time consuming, but at the same time not intense.
Tracing is done. Colouring is done. Background is the only thing I needed to finish.
Learning how to work with a tablet was just a nighmare. Even if I am an artist, drawing digitaly is completely different experience, compere to life drawing. Therefore, It required hours to paint small stones and dust.
All in all, it took me around 80-90 hours to get everything done. Out of any project, this one has to be my favourite. It was challenging, time consuming, interesting and entraining. I put a lot of thought and effort in a creative process.
Finished Version:
Comparison:
Last four months of studying experimental music theories put an adea into my mind, that a lot of modern musicians, in some ways, could be called experimental. Briefly, Experimental music is a general label for any music that pushes/breaks existing boundaries and genre definitions. Through multiple artists and bands like Mike Tompkins, Peter Hollens, Radiohead, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa and so on, I decided to choose Lindsey Stirling, and sort of analyze her music, performing style and production methods. So here we are.
For someone, who still has no idea who Lindsey Stirling is, and why she deserves attention, here is the answer. Lindsey Stirling is an American musician, composer and violinist. She was a quarter-finalist on “America’s Got Talent” TV Show, where she was known as a hip-hop violinist. In my openion, Stirling can be considered to be an experimental artist because of her own innovative style of music, unusual approach to perform with a violin, not conventional method of production, and contemporary dance style.
To begin with, in her compositions, Lindsey Stirling combines non-traditional mix of Classical music and Electronic music. Likewise, Stockhausen experimented with fusion of acoustic and electronic sounds. As Stirling noticed in the interview, a lot of people tend to think that her style is unmarketable, and the only reason why she succeed is because she stayed true to herself. Along with other experimental musicians like Luigi Russolo and Ornette Coleman, she was more interested in the process, than final result of the product. According to John Cage, “Music is all around us.” Lindsey Stirling supports this idea in the song “Elements”; She took everyday sounds of nature and transmitted them through the violin, by expressing the feeling of the four main elements.
Composer Le Monte Young described Minimalism genre of music as, “That which is made with the minimum of means.” Or minimum of instruments. Generally, Lindsey produces violin covers of popular songs such as “My Immortal” by Evanescence and “We found Love” by Rihanna. Besides, she collaborates with some musicians who use such instruments as voice, harp, cello and piano. Back in the time of the beginning of Hip-hop music, using your voice for creating a beat or imitate musical instruments was highly experimental and bizarre. However, Peter Hollens and Pentatonix sound perfectly in combination with a violin. Their covers on Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” or Game of Thrones main theme became as popular as original versions of these songs. Furthermore, harp is not an instrument which audience constantly listen to nowadays, but Stirling inbreathe a new life in the song “River Flows in You,” which became mainstream composition in past couple of years, by playing this song in duet with a harp; what makes this cover unrepeatable and vivid, and increase an interest in this peace of music again.
Lindsey Stirling’s production methods do not really differ from any other modern musician who produce hip hop, or electronic styles of music. Digital technologies shape and change the way how musicians write music. They all use adopted Pierre Schaepper’s Musique Concerte techniques, such as sampling, re-mixing, and mash up. Generally, that’s how all modern beats and music are made. The one distinction, which Stirling turns into account is the live violin recording, that always influences on higher emotional content and specific musical details in the songs. The same result is not achievable with the constant cold and monotonous machinery sounds. Thus, the enormous investment in music was created with the rise of the recording studios. First of all, it made a recording process much easier. Secondly, recording studio technologies allow to record instruments separately, mix them and layer them. And on the last step of audio post-production, called mastering, the final composition can be edited, manipulated, compressed, well equalized, and so on.
Perfomance is a large part of her career as a musician, what had a great influence on her career as the successful artist. All intents and purposes, she became popular due to some of her others hobbies: video directing and editing. Because of her incredible artistic abilities, in the music videos she creates a short films, which just can’t not to catch the eye. Stirling’s the most popular music video for the song “Crystallize” got more than 108 million views on YouTube. Also, she charms a wider range of viewers by creating covers on worldwide famous video game themes like Zelda, Assasin’s Creed III, and Skyrim, and epic movies’ main soundtracks such as Star Wars, Mission Impossible, and Lord of the Rings. In addition to filmmaking talents, Stirling developed her own contemporary dancing style with a violin.
In conclusion, Lindsey Stirling appeals to different techniques and combines various incompatible styles of music, including classical, electronic, minimal, techno, dubstep, drum’n’bass, and trance music. She also collaborates with other experimental musicians and bands, what strengthens her position as experimental artist. Stirlings’ production process involves samplers, midi controllers, drum machines, computer music software and live recording. Last but not least, she develops and continuously improves her own type of dance, which adds spice to her performance. Due to all these facts, Stirling is totally non traditional artist, who the audience got used to see on stage. All on all, this is what experimental music is all about.
To begin with, Gibson is a huge guitar corporation, which was found by Orville Gibson, in 1902. Company that takes a lead position on the market for more than hundred years deserves special attention. Therefore, I tried to recreate Gibson website, and make it more appealing for customers.
No doubt, the hardest challenge was definitely an organization process. Figuring out the template system and guides’ locations requires time, some thoughts and at least blurry sense of what 
you need to get as a result. The same way, organization of layers needs approximately the same amount of time as creating an actual fully designed web page. It’s easy to get lost, but after placing things in right order, it saves a lot of time afterwords.
The purpose of website is to introduce a product. Although, the company established itself at the beginning of previous century, website should reflect the modernization of this product. I decided to give the website a modern look by choosing minimalistic interface style, solid black color layout, with a little bit of gradient on the top and bottom parts of page. Strong headline with zero fluff, great product screenshot in the center of the page, round navigation buttons on the large image. By scrolling down, users download more content. All of these are 2014 trends. My inspirer for picking three main colors was the legendary Gibson guitar model “Gibson Les Paul Custom Black Beauty Bigsby.” The collaboration of black, gold, and white looks well balanced. So, it doesn’t overwhelm the website, or make it look chaotic.
Functionality of Gibson website remains to the same traditions, but becomes more constrained. Viewers might have issues with concentrating on specific thing, if there is too much content or useless information. There is no need to search through the whole page trying to find information you are looking for. If a user is interested in products, he or she just clicks on “products” icon on the top of the page. However, for a bit more interactivity, various products from the Store section may randomly appear on the middle section of the page, just in case if something new or interesting can catch the viewer’s eye. 
Likewise, the Gibson’s music school takes place under middle section with products. Four major key sections for guitar players pushes them to take couple of online free lessons.
Besides, in order to create something completely new, updated version of Gibson website includes a small, not distracting media player. So, viewers may also find their favorite Rock’n’Roll bands or musicians, chosen by Gibson stuff, and listen to 
them right on the web page, while surfing through the content. By pushing the button on the right side, listeners open and close media player. And then, by scrolling up/down or clicking on the top/bottom arrows, they search through content.
Welcome to Lindos. Whitewashed houses, ambling donkeys and car-free cobbled streets are the order of the day on the east coast of Rhodes.
Directed, Shot & Edited: Ali Wonder (Wonder Pro) – alialice1.portfoliobox.me
Music: “Beyond the Veil” by Lindsey Stirling
AliWonder 