In Com 210 I learned an abundance of valuable tools to use in the future. Overall, my favorite project was between the logo design and the audio interview. The logo design allowed for pure creativity, which is sometimes hindered in most classroom environments. I had used Photoshop plenty of times in the past but always had issues with pixelated pictures. Although I did not find Illustrator to be as user friendly as Photoshop, I did think the overall product was much better.

I recently bought a better laptop that allows for me to draw on the screen. I started using some what I learned from the class to design a logo for work outside of the classroom assignments. I love it and look forward to improving my skills.

The Audio interview was just pure fun for me. Coming up with a topic and deciding how I wanted to accomplish the Audio project was entertaining. After deciding what I wanted to do and completing the interview, I realized I had 10 minutes worth of audio. The puzzle of whittling down my current audio into 2 minutes was quite the challenge, but one I enjoyed doing.

Out of every assignment I would say the toughest objective I cam across was finding music for either the Audio or Video Projects. Find music that isn’t copyrighted and fits your scheme is incredibly difficult. Overall, I think the class did a great job covering all the useful adobe tools.

I am enrolled in Sports Management major. For coursework I will be taking some marketing classes and communication classes to round myself out. My goal with this degree is to work for upper level sport management.

What I mean by that is, for example, working for the city of Spokane’s Sports and Recreation. In that position I would bring a large focus back to youth sports in the city of Spokane. Right now, kids are not playing team sports on average compared to the rest of the country. This could be negative affect from two standpoints. Either parents can’t afford it for their children or parents don’t know about the leagues available. This is where taking Com 210 comes into play.

Having the ability to market in different modes is a valuable tool. Com 210 has given me at least the basics to get myself familiar enough to be comfortable with most tasks. Kids should be playing sports, especially team sports and that is my goal in life: to make it more available and cheaper for kids to play sports.

My audio project was on the “Boom Mafia”, which tails some of my previous works. In some of my critique I realize it is not clarified exactly where the “boom” comes from. As I was unable to do a second interview, I will use a few sentences to explain. We are a very small population in the United States Air Force. We are enlisted, compared to commission, basically meaning we do not have college degrees; for the most part. We do aerial refueling, which is explained in the interview. I feel that was the basic piece missing from this interview.

Andrew helped me do this interview over a computer program, similar to Skype, called TeamSpeak. My microphone is not as good as his and it was evident in the interview. I was much quieter and a little raspier than Andrew. We interviewed for about 10-12 minutes and it was difficult to whittle that down to 2 minutes. I used a lot of splicing and rearranging our original content to make the interview.

Following the most common narrative in my critiques, the difference in volumes, I found a nifty tool in Audition. As an effect on each clip, I could raise and lower peak and true volumes. This helped me change what was once Andrew’s loud speaking and my quiet tone as one even decibel. I think this really improved my audio overall. Secondly, I was told I needed to ask intro and outro music. This was some what confusing, as I do have intro and outro music. The intro and outro music are short because of the amount of content I had to work with. Here I chose substance over ambiance.

There was more I wish I could have added if the time requirement allowed me but overall I was happy with the finished product I was left with. I was going for a more natural interview feel, much like NPR. The music was much related, as the horns are familiar to early war as trumpets blew for battle. This was some license free music I found online from the reading. Truthfully, I feel I could do interviews like this in the future to help build a narrative around the many jobs in the military people are not familiar with or are misconstrued. It is valuable knowledge for anyone that may be interested in joining the military.

I decided to do my story like an NPR interview. Seeing most of my posts all follow the same premise, being a boom operator, I decided to continue that trend. I am noticing after each assignment that my scope is becoming more and more focused, which I assume is the purpose of each assignment.  I decided to hone in on the “Boom Mafia”, which I slightly explained in the last assignment. For this assignment, I wanted people listening to get the perspective from another boom’s point of view on what it means to be apart of the group.

Only having 2 minutes really made this difficult. In the raw audio footage post, you can see that it was 10 minutes long. Condensing that into 2 minutes was quite the workload, but I did enjoy it. It was like a very stretched out puzzle. Listening to the raw footage, you can also tell that Andrew’s interview is quite different. I only grabbed pieces of the interview that were relevant and that could create the best picture. This also required editing my questions even. Shaving seconds anywhere I could was the most important thing. I found using Audition being incredibly easy and intuitive. Trying to keep the volume even throughout the interview was slightly difficult but using as Andrew’s and mysself’s voices are quite different and carry differently through the mic. This was easier to do after playing around with audition as there is a volume limiter within the program.

I decided to use some music that I found on ccmixter.org that fits with the interview. I think it is simple enough for an intro and the closing was quick. This helped with my timing issues and gave subtle background music that I don’t believe is too dominating. Overall, I thought the interview turned out great and comparing it with the raw footage, I am impressed with how it turned out!

Interview about Boom Mafia.

The Boom Operator career field has been around since 1948. When the Boom Operator first came into the USAF, there was a patch made for booms with a tiger on it. Ever since then the tiger has been the resemblance of the Boom. I have been in for a little over 10 years and can say that the tiger patch has fallen to the wayside. This is where my inspiration of the tiger comes from. He is to resemble the heritage of the Boom Operator. Since I have been in, Booms have always been considered a “mafia” because of how close-knit and tight the overall group is. It did not matter if you were on the job day one or been in for 100 years, you were accepted into the group. I took this idea and attempted to merge it with the tiger. The shield that it is designed on is a play off the current Boom patch that we wear today.

Starting the design, I uploaded a picture of my sketch into Illustrator. Here I used the brush blob to trace the outline of my sketch and was able to copy and paste onto an artboard. Using the live bucket tool, I was able to fill all the colors and slightly adjust the thickness of my sketch. I realized the further I got into using illustrator that it is not an easy program without extensive knowledge. I found Photoshop to be much easier to use and much easier to customize. Every time I tried adjusting certain paths, I would either get errors or it would not adjust the way I wanted. I did not get to accomplish what I wanted with this design out of pure frustration.

The changes I made from my previous design were fairly drastic. The most common comment I got on my first draft was that the tiger did not look like a tiger. With this advice I needed almost start from scratch. I also attempted to go with a more simple text design and base. I hope in the future I can go back and accomplish what I wanted out of this design.

The “Boom Mafia” has been around what seems to be forever. The name is a representation of how tight the Boom Operator community is. Generally, Boom Operators all hang out together and are relatively close. This is where I came up with the idea of the mafia theme. Designing this, I went through a few different ideas and layouts.

First, I started with the hat and coat from a side and front view. Originally it was just a shadowed face of a person but then I decided on the tiger. The representation of the tiger is historical in the Boom community, dating all the way back to the first boom operators. It has since fallen to the wayside with only a handful of booms that carry on the tiger legacy. Here I saw a great opportunity to design a logo that was entrenched in boom operator history and could potentially be printed out as a physical patch for our uniforms. The tiger made the design much more difficult as I needed to find ways to show what it was without straying away from the overall shadowed gangster theme.

Scouring the internet looking at different logos from all over the place, I saw a lot of sport team type logos and this is what inspired my side profile logo. It also is the reason for the sharpen edges and more condensed look as it follows a lot of attributes that are carried in sport logos.

I scanned my sketch into illustrator and was able to use the pen tool to trace along my sketch and make an outline. It was surprisingly easy to separate everything into different sections for coloring. I would like to add more detail to the face but due to my lack of experience it was as good as I could get it. I would have liked to make the hat seemed shadowed with a blueish tint but again was unable to achieve what I wanted. I found that transforming text in illustrator is incredibly difficult.  Unlike photoshop, Illustrator would not keep items uniform when scaling or skewing. I would like to address the text later on when I have more knowledge. I added a “boom” to the “I” in mafia to give a little more relation to the community. Overall I enjoyed the project and hope you like the logo.

With the title of my blog being “Adventures of a Boom Operator”, I decided to go with a comic book theme graphic design. Using the idea of intellectual unity to combine my title, photos, and design to create a story. All the pictures I used are from my career in the military.

At first the design started as a collage and I realized there was nothing that made it stand out. As the pictures sat there, I had originally used the white borders we had used in a previous project and saw the comic book setting being built. I tried to use my current abilities to utilize as much continuation lines as possible. The hierarchy of the design I feel could have been utilized a little better but was limited to the pictures I currently have. I feel later I can better understand a design feature to really bring the page alive. I attempted to adjust the contrast as we were taught before with the leveling and did the best I could.

The coloring was the hardest part of this design. Using the filters out of photoshop, I found it difficult to really bring the contrast of colors out in the design. I look forward to being able to correct this in the future but found that using the title, with more color, I was able to make the page pop a little more. I settled with the red and yellow in the title because I felt it exemplified comic books. It would bring a little more clarity to what I was attempting to achieve and becomes more relatable to those that look at it. After the reading the typography section, it helped me avoid mistakes like underlining and using the appropriate bolded items.

Overall I was satisfied with this design as I am a huge comic book fan and I feel like it is something “different”. Remembering back to the old Avenger and Captain America comics, I attempted to create the same paneling and titles we all remember. I hope to continue on this idea and make the Boom Operator almost seem like a super hero. This will play off of another post that I had posted earlier in the semester about unsung heroes.

All photos are owned by myself.

This post is prep for a project I will be working on creating a comic book style portrait for my blog. I will use these photos to create a pop art/comic strip for “Adventures of a Boom Operator”.