Feeling The Burn

I haven't gotten any interviews yet, but I have been asked for an online portfolio link. Trouble is, I didn't really have an online portfolio.

I do now.



It still doesn't look quite like what I had in mind, and I didn't take the time to make fancy rollovers like I originally thought to. Yet, anyway.



Also, for most of my work for the past ten years, I don't have the electronic art. It was on company servers and backups, and I'm not at the company anymore, and even if I was it would be ethically iffy to burn copies of the files for personal use like that. So for some of this stuff, I had to just photograph my physical portfolio.



Hopefully, someone gets curious, I'll get to tote that non-virtual portfolio to an interview. Where I can do all the explaining I didn't do in the online portfolio. At least at this point, it seemed like it would get very texty if I started explaining exactly what I did on each project, what skill it illustrates, etc.



Meanwhile, back before I was voted off the island, I burned some mix CDs for a fellow Cult member, Franc Tireur. This was all part of the great Fall CD exchange, whereby various of us nerds swapped names and addresses, spent some quality time with our CD collections and sent off our little pearls of ecclectia to each other. Franc Tireur is French. Or German. His real first name is actually German, but his address is in France. But he knew enough French to correct my blog post about 'Où est ta vache?'



Anyway, I tend to make these things into a project. I know I'm not alone in failing to limit myself to one CD. Franc Tireur's to me was two discs, one of movie soundtrack stuff, one of assorted Django Reinhart, Tri Yann and whatnot.



I made two discs of mainly novelty music: Tim Wilson, Hayseed Dixie, Tom Lehrer and various other items you'd normally hear on Dr. Demento. With some semi-obscure pop tunes, particularly out of genre covers which I love. Cake doing Sad Songs and Waltzes; Luther Wright and the Wrongs doing a country rendition of Comfortably Numb; the Mighty Mighty BossTones doing Detroit Rock City; the Bangles doing Hazy Shade of Winter.



So then, I remembered he liked jazz, though I had forgotten how relatively old school his tastes run compared to mine. So I burned a jazz disc. And then I had this DVD of a bunch of kinetic art called 'Machines' that I've duped a few times. It's one of those rare instances where piracy is not only legal but encouraged: the disclaimer at the front goes something like 'According to certain theories of quantum mechanics, when this video is not being viewed, it does not exist. So copy it freely and pass it along please.' I think part of the reasoning is that it's all MIT mechanical engineering projects, done no doubt for credit if not on grant money to boot.



And I had to make album art for this junk. In my freelance career, I haven't yet gotten the opportunity to do someone's album cover. Typically, self producing sorts try to be their own art directors, often with disastrous results. And if they hire someone, they tend to hire whoever so-and-so used, and if that wasn't you, you don't even get a chance to bid on the work. So I scratched the creative itch, up to a point anyway.


I didn't post the pics sooner here because I wanted him to see them out of the box first. A box loaded with assorted ad specialties, of course.



I kind of wish I had the electronic files for these, but I did them at what was 'work' at the time because I had access to an HP Indigo so the printing would be professional. They'd make a handy addition to the 'just for fun' page of the e-portfolio.