Alex Vorosmarthy, student at Taylor's University Lakeside. Formerly a student in Architecture & Design, I am currently studying Advertising and Broadcasting.
Hailing from California, my free time is spent as a performing musician, actor, and poet in the local Kuala Lumpur scene.
Assignment 1: E-Portfolio
Exercise 1: Stop Motion Animation
Mortal Kombat
The stop-motion video is based around the concept of re-creating the olden fighting-style video games such as Street Fighter and Mortal Combat. Alex Koh directed the short film, while also heading photography. Sashi and Uzair featured as the actors, with creative direction and set-moving done by me.
Photos used to make the stop-motion animation can be found HERE.
Exercise 2: Viral Content
Understanding Drug Abuse
There are many types of drugs available today that are used recreationally, both legally and illegally. Ranging from THC to crystallised Methamphetamines, drugs even come in various forms, like powder, pills, liquids, herbs, or even rocks. Despite the fact that their effects are known to have many negative side-effects, they are still widely used for the purpose of experiencing an otherworldly moment, usually to fulfil the need of escapism.
What is it exactly that captivates users of drugs to continue using them? While peer pressure plays a large role in exposing many individuals, that pressure alone is not what continues the habit. While drug users may spend more time with other users, simply due to seeing the use of drugs as a commonality, studies have shown that repeated use of drugs did not develop a habit until the 4th or 5th use, within a small timeframe.
Infamously, drugs have been said to have addictive properties, yet addictions alone are not the reason recreational drugs still see use. One famous study done to experiment on the addictiveness of drugs was the ‘Rat Park’ study in the 1970’s by Bruce Alexander. In his experiment, he initially placed a single rat in a cage with two water sources: one laced with heroin, and one without. Over the next few days, the rat would drink the drugged water continuously, until the point the rat died; repeated attempts at this study had the same results.
However, to follow up on his initial experiment, Alexander decided to expand the size by including a colony of nearly 50 rats, with an even ration between genders. In this ‘Rat Park’, the same two water sources were included. Astonishingly, the rats rarely drank water from the drugged water source. It was made clear that the rats, free to roam and breed, were in a much more socially active environment, and the lone rat in the cage most likely wanted to distance itself from reality.
From these experiments, Alexander concluded that the continual use of drugs was not something done out of habit, but rather done as a means of escaping from existing worldly issues.The Vietnam War is often cited as the real-world example of this experiment, where many veterans in Vietnam were addicted to heroin, but would stop use of the drug once they’d returned home to their families. From these experiments, and from the observations made during the Vietnam War, it was concluded that the abuse of drugs recreationally was strongly linked to coping with personal issues of individuals who partook in drug usage.
The issue of drug abuse will likely always exist; the best we can do is try to understand the mind-set of why drug abuse occurs. So what can we as individuals today do to help others from breaking the habit of drug use? The best course of action you can take is give those individuals moral support. Take an interest in them, and listen to what they have to say; everyone could use a friend.
Alexander, Bruce K., (2001) "The Myth of Drug-Induced Addiction", a paper delivered to the Canadian Senate, January 2001, Retrieved July 02, 2017
Alexander, B.K. (2000) "The globalization of addiction," Addiction Research, Retrieved July 02, 2017
Drucker, E. (1998) "Drug Prohibition and Public Health," U.S. Public Health Service, Vol. 114, Retrieved July 02, 2017
Peer Pressure and Substance Abuse. (n.d.). Retrieved July 02, 2017, from http://alcoholrehab.com/drug-addiction/peer-pressure-and-substance-abuse/
Exercise 3: Infographics
MDMA (Ecstasy)
Info-graphic on the drug MDMA, more commonly known as 'ecstasy'. The design of the info-graphic is simple and minimalist, as I felt it directly gave the details necessary without adding too many distracting elements, while maintaining a professional outlook without hubris.
Exercise 4: Mobile App
AsiaTraveller
For this assignment we were required to work in pairs to come up with a simple mobile app. Joel Ling and I worked together to come up with this app, titled 'AsiaTraveller', an app focused on offering services that allowed users to book travel packages to locations of their choosing within Asia.
While the app itself is relatively simple and small, we aimed to have something that could be big-impacting on how we deal with the concept of travelling abroad. AsiaTraveller helps users organise quickly and efficiently where they want to go, how they plan on travel, which cities and hotels they'd like to stay at, all while informing them about what kind of activities or locations are popular in those locations.
Assignment 2: Video
Our group video is based on the concept of selling a food-blog that showcases places to eat and the foods available at the showcased outlets. The storyboard and moodboard are shown below, with the shot-list and final video included at the bottom.
Final video. Filming was done primarily by Chah Yee, featuring Wendy as our food enthusiast, with Ting Yee and Sammy as producers. Editting being done by me.
Assignment 3:Animated Chat-Stickers
This assignment required us to come up with 6 animated GIF's to portray 6 different emotions or actions, and display our skills in creating and animating simple characters. The character I came up with is the Cookie Ket!
The moodboard above shows much of the inspiration and design elements I looked at during the initial ideas process. The cat in the middle is a small cat I recently fostered for a month and a half, and her name is Cookie. I used this image as the source of inspiration for the content I would be creating, drawing my colour palette from the image itself. Styles of drawing I knew would have to be simple for the purpose of animating it later on, so I stuck to stylized "chibi" drawings of cats. I also looked at how cats portrayed emotion through their eyes and ears for some ideas, and tried to translate that into simple drawings.
I ended up doing about 3-4 iterations of each expression, using butter-paper as it was easy to layer one over the other for tracing. Once I was satisfied with the initial drawings, I moved them into Adobe Illustrator and traced them over, making a few changes on Illustrator in between frames. Below you can see the final designs, with the animated GIF's provided in a link!
Credits:
Created with images by Isabelle + Stéphane Gallay - "Plini à Aarau-2" • Isabelle + Stéphane Gallay - "Plini à Aarau-1" • Isabelle + Stéphane Gallay - "Plini à Aarau-5" • Isabelle + Stéphane Gallay - "Plini à Aarau-8"