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Jan. 9th, 2007 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
my_window_seatAnd so.
Went to OFFCenter again today to discuss volunteering with my extremely screwed up schedule. Decided that the best thing I can do for them given my limited availability will be to do a monthly events calendar for them that they can print out and have available for anyone to take with them, something I'm a little surprised they hadn't already had. I think they had one in the past but that it went by the wayside. Eh. Anyway, it's something I can do without necessarily having to be there while they're open, since I'll do it with my own software and such and just give to them to print.
Which introduced a new wrinkle - turns out they have their own in-house printing service capable of color separation. Another volunteer there told me the name of the process and I've already forgotten it, but interestingly it's based on the old AB Dick system of plating and on some other system of printing (that I've again forgotten - DOH!), and here's the funny part - it's done on a machine that looks exactly like a modern copy machine, BUT it prints 'plates' on an internal drum/feed system using RICE PAPER! No, seriously! This has apparently been around since the 80's but not having taken a Graphics class since high school (sometime around the Pleistocene Period), I'm a bit out of the loop. Anyway, they have interchangeable ink drums in a variety of different colors, and they currently use the old method of hand paste up to put together the stuff that they print, making different templates for the same document and printing each with different colors. The line-up for imaging isn't always perfect, but it gives the stuff that they do a kind of personality that you don't see anymore, what with most printing methods being completely digital and up for endless perfecting until the final product is so glossy and airbrushed-looking that it's generally - well, generic. So their stuff has some character. I like it.
Anyway, this unfortunately does mean more work for me. I had originally intended to just make a template for their monthly calendar that could be easily and quickly updated and that would just be photocopied month to month as needed. What this means is that what Claudia and Co. would like to have would be a much more colorful product - very neat, and I like it myself - but it also means that I will need to be making 3 or more separated masters for printing for each monthly calendar. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to do this just yet, although I suspect that I'll be making a single master in MS Publisher, converting it to a .jpeg (either finding a way to save it thus or *argh* printing it out then scanning it - [EDIT - yeah, I can save it as a .jpeg - RAWK!]), loading it into Photoshop, and erasing out sections as needed for each master. A great deal more time-consuming than what I originally had planned, but would make a nice product, and since it's what they want and what I offered to do for them, there you have it. Of course, the upside of the time-consuming bit is that it should help with the need to earn hours for my contract, so there's that. Plus I'll be teaching myself a new skill, and it would be yet *another* thing to add to the Almighty Resume. And be much more of a creative endeavor than just plugging in text to a boring document every month. Huzzah. :)
Urgh. I will *definitely* have to drop those two extra classes. I'm just waiting until school officially starts just to make sure something doesn't get canceled first, leaving me high and dry and scrambling for a 'filler' class to keep my full-time standing. I trust UNM about as far as I could throw that beastly, bloated and completely dysfunctional money hole of a 'university'. Gah.
Oh, another cool thing - the rehearsals for PW are in the Kimo Theatre, and tonight I just got my first tour of the building. I've lived in this silly town for 11 years now and still managed never to set foot in the space. Anyway, Bentley was taking me around the space and OMYGAWD is it cool! Seriously - this is a sweet space! It's a vintage Movie House of days gone by, and as Bentley put it, it's a stock example of Southwestern Art Deco. Seriously - click on the link above, which goes the the City website photo gallery for the space - look at it - isn't it PURTY!?!? There are red underlit COW SKULLS fer chrissakes! And apparently the ceiling has inset lights for a night sky interior - how sweet is that! It looks really gorgeous and imposing, but the funny thing is that it's really a small space, relatively speaking - it only seats 650 - but it's scaled just like the big movies houses like the Egyptian in Seattle. It's like one of the big houses, just shrunk all down like a Polly Pocket version. Hee!
'Kay. I could babble on lots and lots more, but I have stuffses to do now and still need to get to bed in time to get up WAY TOO DAMN EARLY tomorrow - campus-bound to do props crap, since Richard is being my heeeerrrrooooo and building additional shelving in the on-campus warehouse for me, since he's an angel like that.
Hope you all had a great day - *mwah!*
Went to OFFCenter again today to discuss volunteering with my extremely screwed up schedule. Decided that the best thing I can do for them given my limited availability will be to do a monthly events calendar for them that they can print out and have available for anyone to take with them, something I'm a little surprised they hadn't already had. I think they had one in the past but that it went by the wayside. Eh. Anyway, it's something I can do without necessarily having to be there while they're open, since I'll do it with my own software and such and just give to them to print.
Which introduced a new wrinkle - turns out they have their own in-house printing service capable of color separation. Another volunteer there told me the name of the process and I've already forgotten it, but interestingly it's based on the old AB Dick system of plating and on some other system of printing (that I've again forgotten - DOH!), and here's the funny part - it's done on a machine that looks exactly like a modern copy machine, BUT it prints 'plates' on an internal drum/feed system using RICE PAPER! No, seriously! This has apparently been around since the 80's but not having taken a Graphics class since high school (sometime around the Pleistocene Period), I'm a bit out of the loop. Anyway, they have interchangeable ink drums in a variety of different colors, and they currently use the old method of hand paste up to put together the stuff that they print, making different templates for the same document and printing each with different colors. The line-up for imaging isn't always perfect, but it gives the stuff that they do a kind of personality that you don't see anymore, what with most printing methods being completely digital and up for endless perfecting until the final product is so glossy and airbrushed-looking that it's generally - well, generic. So their stuff has some character. I like it.
Anyway, this unfortunately does mean more work for me. I had originally intended to just make a template for their monthly calendar that could be easily and quickly updated and that would just be photocopied month to month as needed. What this means is that what Claudia and Co. would like to have would be a much more colorful product - very neat, and I like it myself - but it also means that I will need to be making 3 or more separated masters for printing for each monthly calendar. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to do this just yet, although I suspect that I'll be making a single master in MS Publisher, converting it to a .jpeg (either finding a way to save it thus or *argh* printing it out then scanning it - [EDIT - yeah, I can save it as a .jpeg - RAWK!]), loading it into Photoshop, and erasing out sections as needed for each master. A great deal more time-consuming than what I originally had planned, but would make a nice product, and since it's what they want and what I offered to do for them, there you have it. Of course, the upside of the time-consuming bit is that it should help with the need to earn hours for my contract, so there's that. Plus I'll be teaching myself a new skill, and it would be yet *another* thing to add to the Almighty Resume. And be much more of a creative endeavor than just plugging in text to a boring document every month. Huzzah. :)
Urgh. I will *definitely* have to drop those two extra classes. I'm just waiting until school officially starts just to make sure something doesn't get canceled first, leaving me high and dry and scrambling for a 'filler' class to keep my full-time standing. I trust UNM about as far as I could throw that beastly, bloated and completely dysfunctional money hole of a 'university'. Gah.
Oh, another cool thing - the rehearsals for PW are in the Kimo Theatre, and tonight I just got my first tour of the building. I've lived in this silly town for 11 years now and still managed never to set foot in the space. Anyway, Bentley was taking me around the space and OMYGAWD is it cool! Seriously - this is a sweet space! It's a vintage Movie House of days gone by, and as Bentley put it, it's a stock example of Southwestern Art Deco. Seriously - click on the link above, which goes the the City website photo gallery for the space - look at it - isn't it PURTY!?!? There are red underlit COW SKULLS fer chrissakes! And apparently the ceiling has inset lights for a night sky interior - how sweet is that! It looks really gorgeous and imposing, but the funny thing is that it's really a small space, relatively speaking - it only seats 650 - but it's scaled just like the big movies houses like the Egyptian in Seattle. It's like one of the big houses, just shrunk all down like a Polly Pocket version. Hee!
'Kay. I could babble on lots and lots more, but I have stuffses to do now and still need to get to bed in time to get up WAY TOO DAMN EARLY tomorrow - campus-bound to do props crap, since Richard is being my heeeerrrrooooo and building additional shelving in the on-campus warehouse for me, since he's an angel like that.
Hope you all had a great day - *mwah!*
