Lead Pre-Production

Since the start of this class and even before we formed our groups, we all seemed extremely motivated towards creating a project that could turn an eye, and new possibilities that change the meaning of visual art & communication. With that in mind, we definitely wanted to make something out of the box and innovative, but also wanted it to be practical, useful, and something that actually educates and informs people, which is the nucleus of communication.

Through the first two weeks of the class, I was still exploring different techniques & tools that are used to make AR & interactive projects. I have always been interested in & passionate about photography, design, & technology, and I was looking to do something that combined all three together. Then I came across a new AI software called LumaAI, which uses luminosity from a series of 2D images to create a photorealistic 3D model. It is a relatively new technology and the AI algorithm is still learning ways to make the models look better. The first week of using the app, I scanned objects like a water bottle, my friend, and an orange tree.

While I explored this software, our group also came up with a new idea for our project; to create an interactive magazine (zine). The ethos behind the project seemed impactful to all of us, mainly because it combines the oldest form of communication with the latest one. The project and the idea seemed extremely valuable to me, primarily because this is something that combines all of my passions and is something that I could potentially pursue in the professional field in the next few years. The use of 3D scanning as well as the zine concept could be applied to a plethora of applications such as live advertising through billboards, 3D models of products while shopping online, it could open up an entire new field of art which is based on paper but is actually live through AR. This has the potential to bring back comic books from the dead. The project was so amusing to me that I created my own version based on the movie Interstellar for the preliminary, or trial project.

I also experimented with scanning larger objects like buildings and trees with a drone, however there are multiple challenges with weather and flying safety that we are battling one by one, but should be accomplished in the upcoming weeks. The processing times are also enormous considering the vast size of the files.

With all the exploring and experimenting, we finally settled on a final topic which was to showcase and educate people about some of the more unique and visually pleasing trees that we have on campus. Interesting fact, our entire group had never realized the vast variety of trees that we have on campus and how beautiful they actually are. More importantly, we discovered that the iconic palm trees are not even originally from California, and there are so many trees that are originally from a totally different part of the world with different climate and vegetation, but have adapted themselves to thrive in Southern California. Considering this, we had to let other people at CSUN know more about the trees in our creative language.

Lastly, I am also designing the actual zine, which will be a booklet style 6-page zine. We spent a lot of time on dotting down the appropriate design language and color palette and the overall theme of the zine as we wanted to maintain a linear style of design throughout all our projects, i.e. the website & zine. We will be using a minimal design, but want it to be elegant as well and we decided to go with putting real images for illustrative purposes instead of digital graphics.