Campfiretales

Doogie Houser Orchestra

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:09:00 +0000

Buh-Bye

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 03:47:00 +0000

----------------
Listening to: Tortured Soul - Enjoy It Now
via FoxyTunes

What goes though your mind when you ask for a drink

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:46:00 +0000

Newhouse Portfolios Fall 08

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 20:23:00 +0000

Here is a link to this Fall's crop of Newhouse creative students.
Feel free to review and comment.

Is this thing on?

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 13:18:00 +0000

I received an email from Geoffrey Moore at Great Bear Outdoors who found me online (google search of the name of the company no doubt), but upon the realization that I was not a camping site or a blog about camping asked If I would mind adding him to our blog.

And you know what? Why not. I like camping, and the outdoors and he asked! Not to mention the notion that someone out there might be checking this blog on occasion, intrigued me.

You gotta ask people and sell yourself to whoever will listen, no matter if your an adverting agency, a student trying to get a job or selling camping gear. You never know what it could lead to.

So here's to Great Bear Outdoors, Happy Holidays and good luck with the business.
And anyone else who might be reading this blog, post a comment, let me know you're out there.

that's all I ask.

Holiday Card

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:38:00 +0000

Besides the work I do as Campdesign, I am also the creative director at a local agency called MindShare. We just sent out our online Holiday card. I am pretty pleased with how it turned out. Click here or on the image to see the site.

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 01:58:00 +0000

http://img369.imageshack.us/img369/6012/bailoutyk2.jpg

Testing my Jott account...

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:24:00 +0000

Testing my Jott account with Blog ____. listen

Powered by Jott

Things Are Fine

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:39:00 +0000

Terrific work from BPN in Portland. More oof the campaign

Did you read anything?

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 12:49:00 +0000

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:14:00 +0000

Some nice feedback on the poster I designed for Syracuse Stage's production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.
Here is the poster the article refers to.

Syracuse Stage opens its season with a blistering 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom'

By: WAYNE MYERS, Dispatch Drama Critic

09/17/2008




	Photo by T. CHARLES ERICKSON. Cast members of Syracuse Stage's production of August Wilson's 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," with Ebony Jo-Ann, center, as "Ma" Rainey.

Bond may like individuals to be depicted in theater production artwork as anonymously as possible to avoid audience members linking the depictions to the actors in the roles, but Syracuse Stage's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" poster, designed by Kevin Mann, becomes something more. The viewer is forced into an uncomfortable position. The faces of the woman before the microphone and the horn player in the background are indistinct. All the viewer can see--just as a racist might--is that they are black. It is an exceptional piece of artwork that captures what this play is about.

SYRACUSE - On Sept. 6, just days before Syracuse Stage was to launch its 2008-09 season (Producing Artistic Director Timothy Bond's first where the play selections were his own), the company announced it had scratched the season's fifth play, Stephen Temperley's "Souvenir," based on the life of Florence Foster Jenkins.

Jenkins was a no-talent who wanted nothing more than to be an opera singer...and who had the financial means to stage a series of recitals in the 1930s and '40s featuring herself-including a sold-out performance at Carnegie Hall.

The cancellation centered on artistic differences.

Temperley refused to talk about the situation with the Dispatch.

Things like this happen, but it's not how an artistic director wants to begin their tenure.

But it's already becoming just an unfortunate memory as Bond, in his Syracuse Stage directing debut, opened the company's season Saturday night with a searing production of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," August Wilson's Tony Award-winning recording studio-set tale of lives ruined by racism.

It's winter 1927. A blues group comes to a Chicago studio to record a set of songs highlighted by "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" and featuring "Mother of the Blues" Gertrude "Ma" Rainey for a recording company's "race records" division.

By the session's end, the aspirations of the group's talented young trumpeter will have been stamped out by a shattering self-destructive act.

Wilson's play, the first in his 10-play cycle chronicling the African-American experience in America, garnered praise at its reading at the prestigious Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Conn. in 1982. The play hit Broadway, via the Yale Repertory Theatre, which gave the work its world premiere in April 1984, opening at the Cort Theatre on Oct. 11, 1984, with Theresa Merritt as Ma Rainey and Charles S. Dutton as Levee. (Dutton will play Willy Loman in Yale Rep's staging of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" in spring 2009.) Wilson's last play in the cycle, "Radio Golf," opened at the Cort on May 8, 2007.

In the Syracuse Stage production, William Bloodgood's tri-level dilapidated recording studio set immediately lays out where the characters stand in the scheme of things.

In the basement is the hole of a rehearsal room, which the despotic Ma won't deign to visit. Here musicians Toledo, Slow Drag and Cutler, soon to be joined by the horn man, Levee (Warner Miller), banter while waiting for the overdue songstress to arrive.

The second level-the studio-is Ma's domain, with the microphone as the focal point of the power she wields here.

Above the studio is the recording booth, with Sturdyvant, the white record producer (John Ottavino), its chief occupant.

Toledo, Slow Drag and Cutler simply have come to make a record. But Levee, who sets himself apart from the others-to their amusement-with his flashy suit and new Florsheims, has other plans, intending to bypass Ma to have his own arrangement of "Black Bottom" recorded.

"You ain't here to do no creatin'. You play Ma's music when you're here," Cutler warns him, emphasizing that Levee needs to understand where he fits in when he's in the studio.

The conflict between Levee and Ma, who prefers the "old style" of music, starts long before she arrives.

But this conflict is about much more than just music. It's also about power-who has it, who thinks they have it and who doesn't.

Undeterred, Levee persists in his belief that color will have nothing to do with his achieving success in 1920s' America, and that, solely by virtue of his horn talent and sweet way with notes, he'll be treated by men like Sturdyvant differently from the way they treat other blacks.

Ma, however, knows she means nothing but money to the likes of Sturdyvant and, as a headliner, holds power over him only until she inks the release form, ending the game.

Until then, she calls the shots.

And she does, unmoved by pleas to just get the recording done.

Having to put up with daily humiliations in her life like not being able to get a cab, she's not about to let these white men off easy. When she learns there isn't a drop of Coca-Cola in the studio, she holds up the recording session until others fetch her the Cokes she demands.

She insists that her stuttering nephew Sylvester (a wonderfully sympathetic James F. Miller), a well-meaning young man caught between the seasoned musicians and his overbearing aunt, deliver the prologue to "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom."

She flaunts in the studio her much-younger materialist lesbian lover Dussie Mae, played by a steamy, kittenish Danielle Lenee.

And she bullies her white manager, Irvin (Kenny Morris), who genuinely seems to be a more decent person than Ma will ever give him credit for.

Meanwhile, the undercurrent of rage that is slowly filling the recording studio is barely noticed.

Wilson meticulously sets up Ma's appearance midway through Act I, when "Madame" Rainey sweeps into the record studio swathed in Helen Huang's garish scarlet costume topped with a gold opera-scale regal headdress. Ebony Jo-Ann's aristocratic and coarse (and yet still able to inspire the admiration of Cutler, Slow Drag and Toledo) Ma delivers all that Wilson promises.

Especially nice was the brief interim of harmony all share following the session's completion.

As Toledo, Cutler and Slow Drag, Thomas Jefferson Byrd, Cortez Nance and Doug Eskew delivered evocative portrayals of peripatetic musicians who have spent their lives playing in music halls and brothels in the South while trying to live quietly on the periphery of the white world.

Bond is an excellent interpreter of Wilson, who deploys spirituals and folklore seamlessly, never getting heavy-handed. And that includes how racism infects everything.

Bond may like individuals to be depicted in theater production artwork as anonymously as possible to avoid audience members linking the depictions to the actors in the roles, but Syracuse Stage's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" poster, designed by Kevin Mann, becomes something more. The viewer is forced into an uncomfortable position. The faces of the woman before the microphone and the horn player in the background are indistinct. All the viewer can see--just as a racist might--is that they are black. It is an exceptional piece of artwork that captures what this play is about.

While Dutton's Levee was big and brash, Miller's slighter stature belies the anger Levee can barely contain within himself. Encounters with racism have left Levee filled with wrenching memories that can never be purged, manifested in the stunning Act I-ending outburst where the rage literally makes his eyes nearly pop out of his head.

But the staging was weakened in the last critical seconds of the play with Miller needing to do more than he did to show the realization that Levee, in a deadly second, just irretrievably threw away any future he may have had, leaving Cutler in gasping disbelief over how a simple recording session could have gone so terribly awry.

* * *

At Syracuse Stage, 820 E. Genesee St., through Oct. 4. Tickets: (315) 443 3275 or online at www.SyracuseStage.org.

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 03:03:00 +0000

Washington Lottery's "Birds" edited by Fischer Edit from Fischer Edit on Vimeo.

Sea and Cake

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:30:00 +0000

This was filmed in Cazenovia this summer and features some local kids!

YouTube's star lecturer dies at 47 - CNN.com

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:10:00 +0000

YouTube's star lecturer dies at 47 - CNN.com

CNN) -- Randy Pausch, the professor whose "last lecture" became a runaway phenomenon on the Internet and was turned into a best-selling book, died Friday of pancreatic cancer, Carnegie Mellon University announced on its Web site.

Randy Pausch emphasized the joy of life in his "last lecture," originally given in September 2007.

Pausch, 47, a computer science professor, delivered the lecture, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007, a month after being told he had three to six months to live because his cancer had returned.

The lanky, energetic Pausch talked about goals he had accomplished, like experiencing zero gravity and creating Disney attractions, and those he had not, including becoming a professional football player.

He used rejections he was handed when he applied for jobs at Disney to comment on the importance of persistence.

"The brick walls are there for a reason ... to show us how badly we want something," he said. "Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They're there to stop the other people." Watch what Pausch did for his wife »

Starting with a joke about "a deathbed conversion" -- "I just bought a Macintosh" computer -- the educator went on to say that one of his childhood dreams was to write an entry in the World Book Encyclopedia.

"I guess you can tell the nerds early," he added.

Don't Miss

Oprah.com: Life lessons with Randy Pausch
Time.com: Randy Pausch, life teacher
YouTube: Randy Pausch's 'Last Lecture'

An expert in virtual reality, Pausch did go on to write an encyclopedia entry on the subject.

He discussed his fondness for winning stuffed animals at fairs, showed a slide of them, then -- pretending to be concerned his audience would think the image had been digitally manipulated -- produced them onstage.

Donning silly costume items like a vest with arrows sticking out of it and a Mad Hatter's hat, he described working with students as a way to help other people achieve their dreams.

He also played down his own importance, saying that after he got a Ph.D., his mother took to introducing him as "a doctor, but not the kind who helps people."

The lecture has been viewed more than 3.2 million times since it was posted on YouTube in December.

Pausch co-founded the university's Entertainment Technology Center and was known for developing interdisciplinary courses and research projects that attracted new students to the field of computer science. He also spent his career encouraging computer scientists to collaborate with artists, dramatists and designers, Carnegie Mellon said.

The university's president, Jared Cohon, described Pausch as "a brilliant researcher and gifted teacher."

"His love of teaching, his sense of fun and his brilliance came together in the Alice project, which teaches students computer programming while enabling them to do something fun -- making animated movies and games," Cohon added. "Carnegie Mellon -- and the world -- are better places for having had Randy Pausch in them."

Pausch describes Cohon urging him to talk about having fun in his lecture, and telling him it's difficult because it's like asking a fish to talk about water.

"I don't know how not to have fun," he said. "I'm dying and I'm having fun. And I'm going to keep having fun every day I have left."

Pausch is survived by his wife, Jai, and three children.

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Designers are meant to be loved

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:42:00 +0000

Blogged with the Flock Browser

British Auto Campaign

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:42:00 +0000

Motorcar Service You Can Afford
Posters created for British Auto Service, LLC in Milwaukee, WI.
Steve Koeneke, Creative Director/Writer. Scott Shalles, Writer. Brian Steinseifer, Art Director/Designer. STIR

Google Reader (331)

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YouTube - Cars.com Slow Mo Joe In Fight

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:27:00 +0000

YouTube - Cars.com Slow Mo Joe In Fight

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Stripper Cop

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:24:00 +0000

Cars.com Stripper Cop

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Cars.com Witch Doctor Video

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:55:00 +0000

Cars.com Witch Doctor Video

I found this, created by former students Alex Zamiar and Jon Richman

both working as a team a ddb Chicago

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Get ready people

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 03:00:00 +0000

The Express. I'm in the trailer!

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 03:42:00 +0000

I was excited to find that I made the trailer for the Express. I know, I am really small, but I am walking toward the camera, so you never know.

Here I am. :37 seconds into it.

Here's a link to the first official movie trailer.

My profile

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 02:48:00 +0000

Discover
Kevin Mann's
Personality Patterns

Visit SignalPatterns.com
to get your own!

What Lorem Ipsum Means

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Wed, 14 May 2008 01:50:00 +0000

from the Designer Toolbox

The Short Answer

Lorem Ipsum is Latin which roughly translates to: "There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..."

The Long Answer

Lorem ipsum comes from a book written by Marcus Tullius Cicero, "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" or The Extremes of Good and Evil, which was written in 45 BC. In 1500's a printer developed a type specimen book with the lorem Ipsum passage slightly scrambled. That's why is it roughly translate to: "There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..." Although, the passage contains recognizable Latin words, they don't really add up to anything, and some are just gibberish, for example there's no Latin word lorem. This is why we call it greeking, as in "It looks like Greek to me."

A Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, Richard McClintock discovered lorem ipsum was part of a passage from Cicero. The original reads, "Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..." or translated to English "There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..."

Unlocking Cool

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Fri, 02 May 2008 02:27:00 +0000

| View | Upload your own

The Express

kevin@campdesign.net (Camp Design) — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:24:00 +0000

Coming this fall.
Hopefully premiering in Syracuse.
Hopefully I'm in it!

crazy!