Denise Flasz

Hello! My name is Denise Flasz, I was born in Caracas, Venezuela but I currently live in NYC. I got my BFA in illustration at the Instituto de Diseño de Caracas,and then I decided to do an MFA in Multimedia design at the Centro de diseño digital. After all this college experience and some freelancing I worked for almost two years in a Visual Communication enterprise named Oruga Films, where I can say that I learned many of the things I now know and also gained a lot of experience in what professional work and team work matters. Since I was in college I new I wanted to grow bigger and achieve many goals in life, and for this I knew that if I wanted to do great I had to attend a great school, so I applied and of course choose Parsons New School of Design. For me it was really hard to pick what I wanted to do in this school, and what kind of major I wanted to get involved into, because many things seemed so valuable and incredible interesting that it was really hard to make up my mind, and that's when I saw the DT program and how wide it was, and started projecting and realizing how much I could achieve from this major and how good it was going to be for me.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

What did you find interesting, And unexpected in this video self-portrait?.

I got really surprised about how my days are a cycle, I wake up and I start doing the same things over and over again, although this is basically on the weekdays it’s almost the same every day. So in this portrait I acted naturally as if it where someone from outside watching me do this routine.

I was really surprised to see that I spent most of my time indoors doing school work and being around technology, this portrait came out pretty natural, It was amazing, I knew exactly what my storyboard was from the beginning to the end and what I had to shoot next.

At the end putting it all together in Final Cut made me realize everything and led me to conclude that I have to go more outside and share more social activities with the people I know because life has to have a balance, ad it’s up to us to distribute our time in an equal way for responsibilities and fun.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

In the Norman reading and/or human computation video, what did you find interesting and non-obvious?

I found interesting the fact that many of our everyday activities where designed to make our life easier. We use symbols, sounds or gestures to represent things, but what if we thought about them for a minute? We could see that their representation form is what makes them work. For example, I found interesting when Mr. Norman explained how we use numbers, we know they are everywhere, I’ve learned them since I was very little but never stopped to think why they looked like that. The fact is that our mind remembers images in an easier way than remembering calculations or algorithms that would be easier for machines, our mind reacts to this (Arabic) images because of their representation form, they make it easier for most of our everyday activities and calculations as well as for machine communication, but when we are looking at graphics statistics we need another kind of representation, something that leads us to compare values in an easier and faster way, in this case Arabic numbers for computers will still be fine, but for an average human, graphics as a chart would do the job.

Human intelligence can do many things that computer intelligence can’t, although we pay attention to those who perform machine-like tasks, we need mind aids to avoid errors and spend less time doing things that something without mind can easily do.

It’s an non-obvious thing to think that human mind has more attributes than a machine, because in an era where machines rule, almost everyone becomes dependant on them. But machines without concept or brilliant ideas are almost useless, but human mind plus machine power can rule everything.

Saturday, September 13, 2008

What from “Making Comics” chapter 4 helped you with your photo self portrait series?

Actually some of the information in that chapter seemed obvious, I learned some of those things in my old school, but I also found pretty interesting on how you can actually tell a story of a background or someone just by selecting details, like in Japanese Manga,
I tried to do that with my narrative, for example with my body showing the pictures and the color of my skin as well as my features you can perfectly tell how my body looks like, in the objects I tried to tell the story by taking pictures of the things that surround me right now so in this case you can see the narrative of my life and the things I am into right now.
In the background pictures I tried to position the camera window as wide as possible so I could place the viewer in my world and give him as much information about it as possible , bringing him into it.

The good thing about my photo self-portrait series is that they don’t follow an order, they can be placed and mixed up again and they’ll just tell and introduce myself as an interface to whoever is seeing them.

In this chapter, they also suggested that we shouldn’t at some point leave margin, that it was good to open the window and then bleed the image so that we could leave more to the imagination, and for more sensitivity of being inside that picture to the viewer if we close what we see in a frame, then we are basically telling the reader that that’s it , there is no more to it ,what you see its what you got!. That’s one of the reasons I also tried to bleed a lot if not mostly of my photos. One of the other things that I forgot to mention is the depth of field, I applied that to make my frames more interesting.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

What form the assignment where you surprised by when doing it?
For example, did the difficulty/ease of results surprise you , what about your creative process did you find interesting?

24 hr comic

I got really surprised at the end of the day when I scanned my 24 hr drawings and they actually told the story of my day, how they represented my activities and without text they could tell anyone how my day was. I also realized that when you are calmed and relax, for example when I was at Union Square drawing one of my frames, I attracted people and they came closer to me.

Sometimes it was stressful to just stop whatever I was doing to draw a frame, but I guess at the end it was a great exercise.

16 frame movie

At first I couldn’t make up my mind, because I found really difficult to remember 16 important frames in chronological order of a movie I liked, the only ones I could remember pretty well where the Pixar animations, I didn’t want to watch a movie all over again, so I picked one of my favorite ones of Pixar called Finding Nemo.

I am an illustrator so I found it pretty relaxing, I wrote on a blank page the ideas of my 16 frames, and the way I wanted to display them, then I searched for references of the characters and draw the frames. Sometimes like 3 or 4 times, I eliminated one frame for another until I got the result I wanted. Then I asked my roommate of what movie I was talking about and she guessed, maybe for the illustrations it all became easier, but I think the narrative was also very specific.

The most difficult part was drawing Nemo and his father because I didn’t want to confuse people by their fishy similarity.

Monday, September 8, 2008

I ate something quickly so I could catch up with the rest of my assignments and then went to my room for a couple of hours of homework, then I had dinner, cleaned up a little bit and watched TV on the couch.
I realized that the park was a bit dirty, but the day was beautiful and the sun was shining, after a long day I went back home really hungry...
This is the second set of six moments of my day, walking to school and watching the city, take a walk to the park so I can finish my homework, and watch people.

24 hr comic!

This are my first 6 frames, and six moments of the day, bathroom, coffee, weather, breakfast, dressing and going out!

Sunday, September 7, 2008

1) Choice of moment, frame, image, word, flow, (pick one).
2) What is the goal(s) of it?
3) Give examples

Choice of flow

Making comics is like telling a brief and interesting yet catching story with images. One of it’s big obviously purposes is to actually keep the reader interested in whatever the story is about so the message can be sent and the story can be told.

For this, there are a lot of ways that mostly all writers or artists select in approach of this goal, but the main five steps set on this book by Scott Mccloud assure you success in it.

One of the very important things about this five steps is that they actually give you the perfect recipe for doing a great comic, but for me one of the most important things for a great story telling or narrative is “order”, that’s why I chose flow. Imagine someone telling you a story from the middle to the end and then to the beginning, the message is not going to be received, if you want your story to be understood then you have to “tell” the reader from where to start and where to end.

There is an existing agreement between readers and writers that states, that lecture begins from left to right and from top to bottom, so the major goal of the choice of flow is to keep an order in the way of displaying the story cells and don’t confuse the reader.

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Me as an interface to the world

This is a very complex portrait of myself,you can actually see that my face and head are build upon elements that represent me and each part they describe, for example, in the eyes I draw a watch that represents the future as I see it, and in the other eye I illustrated a huge mountain like the one I love back where I live in Caracas called "Avila". In my head you can see the right and artistic side and the left and intellectual side, sliding throe my hair is my free spirits and the things I love the most, like my family , friends and values.. and just where you think it's ending there is this delicate flower that represents my heart.
I LOVED THIS TOY!
As you can see I've always loved to create things...

This is my favorite toy from childhood, if you want to see more about Creepy Crawlers access this link for more info.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Welcome to my blog!

Hi! I am a visual communication designer with a background in Illustration and multimedia design. I am currently doing my MFA on design and technology at Parsons. And this is my course work, if you want to see more stuff please visit www.deniseflasz.com