Portfolio School/Post-grad ideas

Yesterday I got a rather hefty package from the Chicago Portfolio School in the mail. It had information from the school, a blue Sharpie with the school logo on it and an issue of the Chicago Reader, a free weekly newspaper in Chicago. This is a great way to get students interested in your school. I requested info from five portfolio schools in total and this was by far the most elaborate setup that was sent to me. The other schools included Brandcenter, Miami Ad School, Brainco and the Portfolio Center. Although I recieved really well put together brochures from Brandcenter and the Portfolio Center, the Chicago Portfolio School got me extremely excited about the prospect of portfolio school. I was actually looking up apartments in Chicago and was really pleased to discover that Chicago apartments are far cheaper than those in Boston or NYC (sidenote: Why are there no portfolio schools in Boston?).

So back to the main point of this post...With all of the work and portfolio building I am doing before graduating here at Ithaca, will I still need to go to portfolio school to get a job as a junior art director? I look at the books of students who are just graduating from portfolio school, and I can't really measure myself against them. I see some good work and I see some bad work. I am working hard right now on not only coming up with a bunch of new campaigns, but working with my professors and other creative students to make sure my work is worthy of going in my book. I have two campaigns in there already, but throughout the next three semester I should work on at least four or five more campaigns in class alone that will worthy of going in my book. However, this still bring me to my question of whether this will be good enough to be able to make it into advertising without having to shell out another $15-40k in school fees.

After talking with my creative professor, I have started searching for a summer internship for summer '09. I have already been in contact with Modernista! in Boston and have sent out several other e-mails to agencies such as Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Strawberry Frog, Cowboy and Wieden Kennedy. My professor told me that getting an internship would be the most important thing (besides a solid book) that would get me a job as a Junior AD. Hopefully this will all pan out and I will be able to get an internship, do some great work and after graduation get into the industry.

Dying to be Thin

Sophomore year I did advertising for a theatre performance titles 'Dying to be Thin'. This was a one woman show about a woman suffering from bulimia and was a very moving show. It also happened to be directed by my girlfriend. When I did this show, I sort of took a different approach to the conventional theatre poster and created a campaign for it. I took lines out of the show and gave them characters. Seven in all. All of them had different themes and feelings, characters that were prevalent in the scene I had chosen. I wanted people to see all of the different emotions that afflictions like bulimia could have on a person. Although it was a one woman show, I created some of the characters as men so as to reach a broader audience. I don't know if I could ever put these in my portfolio being as they are not typical ad pieces, but I really like the idea I had and we attracted 320 people to two performances with maximum space of 400 total. This was for a performance associated with no theatre group on campus. We actually out earned all of the other student theatre groups who usually ran for three or four performances.

Any comments are welcome on these.

Dow -679 Points???

WOW

The though of being able to get loans for school next year is becoming slimmer and slimmer. I mean, honestly, a degree means extremely little going into the industry I'm going into, but a college degree has always been a benchmark for what I need to be successful in life sort of. And next year I will be taking some amazing classes to help my portfolio. So I need to start working on a way to make sure I can get my loans for next year. Anyone reading who wants to co-sign a loan for me...might be my only option.

My Work and the Mi'kmaq Nation

There are a bunch of things I love about Ithaca, but this is one of its huge faults. Ithaca is not a school for creatives in advertising. It's fantastic for the business of advertising, PR and marketing, but it does not have the classes or facilities designed to help students who want to go into creative. So I have sort of taken it upon myself to take as many design classes as I can, even repeating a few where I get to create campaigns, as well as designing my own senior workshop for creative portfolio development. So I have worked on a few campaigns for brands thus far, including: Fresca, the NFL, Risk, Mandles (fake candle for men), Atlantis Diving (fake custom scuba shop), and a few random pieces here and there. I'm going to put up one piece from my NFL campaign and my Atlantis Diving campaign here and any comments are welcome. I'm not going to explain them because that kind of defeats the point. An ad should be able to be understood by just looking at it. If it needs to be explained, its not good.

NFL


Atlantis Diving


Also, on a random note, I talked to my grandmother because I have been curious about my heritage. I'm taking a native nations class that deals a lot with various nations, predominantly the Haudenosaunee, or the Iroquois Nation. But my grandmother informed me I do have a little native heritage on her side from Maine and Nova Scotia. I talked with my professor and learned that that is 95% certain the Mi'kmaq. I think that is so cool, but I just want to learn more about it and I don't know how to go about it. I can look up their history all I want and it's easy, but finding out what they are up to now I think would be extremely interesting.

First Blog

Hey,

so I thought I would give this a shot for a few reasons.
1) Don't see lots of family for long periods of time and this will give them something to read if they care to read.
2) There are a bunch of things I see around town and online that I feel like I should tell someone, and there are not always people around.

So at this point a week ago I started tearing ads out of magazines and putting them up on my wall. I read through a 200pg copy of G.Q. and although half of the magazine was ads, I found about four ads that I actually liked. There is a somewhat new campaign for Old Spice that came out by Wieden+Kennedy, which was a surprise because Saatchi and Saatchi usually handles Proctor and Gamble accounts. I especially love the campaign because a commercial and and a print ad featured Nell Patrick Harris...aka Barney from How I Met Your Mother and Dr. Horrible.








So I will try and update this with my own work, as well as my general ideas on politics, advertising and life.