Into Digital Arts

My most recent project has been about studying Typologies, or the study of types. Specifically, I studied the work of Hilla and Bernd Beacher. They did some very interesting work, taking photos of different industrialized areas of their country. They lived during the time of the industrial revolution, so they had many different new building types to study through their compositions. I wished to attempt to mirror their work with a piece of my own. I originally was going to focus on different trees, however that would prove somewhat difficult to find trees that would fit within the frame of a photo taken from my phone. So I decided on something smaller, a book. The University of Toledo has a large library with a wide range of books so I had no limitations on the number of pictures I could take.

I recently went on a photo shoot of downtown Toledo, focusing on Urban Landscapes. I was looking for something to do with these photos, so I learned a bit about how to edit photos. This was a great exercise and I had some fantastic results. I recently had a new form of inspiration with the downtown area. On the first thursday of every month, an event known as the Art Loop takes place in downtown Toledo. I was directly involved in this event as a member of the University of Toledo Orchestra. Downtown was alive with a very large crowd bustling from event to event of the loop. This inspired me to make something that would show the strong community and its interest in the arts. I made a short clip utilizing Animoto. This was a great tool to easily create a video using photos and simple text. I felt that this video turned out really great, and it gave me a great project to work on with the photos I had taken.

      Recently, I made my first attempts at learning how to edit photos. This was a very interesting learning experience as I never realized how much effort it actually takes to edit a photo in a way that is presentable. In editing a photo, one first has to have a photo that would actually benefit from editing. Almost any photo can meet this criteria as humans are not perfect and there are many mistakes that could be made when taking the photo. Such as the lighting not being quite right or the angle of the photo being slightly different from what the photographer had intended. In my case, I had a number of photos that I wanted to edit for my Fundamentals of Digital Media class. These were taken of the downtown Toledo area as part of an Urban Landscape focus point. One photo that really caught my eye was of an empty street leading away from the middle of the downtown area. It caught my attention because the road was completely empty, despite it being in the middle of the a...

Welcome everyone! My name is Jacob Schaupp and I am a 3rd year student at the University of Toledo studying computer science and engineering, with a minor in visual effects and animation. I have always enjoyed animated movies, especially those by Pixar. I was presented with the opportunity to build my first animation for a presentation in high school at a national rocketry competition. Ever since then, I have been teaching myself how to build animations by watching YouTube videos and reading articles on the subject. Taking photos has also been an area of interest for me. There are a thousand interpretations of a photo and the story it has to tell. This is fascinating to me and I hope to explore all of these through this blog.