Scrabble Tournament
This month’s playdate is Scrabble tournament. Lunch at the studio has always been enjoyed with movies and lighthearted banter; however, these days, a new pastime has been keeping both the hands and minds of the BNP Design Studio staff busy. We’re talking about Scrabble. Indeed, intense bouts of silence alternated with the sound of chewing as players contemplate where to place their tiles on the Scrabble board to snag the most number of points. That’s how competitive the players have been in the last several days that instead of playing random games, we decided to hold a mini-Scrabble tournament in the office to decide who will be the last one standing. To do this, we divided the staff into three groups, with the winner of each group moving on to face each other in the championship match. After players have been assigned to their respective groups, we discussed the rules of the game and decided on which dictionary we’re going to use for reference should doubts about the validity of a move has been challenged. Once that was out of the way, we moved on to the actual matches. The matches started out slow, with a good number of the players settling for less than impressive scores while waiting for favorable openings that could come later in the game; however, as the game progressed, the players started to become more proactive in letting higher-scoring tiles go and using manipulative tactics to lure their opponents into playing words that would work to their advantage. This resulted in matches that took longer than we initially anticipated, so we were forced to call it a day after the first round of matches concluded and leave the championship match for another day. In the end, our art director, computer programmer, and one of our writers won in their respective brackets, although we have yet to see who will be the one left on top once we find the time to hold the championship match. Stick around for updates! ^^...
read moreBNP Launches its First T-Shirt Store
This is it! This is really it! Two years after we launched the T-shirt project that you all know now as talk@tee, we are very excited to tell you that aside from our virtual store at www.talkatee.com and the BNP Design Studio located along Diversion Road in Ilayang Dupay, Lucena City, you can now check out our latest t-shirt products at our first physical store that had just its soft opening last August 08, 2013. That’s right! Our baby is finally ready to venture outside. The preparations ate up quite a bit of our time that we had to set aside some of our planned playdates and turn down some project offers for the time being (T_T), but seeing all the people who have been coming to our kiosk to get their own talk@tee shirts, we can truly say that our collective efforts have been well worth it. So, what are you guys waiting for? For those who haven’t gotten the chance to visit our store yet, do drop by at the second level of Pacific Mall Lucena, just around CD-R King and we’ll be more than happy to show you our wide array of couple, Pinoy, statement, and other random shirts. See you guys there!...
read moreParty Printables
This month’s playdate is printables. Organizing a pirate-themed birthday bash for your little boy; making a cute, romantic envelope for your love letter to your amour; or a scrapbook of the most memorable moments in your life – those are just some of the things you can do with printables. Not familiar with printables? Printables are ready to print illustrations that you can download from the internet and print with your own computer. They usually come packaged in groups, but there are also some printable makers that allow people to mix and match different bundles according to their preferences. Our artists have been making printables for some time now, but the rest of the BNP team hasn’t had much opportunities to experiment with them, so we decided to make party printables the topic for this month’s playdate. We’ve been hosting friendly competitions since we split up the team into three groups a couple of months ago, so before we started, the members of each team were asked to pick a theme first. The first team picked a pirate theme, the second one chose a “glam girl” theme, and the last team went for Halloween. After we’re done picking themes, we started to choose the things we’ll be using for the activity. Each group were asked to pick three items from a predetermined set (buntings, cup wrappers, cupcake wrappers, cupcake toppers, table toppers, straw flags, invitation cards) so everyone got busy discussing what they’re going to pick. After all the teams have decided what they’re going to do, we started gathering the materials we’re going to need. All three teams pretty much used the same materials, although some groups threw in a couple more for some extra touch. Since we were on the topic of printables, we just browsed our database for existing designs that match our chosen themes, then we had the artists from our teams group them together in one file. When everything was finally ready, we printed the designs, then we started snipping away the unnecessary edges. The buntings were quite easy to cut because they’re triangular in shape, but the cupcake and cup wrappers were a bit tricky because they are circular, so we had to make sure that the length and width of the printables matched the measurements of the cups and cupcakes so the edges would fit snugly. After we’re done cutting, we moved on to gluing the items we printed and cut to their respective places. When everything has been glued, we thrust the cupcake toppers on top of the cupcakes then we started arranging the designs together so we can take some photos of the final products. Below are some shots from the activity. What do you think? If you’re interested in trying it out for yourself, you can download one of the printables we used for this activity. We’ll also be releasing more printable designs soon, so do watch out for them....
read morePop-up Art
Do you remember those pop-up cards or books that we used to marvel at as a child? You know, those wonderfully drawn images springing up into life when we open the card or the book? This month, we’d try to make one of those. Let’s start with the materials. The most important thing you’d need in making popup art is the paper. You don’t really have to use any special kind, but you do have to make sure that it has the right amount of thickness for the project. A piece of paper that is too thin would have difficulties holding up while a piece of paper that is too thick would be difficult to fold. Usually, an Oslo paper should be enough to do the job. Aside from the paper we’d also need a protractor or a ruler (we’d have to use it to measure the angles of the folds), glue or double-sided tape (for sticking the popup art to its base), and a pair of scissors to cut out pieces of paper into our desired shape. When the materials are all set, we’d begin by picking a design. Pop-ups can either be paper cutouts glued or taped to the base, or strips of paper that are carved into the base. Which one you want to use is totally up to you, but if you neither have the time nor patience to draw or carve complicated designs unto paper, printing a digital design then cutting the parts you need out is a faster and easier alternative. If you’re going to use a cutout design, though, try to leave an extra centimetre or two of blank space from the edge of your design because we’d be using it to prop it up. After you have the design cut out, we’ll start folding the paper. To make the folding easier, you can use any object with a blunt end like a bread knife or an old ball point pen that has no more ink to make indentations on the parts that we’re going to be folding. However, before we fold the design, we’ll fold the extra centimetre of blank space that we set aside earlier first then slip it under the design until it’s no longer visible. When we’re done with that, we’d start folding the design itself. While doing this, make sure that the spaces between either side of the design is even (e.g. 45 degrees to the right; 45 degrees to the left starting from the middle) so the pop-up design would close down and open up nicely. After that, we’ll apply some glue or stick a strip of double-sided tape on the stand then press it tightly against the base. For good measure, you can also stick another strip of paper (the same width as the other stand) at the back of the designs so it will be easier for the designs to pop up when you open the card or the book. When all of those are done, just hold the back cover of the card or book, press it down against the front cover until the pop up design in the middle is flattened it out. Hold it down for a bit, then after a few seconds, open the card or the book, and the design should pop up. If it didn’t close down properly, you might have to adjust the angles of the stands supporting the back of the designs, but other than that, that should be pretty much everything. So, how did it go? Let us know the result of your...
read moreStop Motion Animation
Stop motion is an animation technique used to make stationary subjects look as if they are moving. This is achieved by slightly altering the poses of objects, photographing each alterations, then viewing them in sequence to make the illusion of movement. Plenty of materials can be used for stop motion. Some of these are clay figures, wooden mannequins, and paper cut outs — but for this activity, we’re going to use the last one to do our little experiment. There are no special materials necessary. We just used a whiteboard to sketch the storyboard and draw the backdrop, a digital camera to photograph the different poses (using a tripod is optional, although we recommend using one to make the camera steadier and the shots clearer), a photo editing software to remove unnecessary objects in the photographs, a video editing software to place the photos side by side and play them in sequence, and a printer to print out the illustrations we’re going to use for the project. Before we started with the project, though, we tried to come up with a storyline first. The direction you want your story to go to is completely up to you, but we suggest you try to start with a simple one first because the more complicated the story is, the more photos it’s going to require; and believe us, taking photographs, sorting them out, and editing them could take quite a while. After a few minutes of deliberation, we decided to do a short featuring characters from talk@tee’s World of Tokkats taking a jeepney ride, and to give us a better idea of how the project would play out, we did a storyboard featuring sketches of each proposed frame. After we were done with that, we started drawing the would be background by drawing a typical cityscape on a whiteboard. Normally, we would have taken care of the characters first, but since we already had the designs we’re going to use on file, we simply printed them out and placed them against the background. Once that was done, we started taking photographs. To do this, we assigned one person to take the shots, one person to hold the lights, one person to move the cutouts along the background, three people to move the whiteboard to make the illusion that the jeepney the characters are riding on is moving along the highway, and six people to cheer from the background (Go, guys!) 😀 All in all, 175 shots were taken, 152 of which made it to the final video. Some of the photos had to be discarded because of continuity errors and lighting issues (we had to shoot indoors under artificial lighting, so we had to make some adjustments every now and then) and some new photos had to be taken because editing some parts out would have taken more time and effort. When the photos that would be used for the video have been picked, we superimposed some text on the photos in the extro to let people know where to get their own talk@tee shirts. After that, we used a video editing software to place the chosen photos side by side and play them in sequence then we we gave it a final touch by adding some music on the background – the result of which you’ll see in the video below: How about you guys, have you tried this before? Do you have any tips or stories that you can share?...
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