I’ve got three sub-sections that I’ve updated on my About Us page. I’ve added a professional page and updated my personal about us page. The gaming about us page has yet to be updated, however. Check it out to learn more about Matt Richards!

I’ve written a review for the Science Fiction film directed by Neill Blomkamp called District 9. Just what is District 9? You really have to watch the movie to find out. And boy, will it blow your mind.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film, and I believe that you, too, should have the experience of watching it.

You read my review posted over at my new website called “Movie Sector.”

For our first project in Advertising and Imagery (a class I’m taking this semester), we were instructed to design an advertisement for a new type of cigarette, the “Marijuana Cigarette.” This is obviously not a real product, mind you! I designed and developed all three ads.

Check out what I came up with:

• Advertisement for male magazine
• Advertisement for female magazine
• Alternative advertisement for female magazine

Normally I won’t post my school projects on my blog, but recently I’ve felt I’ve done some really interesting work, and it’s beyond the spectrum of “just a paper.” I’m really proud of my work, though it’s not masterful work, it definitely is making me happy to see how it turns out.

Anyway, I struggled quite a bit on this project, but I really turned it around. We needed to select a certain type of media (an image, advertisement, poster, film, music, whatever) and analyze the “semiotics” of it. It’s a difficult theory to explain in a thumbnail, but it essentially states that everything has a signifier, a signified concept, and tosses in concepts ideologies, symbols, icons, connation, denotation, syntagm, and many other ideas to spice things up a little.

What I ended up analyzing were three movie posters for Dark Knight. I used a lot of imagery and media to go along with this analysis, and in the end it looks really awesome.

Check it out here!

View “The Dawn of Battle,” a Battlefield 2 graphic novel on my website.

This is an artistic vision of the popular Battlefield 2 modification, Project Reality. I went in and recorded all the action, in a single-player battle against bots. I then went in with the Battle Recorder, and took a ton of screenshots from a variety of angles.

The next step was utilizing Adobe Photoshop to construct a unique theme to the images. I went in, constructed an HDR profile of each image, then applied various lighting and coloring techniques to try to tie everything together.

Then I applied the images to the graphic novel pages, using a variety of overlays and lighting styles to blend everything together. The goal was to sharpen certain elements – like facial features and the weaponry, whilst blurring out the background. I then applied various artistic filters and blended them into the images.

The final step was adding text. I had constructed the plot before hand, so I knew exactly what was happening throughout the graphic novel. Then, I applied an action that darkened the edges and added a slight film grain throughout the page.

Whilst not the perfect graphic novel (in fact, it’s “to be continued”), I felt it had a very unique, interesting visual style. Especially since the base material was, in fact, a video game. It’s fun to read, even more fun to look at, despite the rather bland plot.