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!

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.

Well, I’ve been having trouble with my headset, the famous SteelSeries 5H v2, for awhile. It’s a great piece of equipment, mind you, but it broke about three months ago. I’ve kept soldering and gluing it back together (I really love this headset!). But it’s broke again (for the fourth time!) and I don’t have any soldering here at school. So I’ve got no means to fix it anymore… which means I’m without my favorite headset.

I’ve considered buying a replacement for it. As I mentioned, it’s a fantastic headset. It featured superb sound quality, amazing comfort, good voice quality, and it just rocked for gaming. It was pretty much the perfect headset. So why didn’t I just spring and buy another one? Well: the price tag of $100 was a bit of a turn off. Plus, I wanted to try something new. And thus my adventure began.

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Check out this beautiful, elegant new theme. I say it’s elegant, of course, since it’s from Elegant Themes! Sexy!

So, besides this amazing new theme, I’ve gone through and tries to apply some more functionality and features to the site, updating a bit of old content, doing some editing, and just making it a bit more clear.

There’s still a lot I need to do to get this blog up to date. But for any major updates I do complete, I’ll be sure to let you know via a new blog post. To keep up with what I’m doing on a more day-to-day basis, you suggest really try following my Twitter.

Be sure to tell me what you think of the new design.