I’m official over the hill. Instead of looking at how long I’ve got to go, it is beginning to feel as if the end is near. And though I look forward to venturing out into the “real world,” I can already tell that the college experience will be missed. This is just a quick recap of where I’m at right now, and where I’m headed with my next two years.

Here’s a summary of where I’m at academically:

• Mass Communications major, Marketing minor (switched from Journalism last year)
• 3.66 GPA
• Enrolled in Honors Program (and have satisfied all Honors requirements except Capstone)
• Satisfied all general studies requirements

However, where I am focusing my energies on is instead networking, projects, and other non-academic goals.

• Worked on Program Board as an executive programmer and webmaster since my first year. This year I am the graphic designer as well. I’ve hosted dozens of events on campus while providing flyers, advertising, and website updates for the rest of the board.
• Worked on A-Team over the summer. A-Team is a peer leadership group that is involved in making a smooth transition into college life for first year students. We advise, give support, and provide a quality role model while leading them through a two-day orientation.
• Worked as a Resident Assistant for a semester (more on that later). I hosted some of the largest events and provided a positive role model for a diverse and unique floor of residents.
• Ran for Student Body President my Freshman and Sophomore year. I plan on running again the next two years. I lost to my now-roommate / partner-in-crime Anthony Bellismo.
• I’ve been involved in the Student Government Association, Technology Oversight Committee, Honors Program Board, and the Student Life Council.
• Recognized at Student Recognition Day as a Freshman and Sophomore. 
• I’ve was the webmaster for Student Affairs and Intramurals briefly.
• Started up a now-defunct movie review blog with a few fellow students.

It’s been a pretty good ride, however over the summer and the beginning of this semester have seen a series of events that have taken the turn for the better. That is awfully vague. Allow me to explain:

Over the summer, it became apparent that my help was needed at QuakeCon 2010 with my internet broadcasting organization, Quake Live TV. The issue with this was that it directly conflicted with my Resident Assistant training. I explain my situation in detail, offered to do all the coordination with my staff and do extra work to make up my time off. Unfortunately, they still were unable to keep me onboard and I lost my position as an RA.

However, QuakeCon was an amazing experience and I’m completely glad I went. I met the majority of my staff on Quake Live TV, as well as bonded with a lot of QuakeCon staff and volunteers. On top of that, was able to spend a bit of face time with Bethesda, Splash Damage, and id Software developers and executives. It was a great personal and professional experience, and we did great work while we were there. See our coverage at our QuakeCon site.

I was also laid off of my Webmaster Advisor job for Student Affairs (they essentially combined two positions into one and I got the short stick), so I lost two jobs when I came back to campus. However, I’m still the Graphic Designer for Program Board, and also Rachael (my boss) hired me as the Webmaster for Student Activities, which means I’m charge of making some really cool website stuff. I’m pretty excited.

In another unfortunate twist, my good friend Jon Haar lost his federal aid and wasn’t able to go to Shepherd. However, this let me take his place and room with Anthony Bellismo, Nick Frendzel, and Justin McKenzie. This collection of gamers, filmmakers, and digital artists is truly a great place to be, and already we’ve kicked off and done some fun, unique projects. I’ll be posting some of the videos and films we produce while we’re here shortly, already we’ve done a lot. I’m also rooming right next door to all the ladies I was very close with first year—Stephanie Singleton, Becky Van Wagoner, Ashtyn Lake, Hannah Pebbles, Abbie McMullen, and the “new kid” Heather. They’re a great group of friends and it’s exciting to have them next door.

There has been some ups and downs, yes, but at the end this is looking to be a great year for my personal, professional, and academic growth. Woot!

… when professors said they want 10-page research papers with annotated bibliographies, they really meant to say they wanted a 10 page paper (with diagrams and pictures) about your thoughts on how Abe Lincoln is a badass future robot who will time-travel and conquer the world with an army of waffle irons.

That would be a lot more fun.

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.