A team of TeleProductions designers earned the Silver Communicator Award of Distinction in the Online Video category for the 2012 Traveling Stanza’s animated poem “Blooming Thoughts.” Senior visual communication design major Alex Kurr, student designer Brian Recktenwald and graphic designer Jim Hurguy worked with Glyphix to animate posters from the Traveling Stanzas series. Kurr has worked at TeleProductions since July 2012 and expects to graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in May 2014.
Students in the Glyphix Design Studio created the 2012 Traveling Stanza posters from poems written by community members. For the “Blooming Thoughts” animation, the TeleProductions team combined the poster by Glyphix, the original poem, which was written by an elementary school class, and one student’s voiceover of the poem to create the final product.
In its fourth year, the Traveling Stanzas project is a collaboration between Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center and Glyphix design studio in the School of Visual Communication Design. The objective of Traveling Stanzas is to promote awareness of poetry and graphic design in the community and encourage dialogue about the connection between art and medicine, writing and healing, according to the project’s website. The poems have approached topics such as war, violence, health and medicine, among others.
Kurr said that while he’s always been interested in video, working at TeleProductions has inspired him to pursue it as a career. He plans to pursue animation, motion and video after graduation with The New Fuel, a company he and Recktenwald, a senior business administration major, co-founded, The company currently produces videos and animations for corporate and sports related clients.
“All of the design principles I learned in my first year in VCD are important in any video project that I do; most importantly the attention to detail.”
“In a print piece, the design has to be perfect once,” Kurr said. “In an animation, where there are 30 frames per second, one frame out of place will be noticeable.”