I designed and manufactured this portfolio book around late 2007/early 2008, to showcase my work in Home Entertainment up to that point. At the time, I had a little over two years experience designing and animating for entertainment clients like Fox and Newline, at Company Wide Shut, a small boutique design house in Downtown Los Angeles, specializing in DVD menu design, where I started working while still a Design/Media Arts student at UCLA.
As a smaller company, Company Wide Shut offered me an opportunity to take a lot of responsibility from the start, and gain experience in a broad range of challenges, in design, and project management. Because of it’s small scale (a crew of less than 10, working out of a loft) and limited resources though, I eventually outgrew it, and began searching for new opportunities. For a period, I focused on polishing my portfolio and branding. This book, and a resigned website (an early version of www.omarramirez.net, which I built primarily in Flash), were part of that. The book included case-studies, with details of projects, examples of motion storyboards, examples of full menu sets, as well as a DVD in the back-sleeve with my reel, highlighting my video and motion-graphics work. Apart from using it as a marketing tool, creating this book was also an opportunity for me to revisit techniques I hadn’t used since my undergrad days, where I had heavily covered branding, print design, and production processes.
This book, along with my website, eventually helped land me at Trailer Park Inc, a leading entertainment design house in Hollywood. At Trailer Park, I continued working in Home Entertainment, though because of its scale and status as a “one-stop shop” agency, I went on to diversify my experience well beyond DVD and Bluray Home Entertainment, and work of a scale and pace to rival any firm.
