The purpose of this Conceptual Project is to create a website using HTML that contains all of the productions in our classes that we've done so far at Freestyle. For example, photos I took for Design, poems I wrote for English, and videos and music I created for Digital Media are the elements that make up this site. Each class offered different pieces of content to the website and the rules of C.R.A.P., which we learned about in Design, were utilized in the structure of it. Some of things you can find in this website are four different poems, three of which have videos and accompanying music, two conceptual photos, and two pieces of produced music. In the Conceptual Unit, I learned so much about so many programs (Dreamweaver, Protools, Premiere Pro, Photoshop) and also many artistic and technical things I never considered before. I learned about the principles of design and how to take photos with a camera and adjust the settings to your advantage, and also how to mix and record music. From this entire Conceptual Project, I enjoyed putting all my work together in one organized place and valued learning how to do so.

In English, we wrote 3 types of poems, not including the haiku: free verse, ekphrastic, and spoken word. The free verse poem was about the same concept as the haiku and was the standard poem with lots of lines and optional rhyming. The ekphrastic poem was a poem written based off of a piece of visual art. To find our art, we went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and then wrote a poem about how we interpreted the image. The spoken word poem was a poem written to be performed and convey vocal subtleties that would otherwise be lost if it weren’t spoken at all.

Concept statement: I am exploring the feeling of reluctance through the experience of making excuses.

I chose to write my ekphrastic poem about a painting of a woman dancing with the outline of an invisible man.

He was red orange
His touch like the sound of a harp
 His slow dance in time to the muted beat of his heart
“He’s not real,” they said
But I knew he was

We came here every night
To dance under city lights
His eyes were a G Major scale
His suit like a starry night
He was like velvet against my cheek
“You’re dancing with your dreams,” they said
But I knew he loved me
He came here every night
Just to dance
With me

He never spoke and was
As silent as a mannequin
But he was a setting sunset
And I wouldn’t have had him any other way
My mother told me to stop playing games
And to get a real man I wanted to listen
And I almost didn’t

But then he didn’t show up

I had to dance alone

“He’s not real,” they said
He didn’t show up the next day either
“He’s not real,” they said
He didn’t show up for almost a week
“He’s not real,” they said
I thought they were right
But then he finally showed up

For the first time, he spoke
His voice like an ocean breeze

“I’m real,” he said
“I know,” I said
“You’re insane,” they said
“I know,” I said

That was why I brought the metal ice
And laid on the loathsome dance floor
Letting crimson dance
Where he and I once did
He was not real
He never was

Yet at the wake
A red orange man
With G Major scale eyes
And a suit like a starry night
Stood up to speak

The spoken word assignment was to write a poem and record yourself performing it. There was no specific concept statement or other medium to base this poem off of, unlike the Free Verse and Ekphrastic poems.

The Haiku assignment was to write a haiku based on a concept statement pulled from a bag. This English assignment was enhanced in Digital Media by adding music that corresponded with the emotion explored through the poem. To produce the haiku, we used Premiere Pro to put the music, vocal recording, and image together. What I enjoyed most from this project was piecing together samples to create a short composition of music.

Concept Statement: I am exploring the feeling of reluctance through making excuses.

This is a screenshot of Premiere Pro, which I used to produce the haiku video.

In Design, we were assigned the transport project, which was to simply take a photo of a non-motorized wheeled object.

   For this project, we had to find an object with wheels that wasn’t motorized or had an engine. The object I chose to photograph was a Lego toy car. I thought the colors were very bright and contrasted well against each other and would make for an interesting picture. I placed it in-between two branches of a tree because I thought the angle emphasized the wheels and the texture of the bark contrasted with the smooth surface of the wheels and the Lego block. Additionally, the colors of the toy were very unnatural in comparison to the tree and I thought that they would look interesting together. I took this shot in the early afternoon since this area was in the shade and I wanted it to be bright enough.

   I didn’t have to do much when photoshopping this image. The colors were bright enough on their own and I didn’t think I needed to saturate or desaturate anything, because even though the toy was bright blue and yellow, I didn’t want all of the photo to be conspicuously unnatural and edited. I started off by cropping the image to abide by the rule of thirds, getting rid of an unnecessary portion of bark. With the healing tool, I cleaned up some blemishes on the Lego part of the car and the off-yellow parts of the wheels so that they would appear smoother and contrast more with the rough texture of the bark. Aside from that and a few lighting adjustments, I didn’t really edit it that much. Regardless, I learned how imperative it is to watch where you’re sampling the color from with the healing tool, as I often went too far away from the color I wanted and had to undo and redo the process several times.

Concept Statement: I am exploring the feeling of reluctance through the experience of making excuses.

   The objects I chose to represent my concept statement were red rope and garden clippers. I spray painted the rope red because red is generally seen as a color to signal to stop or to not do something, which is what reluctance causes you to do. The rope was placed precariously between the blades of the clippers to show how easy it would be for them to just slice through it, yet the rope remains intact. In addition, I decided for the background to simply be gray pavement because I wanted the rope to be bright and contrast with it and be the main focus of the photo. The cold lighting, however, was supposed to convey the feelings that come with reluctance and how they aren’t happy, bright ones. I chose this angle because it emphasizes the clippers position over the rope and how easily it could cut through it if it wanted to, and the photo had more depth, which made it a more interesting shot.

   The rope and the garden clippers exemplify the concept statement from English because their positions emphasize the relationship between reluctance and making excuses. Making an excuse indicates a lack of action, which is exactly what reluctance prompts you to do. The clippers were tangled into the ropes but could have easily broken free by cutting through it. The rope was right between the blades, so it was very realistic for it to be cut, but it wasn’t. Portraying a sense of unwillingness, the clippers let itself remain tied up in the rope.

   The majority of the Photoshop process for this image was cleaning up unnecessary pebbles on the ground and filling in some of the white parts of the rope that I missed while spray painting it red. I learned how important it is to sample colors based on the type of lighting the area I wanted to fix had. For many parts of the rope, I originally only used colors from in the vicinity, but when I zoomed back out to look at it, the rope looked unnatural and too pink to be sitting at that angle. In order to get the lighting right and make it realistic, I had to use the colors from a part of the rope farther away from the area I wanted to edit.

This is a screenshot of Photoshop, which I used to edit this photo.

The song I parodied was “Follow You” by the band Bring Me The Horizon. To remove the vocals, I duplicated the original track and froze and muted it so that I would have a completely untouched version of the track in case anything went wrong with the one I was removing the vocals from. I then split the duplicated track into two mono tracks and reversed the polarity of the right mono channel track. I set both mono channels to center and nudged the right mono channel to the right by 2 samples. Then to remove high frequencies and add more bass to the mix, I used the EQ3 1-Band EQ plugin on the stereo duplicate track to add a low pass filter and increased the volume of the duplicate stereo track. After that, I created a new mono audio track and recorded my parody vocals over it and added reverb to blend it into the mix.

The experimental music assignment was to create a piece of music at least a minute long with the instrument plugins in Protools. My music was inspired by the music in a video game my brother played when we were younger. I was playing around with a tune on the organ and its sound reminded me of one of the levels of the game, so I built the rest of it around that, including the image for the album art. The process of producing this music started with deciding on what the main tune would be with the mini grand piano and building the beat with the Boom plugin around that. I experimented with chord progressions and notes until I finally came to one that I liked, and then recorded it on the piano. Then I recorded it again on the organ as the piano part was just an intro, and experimented with different beats until I made something I liked. Adding the bass with the vacuum plugin was the last step, which I kept simple so that the focus would be on the piano and organ parts.

This is a screenshot of Premiere Pro, which I used to produce the experimental music.