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Welcome to my second narrative website! During this project I created short story in English that was dialogue driven. As well as a book trailer in WebAudio which was created in Adobe After Effects. And lastly, a book jacket cover in Design which was created in Adobe InDesing. During this unit I have produced work that I am most proud of. I hope you enjoy my website!
Short Story
In English we had to create a short story with dialogue. It took me a while to start writing and actually come up with an idea that I wanted to pursue. Eventually I landed on the idea of writing about a girl who, simply, just can't write an essay for her English class. On the right, you will find my short story titled, True Life. Below you will find an audio recording so you can listen to the story as you read! Enjoy!

True Life

I sat there. Cursor blinking. Empty page. Not a word written. The clock blinked in bright red numbers 10:53pm. I had been sitting at my desk for four hours and I had accomplished nothing. I had to have a 3,500 word essay finished by tomorrow morning. The prompt was to write a nonfiction story on a hardship from our past. I kid you not, I had no hardships. I was the most privileged 15 year old girl in my school. The previous summer I had gone to Costa Rica to do community service work, and the fall of my sophomore year I had gotten to go to New Orleans to help rebuild homes after Hurricane Katrina. Not to mention I'd planned to take a week long trip to Hawaii during spring break. Anyways, back to the essay. I was still just sitting there thinking about what hardships I could talk about. I could lie and write about something that didn’t actually happen, but that never ends up well. I banged my head against my desk trying to elicit some pain to help get my creativity going. Lately, that’s all that seemed to be working to get myself focused enough to finish my homework. Of course my mom heard that. “Honey? Is that you?” “Yeah mom, I just dropped my textbook on the ground.” “Are you alright?” “Yeah,” I said, rolling my eyes. Ever since my little brother died from a car accident 6 years ago, she was always scared something was going to happen to me. The car accident tore my family apart. My brother was six and I was nine when it happened. My mom was driving and my brother and I were fighting in the back seat. She turned around to break up our fight and swerved into oncoming traffic. We were all rushed to the hospital, but my brother was the only one who didn’t make it. My mom and I were the lucky ones. I remember seeing my dad arrive at the hospital. It was the first time I had ever seen him cry. His face showed this emotion that I was not used to seeing. He looked as if his heart had just broken in two. Ever since that day, my parents have had some resentment towards each other that they just can’t seem to get over. A year after the car accident, my parents got divorced and my dad kind of just walked out of my life altogether. He started drinking and I didn’t want to be a part of that. We used to be that perfect happy-go-lucky family. It was my mom, my dad, my brother, Lucas, and me. I don’t know why anything like that had to happen, but it did, and that was my life now. It was my sophomore year of high school and I had oh-so-unfortunately been assigned the hardest English teacher in the entire school. Mr. Henglis was the death of my sophomore year. He never gave out any A’s and rarely gave out any B’s. I was used to being a pretty decent student and I surely never got any C’s so this year hit me in the face. Hard. I knew that I had the option of writing about my brother’s death for my english assignment, but honestly it didn’t feel like a hardship to me. It felt more like a horrible event that I never, ever, wanted to talk about to my teachers and classmates. So, I was stuck with nothing to write about. And now I had my mom worried about me more than ever. What was I going to write about? I decided that for the first time ever, I was going to email my teacher and ask for an extension. I didn’t even know if Mr. Henglis gave out extensions, but I was going to try. I went to bed that night with the worst feeling in my stomach. I woke up the next morning feeling no different than I had last night: my stomach was churning. Despite this, I went downstairs to eat breakfast. “Hi sweetheart!” My mom was way too energetic in the mornings. “Morning.’” I was not a morning person. “Eggs and toast are on the table, I’m off to work. Love you!” “Thanks, bye.” I was definitely not in the mood for eggs, and especially not in the mood to face Mr. Henglis. I walked out of my house ten minutes after my mom left. It was snowing outside, as usual. It never stopped snowing in this town. I mean, living in Colorado did kind of make it a given that it would always be snowing in the winter. I paced back and forth at the end of my driveway as I waited for the bus to come. I was not prepared for English and I didn’t like the feeling in my stomach. I finally hear the bus turn the corner and make its way to my house. As I’m getting on the bus, I see a whole bunch of people who are in my class. I wonder what they wrote about for their English papers. Did any of them write about a family member's death? Or a death at all? Twenty minutes later, Hannah walked into school just as the bell rang for first period to begin. As I walked into Mr. Henglis’ classroom my stomach dropped to the floor. I couldn’t believe I thought it would be okay to come to class unprepared. What had I been thinking? “Oh my god, I have to leave. I can’t be here” was all that ran through my head. The final bell rang: meaning we all had to be in our seats. “Good morning class. I hope you all had a swell weekend” Mr. Henglis said insensitively. Mr. Henglis always asked us about our weekends, but never acted like he truly cared about our lives. So the class just proceeded on. “I will be coming around to collect your papers. If the paper was not formatted correctly, don’t even turn it into me. Go home, fix it, and turn it into me tomorrow for late credit.” Crap. This was bad. So very bad. He made his way around the room, and finally got to me. “Hannah, do you have your paper?” “Yea about that… I was going to ask for an extension because I need some extra time to work on it.” I was probably quivering while I said that because Mr. Henglis then told me to stay after class to talk to him. After class, Mr. Henglis says, “Hannah, why have don’t you have your essay?” “Uh, uh, I don’t know” I said self consciously. At that moment Mr. Henglis stared at me so deeply it was almost as if he could see right into my brain and knew what I was thinking. “Hannah, are you feeling okay?” “Yea, of course. I’m sorry Mr. Henglis but I think I have to go. My mom is waiting for me” I said. Trying not to act scared. All I could think was, “please don’t fail me.” “You are one of the strongest writers in this class, I am very surprised you weren’t able to come up with anything for this assignment. Can we brainstorm together real quick?” I was in shock. Why was he being so nice to me? “Sure. Yea. That, that would be great thanks.” We then proceeded to talk. We talked and talked. But he did it, but he got me to talk about my brother, Lucas. He told me to tell that story in the paper. I hesitated with the topic at first, but I realized that if he was encouraging me to write about it then I probably should. He told me to turn it into him tomorrow for full credit. I was blown away with his kindness. I went home that night and wrote about Lucas for the first time since his death. I wrote about how he died. I wrote about how I felt like I was the cause of his death. I wrote about Lucas. I could feel his presence with me that night as I sat at my desk and wrote. I knew he was with me.

Book Jacket

Book Jacket Artist Statement:

My story is about a girl who is faced with writing an English paper on hardships in her life. She doesn’t think she has any hardships so she decides not to turn anything in. However, her teacher eventually pushes the hardest truth out of her; her brother’s death. Two years ago her brother died in a car crash. She has always blamed the accident on herself and has always forced herself to stop thinking about it. By the end of the story, Hannah, the main character, is now able to talk and write about her brother’s death. She turns in a paper to her English teacher and, much to her surprise, receives a stellar grade. To create my book jacket, I used Adobe InDesign. I knew I wanted a simple book jacket but I wanted it to also have meaning. I came up with the idea of having clouds fall from the sky instead of rain falling. I associate rain with death and sadness so I thought that was a perfect combination to have the dark clouds with the papers falling out of them. I chose the color scheme of blue and purple because although she is saddened by her brothers death she is overall a happy person.

Trailer
This is my book trailer for the book I wrote in English. This trailer is supposed to make my book sound interesting and intice people to read it. I created this video in Adobe After Effects. I struggled with this application in the beginning but after a while I got the hang of it and it came easy. Click the play button on the video to watch! Enjoy!
Surrealism

Surrealism Artist Statement: My surrealism art is based on multiple dreams that I have had. In my first dream I saw these trees overarching a pathway. In my second dream I just saw puzzle pieces falling from the sky. The story behind this is that there are many pieces of our lives and they will eventually all fall together. The puzzle pieces are representative of every aspect of your life and how things can and will change. I used Adobe Photoshop to create this piece. I used the liquidation filter to get the puzzle pieces to droop down like they were melting. My HDR photo is the black and white background image. My foreground are weeds that I cropped from a different picture I took and I applied a filter to make them a different color than the original. The background is blurred and rounded in the middle to give the illusion of a dreamy scene.