Introduction
As a Freestyle student, we work with a variety of programs to make risk-taking opportunities to develop our critical thinking and creative thinking skills. We used a list of professional products such as DSLR Cameras, Tascam Audio Recorders, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Animate, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Audition, Pro Tools, and WordPress in order to get hands-on experience with some of the unique programs that allow many of the amazing things we see today. I was able to learn through the Digital Media class about many of these programs along with the ins and outs of how professionals get around using them. I really enjoyed the experience of working with Photoshop and Pro Tools, as it allowed me to really understand how long it takes to mix and sample audio and pictures.
First Project – Photo Haiku:
In English class along with the help of Digital Media; we were able to analyze and deep dive into many poems and haikus made by inspiring writers throughout Japan. After spending time analyzing them, we were challenged to develop our own haiku with a given message we needed to fill in our own creative way.
One of the key things we learned with Premiere Pro was the idea of putting together the end product. We learned separately how to edit and sample audio and pictures, but with learning Premiere Pro we put our two skills together in order to combine the two to make a high-quality video that showcases our skills.
A Mastery of Elements: Poetry
After finishing the Haiku Poem, we spent time practicing more with Photo Shop and with Pro Tools to develop our own unique poem with our chosen picture, audio and intention statement. We developed the poem in english and through digital media were able to put it all together to form one video.
We’re Slicing him Open is a free verse poem about the toxic relationship/friendship between me and a guy named Matthew for 2 years. The poem is supposed to convey the hardships and illusions that having a toxic close person to you will have and how even if you know something from the very beginning, you still cannot see it. The speaker in this poem is myself talking about my feelings toward Matthew. The situation they are in is that the one close friend in their life treats them horribly but still insists on being the close friend. In the first stanza, I use end-stop along with contrasting imagery of the lines to convey how both feelings are present. When the tone and contrast of the poem change during the line turmoil and anger, the speaker’s attitude becomes a lot angrier and confused. Ultimately, the pattern of contrast and tone in this poem shows the realization that it was a toxic relationship with the other person, and that continuing to talk to them would just continue the cycle of toxicity and negativity in the speaker’s life. During peer reviews, my readers enjoyed the continuity of the poem and how it conveys different emotions at the same time. The line “You’re insane, you’re stupid. How could you think that? they said.” I purposefully said they gave the idea that the speaker was also saying it. The line is intending to give the idea that the toxic person said that so many times, that they started to believe it and say it to themselves. I tried to emulate the idea of end stop and enjambment to give the poem more rhythm and flow in some places while stopping it and breaking it up in others. I think I did this effectively.
Elements & Principles of Art:
The point of this assignment was to explore the different forms and different things that make up an art piece. We did this by finding images from different time periods throughout history to show how these principles and elements have been ingrained throughout all of art’s history.
Learning Animation
My experience in Animation has been amazing. With a background in stop motion animation, it was very awesome to develop my skills further through stop motion cutout and object animation, as well as learning how to add audio effects and music to said animations. we were able to set up shots, scenes and create characters with their own little story picture by picture and I loved it very much.
For a warm-up, we worked to create a Zoetrope Animation using a CD and some paper while turning to create the illusion of movement. I used a bouncing ball to show how it can go down, and looking through a slit in the paper shows movement. This taught us about how paper and stop motion animation works with pictures and not fluid movement. We also learned about bouncing and other animation techniques to make the animation look more fluid than just fast-paced and unhuman like movement.
For our first project, we were tasked with creating a Phenakistoscope Animation, which involved cutouts and drawing of a circular piece of paper with little drawings to create an illusion of motion.
We created a gif version of the Phenakistoscope using photoshop techniques that we learned previously, and were able to use a timeline to make it into a moving flowing animation. we also learned how to center an image, remove background, and turn it.
We also worked on creating a Flipbook Animation which looks incredible for the few seconds it plays. We learned how time-consuming some animation can be, as with these, they can take hours just to create mere moments of movement.
We then moved onto bigger and better projects, beginning with a quarter-final of making a paper cutout animation. I took the time to cut out some parts and some figures for the animation and ended up making this.
I used StopMotion Studio to create an animation about a crab who sees a pun about him for the very first time. Taking the time to make sure everything stays still but things I want to move do move was very tough but was very fun to try and achieve.
We took a second to learn stop motion studio, learning about 30 frames a second being the standard for animation and learning about all the other standards.
Last but not least we made a Stop motion object animation through the Stop Motion Studio App. I used legos to develop a stop motion story.