The Conceptual project was my first at Freestyle. Through it, I got to know the vast array of hardware and software available to me better. I spent the last two and a half months creating poetry, music, digital art, this website, and experimental film. The knowledge I have gained in this unit will be invaluable in my future projects, and I look forward to seeing where it can take me!
Free Verse Poetry
We spent this unit studying two forms of poetry in English: the haiku and free verse.
I am a part of the English honors program, and we were assigned Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things to read. Bright Dead Things is a collection of Limón’s poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In reading this book I learnt to appreciate free verse poetry, something that I hadn’t particularly understood in the past. I learnt to look for hidden meanings, and techniques that poets use to give us clues as to what they might be. The free verse portion of the poetry unit culminated in our creating a free-verse poem from a concept statement. Mine was “exploring the feeling of terror through falling asleep.”
We used text, images, audio, and video to present our poetry. We learned Adobe Photoshop, Avid Pro Tools, and Adobe Premiere Pro and used our skills in these programs to produce multimedia accompaniments for our haikus and free verse poems. Before Freestyle, all the poems I had written for school had just been turned in on sheets of paper. However, with the technology now available to me, I was able to express my work in multiple formats I hadn’t even thought about before. To the left is my free verse poem. Click on the image to listen!
Haiku
Before this unit, I had no idea of the depth to which one could take haikus; I thought they were just “ironic poems” that made fun of themselves for being simple. But after spending a few weeks studying them, the difficulty it takes to write one and the deeper meaning one can find in them became apparent. I learnt not just the theory of haikus, but also how to truly appreciate them.
Our first English project of the year was the creation of our own haiku poem; like the free verse poem, this was also based on a concept statement. Mine was “exploring the feeling of adoration through visiting a new place.”
Elements and Principles of Art and Design
In order to familiarize ourselves with the different elements and principles of art and design, we searched for different examples of them online and created a presentation showcasing these examples. We are going to be using these terms a lot over the next two years, so we need to know what we’re talking about!
Experimental Film
In film we had to create an experimental video that evoked the concept statement that we used for our free verse poem in English. Mine was “the feeling of terror through the experience of falling asleep”.
I wanted to highlight things that made sounds in the night that would scare somebody while they were sleeping. For example, a faucet dripping might scare somebody as they were trying to sleep. Even though it’s completely innocuous during the day, the mind can invent things during the night. I tried to make these harmless things “scary” through how I filmed them. I didn’t use any special effects; all of the effects in my film were created by my manipulating light while filming.
This film was meant to familiarize me with Premiere Pro and my DSLR camera. Even though I’ve had previous experience using both, going over it again has helped reinforce the basics of each. I also learned more about framing and light while filming. I filmed and re-filmed my shots several times before I was happy with how they turned out because small things, such as the positioning of the object in focus, weren’t right. This film taught me how to have more of a director’s eye when filming and to not rely on editing my clips in post. I am very excited to carry the experience I’ve gotten in this unit onto the next!
