Explorations Project
In the explorations project, we could choose a skill to work on and improve. For animation, I made an artwork in Photoshop centered around the poem “Ondine,” featuring various brushes. I wanted to improve my ability to utilize various textures of brushes, rather than using the plain, hard, round brush, which I’ve been using. Moreover, I learned better organization skills with the various layers I had to arrange in a specific order.
Process
Final product
Reflection
As a digital artist, what I valued about this exploration project was the ability to utilize Photoshop’s various brushes. In the future, probably for my Zenith project, I hope to create an animated short film featuring the actual music from Gaspard de La Nuit or some other classical work. I plan on starting on this project early next year, so I can get a head start on the storyboarding and animation and come up with the appropriate scenes to portray the music. If I happen to be learning a classical work on the piano which is polished enough to be recorded, I will try to incorporate my own playing with animation.
Music Recording
For the music recording project, we were tasked with recording a song or musical piece we played in the Freestyle recording studio. Me and my friend Jerry Liang were both avid minecrafters, so we thought it would be cool to make a cello/piano rendition of C418’s Sweden.
During the process of recording, we initially wanted to record the song on cello and acoustic piano, but under Mr.Flo’s guidance he suggested that I switch to the electric piano since I can hear Jerry’s part better.
After the recording session, we edited the recording using ProTools, adjusting the appropriate sound levels for each instrument as well as cutting off parts where there was any empty space.
Going into this project, the recording studio looked like a maze of wires and buttons, but under Mr.Flo’s guidance as he explained how every device in the room worked, suddenly all the devices and microphones seemed connected to each other and I understood how ProTools recorded my audio tracks.
Artist statement
For this project, we chose to play an excerpt from “Sweden” by C418, a Minecraft song, as Minecraft was our favorite video game growing up. Since this song was relatively simple, we went on a scavenger hunt online to find sheet music that was suitable for both a cello and piano player, as those are the instruments we play. During the recording session, we learned to configure the microphones in the studio while Mr. Florendo was our recording engineer to help save and upload all of our takes into Pro Tools. Finally, we edited our best recording in Pro Tools, making the piano (the melody) louder and the cello part (harmony) softer, and added a fade-out transition at the end.
Our takeaway from using the recording studio is that it really is a professional workspace to record live instruments as you can get the pure sound of what you play. In contrast, when you use a low end microphone or just basic tools, there’s background noise, echoing, and other factors that affect the pitch of the recording. Because of all the advanced equipment in the recording studio, it inspires us to create more audio or music production projects in the future. Along with that, it makes us value other people’s audio productions because they have to use similar equipment like what we have at Freestyle to produce their music.
Poetry
When we first began the poetry unit, we did various workshops, one which involved reading a random magazine article and writing a poem based off of it. The article I found was about the fall of a Hawaiian Monarchy and the castle of this Monarchy that still exists today.
I chose the title “To Fell”, since I wanted to capture the experience it was like to be so powerful and formidable yet to collapse back into nothing, which was what happened to the Hawaiian Monarchy. In addition, I used sound effects such as “Ching Ring Ching” as well as lots of line breaks to capture the silence of the Hawaiian castle, as if the reader was walking through the empty corridors.
