The visual narrative unit enabled me to learn how to use software, including ProTools to record my short story in digital media. In animation, we worked on our visual narrative group project. From this project, I developed my experience with Adobe Photoshop, such as mastering layer animation and various brush textures.

In English, we were tasked with creating a short story based on the character we created. During the process, we read and analyzed various short stories by authors, including George Saunders, to grasp the key elements of storytelling and methods for drawing the reader’s attention.

My story was about an airship mechanic named Krill, who is forced to work in his monotonous 24/7 job as he has to support his family. Throughout the story, the reappearing symbolism of a crow is used to depict Krill’s struggle with his fading self-image as he delves into more work. The inspiration for this story was after reading Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis in English class.

In addition, the audio for this short story was produced in the isolation booths at Freestyle Academy’s digital media room using microphones connected to ProTools. After the recording phase, I used Adobe Audition to add in sound effects from a sound library and also fine-tuned everything on Audition, such as increase/decrease in volume. During this process, I valued skills such as navigating ProTools software, making sure the microphones have the correct input levels, and reading over the text multiple times to find the best placement for the additional sound effects.

Mechanicus, entrapment

“It was a cold morning in the city of Petrapolis. As the sun began to set, the silhouettes of the sky-high buildings could be seen from miles away. They were stone buildings, consisting of intricately carved statues and pillars helping to support them from the ground up. Bridges in the sky helped connect these massive structures, creating a whole pathway above. Shabby makeshift houses scatter not a few miles away, lost in the shadows“

In this album cover art I created in Adobe Illustrator, the circle on the top right is supposed to represent the everyday daylight cycle, showing how fast each day passes with Krill’s monotonous work. The two rectangles at the bottom are supposed to be brutalist representations of Krill’s workspace hierarchy.

Artist statement

With this project, I grew artistically as I was able to fit the correct audio tracks with the appropriate parts of my story voiceover. I confirmed my technical skills in protools as I could navigate the recording studio and protocols with ease, such as setting the correct input and output, and using the right keyboard shortcut commands. Some struggles I encountered with this project were that the input and outputs of the microphones weren’t working, I later figured out that it was because my settings weren’t correct, and I went back to my EVO dropbox to apply the correct input/output configurations. I also struggled with adjusting the right volume of the sound effects tracks so that they didn’t overlap my voice, to overcome this I experimented with various volumes until I got the perfect fit.

I would change the sound effects tracks so that they included a wider variety of sounds. For example, I could record my own sound effects using a microphone and add it to my short story audio production for a more distinct and unique sound effect. This also enables me to tailor the sound effects to my needs instead of searching through the entire sound effects folder. I am most proud of this project as I was able to create a short story with sound effects that matched the audiobooks I listened to, and I gave me a sense of high professionalism as well as unlocking my technical skills with audio production.

I will use the ideas I learned on this project in future projects such as applying knowledge of using protools to record music. I can apply this to my life to create a daily diary where I narrate and put special sound effects for humor. This project changed the way I saw others’ audio productions as it showed me how easy it was to create an voiceover with sound effects, even with the most basic knowledge of professional end audio software, I was able to produce something significant. I know understand that audio productions such as for video game tracks require lots of attention to detail and editing in order to make the perfect audio tracks. 

Here are some of the illustrations I made in Adobe Illustrator. These include the short story album art cover, exquisite corpse group project, and the embroidered patch for the own choice project.

For the exquisite corpse project, we were assigned a group where we each creared an image in adobe illustrator. We didn’t know what the other team member was drawing, but we had guidelines of where to start and end the drawing. The results were interesting.

In this illustrator own choice project, I created an embroidered patch using adobe illustrator. In this project, I wanted to create a nature scene. Looking back, my first ideas was to create a scene of a swamp that was intricately detailed. I realized that my initial design wasn’t going to be possible as it was too detailed for the embroidery machine to sew, hence, I had to go with a more easier design of some trees and leaves. The focus of this art piece is the yellow log on the right, which stands out as it is yellow and has orange leaves. This represents nature, as greenery never follows specific patterns and can often vary.

Compared to other projects I made at freestyle, this project was very different as it required me to use adobe illustrator, an adobe application I had recently learned. For example, for animation we created projects using adobe photoshop which is less vector based meaning that there is more creative space for individuals that are good at drawing. In illustrator, I had to come up with ways to express my details through the various tools that illustrator offered including the line tool, shape tool, and pen tool. For the pen tool, I decided to use it on the leaves, which required varying curvatures. To achieve this, I used anchor points to set where I wanted the curves to turn. In addition, I used the line tool to create a modernistic styled tree as it appears that it is cut out of the green background. For the shape tool, I used the ellipse which was used in some leaves that I wanted to appear rounder, as well as the rectangles in the background to create the illusion that the darker colored trees are farther away.

  From this project, I learned that vector-based drawing software contains various utilities which enable an artist to precisely convey their intentions. I learned that since I was so good at photoshop, it was actually harder for me to start out in illustrator as I was used to creating drawings only by using the pen instead of using premade shapes, objects, and patterns. Overall, I am most proud of how I was able to successfully simplify my original design to fit my artistic ideas onto a small embroidered patch. For example, I could look at my patch from far away and still see a forest. I will use ideas that I learned from this project in future projects such as creating accurate panels and shading for graphic novels in illustrator. This project made me see minimalist/less detailed artwork as valuable as the artist spends lots of time in composition and arrangement to make their artwork look appealing to the eye.

In the experimental music project, I chose to make 4 interstitials in ProTools. For the interstitials, we were requried to use ProTools virtual instruments such as the Xpand, keyboard, organ, and many others which ProTools offers.

my process in producing my experimental music in protools was I first composed the first interstitial using basic chords and the appregiation feature on the virtual organ. Then, I composed the rest of the interstitials based around the theme of the first. Finally, after creating the music I adjusted appropriate fade ins/outs as well as adding specially recorded tracks with acoustic instruments (cello).

 For my experimental music project in Digital Media, I used my experience with music theory and my piano and cello experience to created the audio tracks for this piece. To make this piece, I used virtual MIDI instruments such as the virtual piano keyboard, virtual organ, and the virtual vacuum instruments on ProTools. I also used an addition real instrument track where I recorded my cello playing and put it onto ProTools so that it adds more diversity in the sound of the instruments.

 When making this piece, some struggles I encountered was making the tracks match with one another. I had to slowly and precisely crop each track so that the organ, piano, and vacuum matched with each other. In addition, since ProTools has so many functions and features, I had to take some time to learn how to navigate ProTools to be successful in my music production. For my real instrument track on the cello, I experimented with different angles to position my microphone and different input levels so that the audio wouldn’t be too grainy or too loud. Finally, timing the fade outs correctly took multiple attempts as I wanted the listener to not have an abrupt listening experience.

Overall, I felt accomplished with this MIDI music production project since I was able to apply the skills that I learned in digital media of using ProTools. For future projects, I will use ProTools when I have vast amounts of digital tracks to produce, or when I want to edit my audio tracks recorded with real instruments. Upon reflection, I realized this project made me realize professional software isn’t that hard to use, and can be used to produce music by anyone if they know the software well enough.

Using MIDI instruments such as the electric keyboard, I was able to understand how to convert real time playing into music recording software. This is important since in the future I can add various MIDI instruments and record them virtually instead of acoustically. In addition, ProTools taught me the various virtual instruments which I can use to expand the music that I create as well as a wide arrange of sound effects which can be useful for animation projects.

Character biography

In animation, we were tasked to create our own fictional character along with a biography, such as their backstory, features, and traits. We then had to make this character into a puppet, where we hand made the clothes of the character and put it onto a metal frame. I decided to make my character a type of desert wizard, which was heavily influenced by the movie Dune

After the puppet was completed, we then had to animate the puppet walking through the stop motion software DragonFrame. Since DragonFrame directly connects to the canon DSLR, I had to spend a lot of time fine tuning the camera position and focus in order to produce a good animation. 

Character walk cycle

We also made a digital walk animation of our puppet, where we animate our character on Adobe photoshop through the timeline feature. Looking back, I could’ve made my animation work easier by separating all the body parts of the character into individual layers and moving them across the frames. After the digital and stop motion animation was completed, we combined both the animations in Adobe After Effects.

Character lip sync

For the Lip Sync product, we were tasked with using a vocal audio track and creating a face with animated lips that would sync to the audio as if it was talking. I decided to use the audio of Paul Atreides from Dune where he gives a speech. One of the challenging parts was to correctly match each lip shape with the right words, so I used reference lip shapes and matched each lip that would accommodate 1-2 words. Additional animations were also added such as the eye blinking. All this was finally composited in Adobe After Effects.

Visual narrative animation

For the visual narrative animation, our class divided into two groups where we had to make an animation consisting of a storyline and a character who has a conflict, resolution, and ending. One of the challenging parts of this project was coming up with an idea that everyone agreed with, at the end we decided to make an animation based around a cat’s dream. In addition, we had to create daily tasks for each team member so we will meet the deadline for the project. We were divided into roles, like animator, background artist, concept artist, and color artist.

Overall, it was a great experience as I got to feel how animation studios like Ghibli functioned when they needed to produce films under deadlines. I also learned a lot more about Photoshop animation and keyframing.