Introduction
This unit, we were required to reflect on ourselves and our previous years of high school. Since we’re graduating this year and will go through a big change, go to college and start our career, it’s important to have a strong sense of your own identity. The essential question this unit is “Who am I?” I learned a lot about myself over this unit, and how my previous hobbies as a kid turned into the things I’m pursuing in a career now. It was interesting to see how everything connected over my life.
We were also required to discover and write about our core values. This is especially important for college essays that ask you who you are. Most of the time your core values will connect to the thing you’re going to study so it’s important to connect those as well. After making a list of my core values, I put them all together in Adobe After Effects. The video is linked below. It’s a good introduction video to what this unit is all about.
Personal Mandala
One of my favorite projects for this unit was the Personal Mandala. We created a mandala by designing one sliver of a circle and then copying and rotating it so it formed a complete circle. First we just did line art then we were required to add color. Then, we printed our mandalas on different objects like plastic, metal, and in my case, a pizza board and photographed it. Overall, it was relaxing and fun and I unexpectedly liked it.
My inspiration for my mandala were biblically accurate angels. I liked the repetition of wings and eyes and I thought I could incorporate something like that into my mandala. That was my starting point, and I made it up as I went along. It ended up being a visualization of the universe as a living being. The earth, which is the center of the mandala, has a heart in it which branches into trees. The trees reach up towards the sky, which has a big eye, mouth, and wings in the center of it. I also added a UFO abducting a person from a building. As for how this represents me, it represents my thought process as being chaotic and abstract. I visualize myself as the person being abducted because I feel like I’m in the middle of all my thoughts.
If you can’t see the mandala below, zoom out and then zoom back in (command + plus or minus on a mac)
My biggest challenge with making the mandala was just letting go and letting the art do its own thing instead of making a plan (which is what I usually do). The mandala project was a great way to learn this because it allowed more creativity. I thought anything I made could look good because of the symmetry, so I just allowed myself to do whatever I wanted.
When I was making my colored mandala, I got inspired by the examples that had a black background. Having a black background and bright colors for your mandala looks like glowing neon lights which I thought was cool. Just like with the laser mandalas, I let myself relax and let the colors take me wherever they went. I encountered some challenges with using gradients in Illustrator. I couldn’t figure it out for some of the designs I wanted but I did manage to have a gradient in the tree trunks. Overall, I like how it looks kind of like a casino in Las Vegas or something with all the neon colors and cool imagery.
Below is a “speed paint” of my mandala. You get to see all the details in this video.
Finally, we had to photograph the physical object we engraved our mandala on. I wanted my mandala engraved photo to look cold and dark, as if it was in space. I chose a black and gray painted background and I photographed it in the studio. I used one of the lights which ended up being too warm. Most of my photos turned out too warm or oversaturated, but I got a good photo by angling the light to the side and taking a closeup. I learned that I didn’t have to take a photograph of the whole thing and I could focus on the details. In Photoshop, I edited the photo to bring out the cold space feel.
Personal Essay for College
For English one of our assignments was writing the personal essay which is required when applying to colleges through the Common App. This was really helpful because not only did it give a lot of guidance when writing the essay, but it gave me a jumpstart for writing other required essays for colleges.
The first thing we did was gather our core values, mentioned in the introduction. Then we had to write about an experience we had that showed how we developed these core values and optionally connect it to the subject we want to major. It’s harder than you think to turn your life into a narrative structure.
Through a lot of planning, structuring, and re-writing (feedback from Mr. Greco helped) I was able to do it. Through writing this essay, I answered the question “Who am I?” because I combined many different parts of my identity in it. After that, I recorded my voice performing the essay and added music, which is linked below.
Motion Graphics
In Digital Media, we learned a lot about Adobe After Effects. I knew the basics last year, but this year we learned about motion graphics and cool effects we could produce in After Effects. For this project, I learned how to sync audio to waveforms which I made into a Spiderverse video (shown below), and created an “advertisement” for Coca Cola using wave and bubble effects. Finally, I learned about rotoscoping and I made a video in which I separated the subject from the background which is cool if you want to do those effects where words/effects appears behind somebody.
In conclusion, I really valued learning more about After Effects. My projects ended up looking professional, like something I would see in an advertisement. It was cool to learn that I have the resources to do that. I was also liked audio synching because it opens up more possibilities for making a music video or something. Overall, this project was really professional but also allowed me to be creative and bring in my own interests.
Film Projects
Our first big film project was our Reflections video essay. The goal is to show who you are and your unique outlook on the world. his was fun because I could represent myself creatively. I took this opportunity to combine animation and live action. It also helped answer the question “Who am I?” because it was all about how we think and process the world, not just what you see on the inside.
Now that Freestyle has a new green screen studio, we were tasked to come up with a green screen shot that looked realistic. I decided to do 2 shots and I used this chance to play with opacity. I used a ghost character who was fading in and out and looking at their gravestone.
The 1-minute film project was an exercise to get us to work with the whole class. We had to no idea what to expect when Mr. Taylor made us storyboard a 1-minute film in groups of 4. He revealed we had to pass our storyboards to the next group to film it. We had to work with storyboards we didn’t make and had to interpret the previous group’s vision. Then once we were done filming, Mr. Taylor told us to pass our SD cards to the next groups. We had to edit footage we didn’t film which was a challenge. It was cool to see everyone’s filming style. Below is the film that our group edited, however two other groups came up with the story and did the production. It was like the whole class worked on it.
This next project was exciting because we had to conceptualize, film, and edit an entire film in one period. The point was to get us to budget our time which is important in the industry. It all relied on collaboration whch is an underrated part of filmmaking. Our group worked together and produced our film called “The Sneakening.”
Below are some screenshots that showed my progress editing my Reflections video essay. I wanted to add hand drawn animated effects so I asked Mr. Taylor who said I could combine Adobe Animate and footage on After Effects. I could animate over the footage in Animate, but since it doesn’t export with the footage, I have to combine them in After Effects. I ended up making a lot of mistakes, for example messing up the frame rates so the animation was too slow, but I made it work.
Overall, this was a great start to the year! I learned a lot about making films and I can see my improvement from last year. I liked being creative on my personal essay, learning that I could work under high pressure situations, and collaborating with my classmates. Hopefully the rest of the year will go well!