Introduction
During our Narrative 1 unit we worked mainly with Adobe Illustrator and learned how to write our own short story. We used Illustrator to depict an important scene in our story. I valued how this unit helped me think out of the box and forget about reality. It allowed me to open up and expand my creativity, especially when creating my creature for one of my Illustrator projects.
Story
In English, we were challenged to create a short story with a storyline where the main character had to overcome some sort of conflict. For me personally, I found this assignment challenging, especially coming up with a character and an interesting conflict. We were given a character questionnaire to fill out and I just wrote the first thing that came to mind until I had a character I was proud of.
This character questionnaire was the first thing we filled out – a starting point for our essay. It was filled with very specific and detailed questions in order for us to fully understand our character and bring them to life.
After a lot of thought and changing of the plot many times, I created a story titled “Trainwreck” that I was proud of. We were then given an opportunity to record our story in Digital Media and create an album cover to compliment it. Using Pro Tools, I was able to edit my voice recording along with some background music and sound effects to bring the story to life. I used the skills I learnt to create an album cover to go with my story.
Here are both the recording and the story below:
Trainwreck
Tina knows she is going to miss her train if she doesn’t get to her platform on time. The train’s horn is already echoing throughout the station. As she hurries to reach the train’s door, a young man holds the door open for her, as if he had been waiting for her. Once she gets on the train, she hesitates while looking at him, debating whether to thank him or not. Chickening out, she walks with her head down to an empty compartment. She places her purse next to her, guarding it, even though she’s alone. Carefully taking out her monthly issue of Vogue, her mind still muses on the man who held the door for her. She knows that she needs to thank him, but is not really keen on it. It’s not because she wasn’t grateful; she was beyond grateful, but she had no idea how to go about doing so.
The compartment door screeches open as a train attendant comes in with a coffee cart ready to take her order.
“Hello, Madam, what can I get for you today?” Glancing up from her magazine, she responds,
“Hi, I’ll have a coffee please. Milk but very little, just about two spoons and sugar… Brown sugar. Merci.” The same order as her dad. As the attendant passes Tina her coffee, the mystery man walks in.
“Do you mind? Everywhere else is full.” He asks in his thick French accent, signaling to the booth across from her. His hair is unmade and he carries a backpack that slings over his left shoulder with the front zipper wide open. There is something about him that reminds Tina of her dad. She always felt safe with her dad. Hesitantly nodding, she continues to stir her coffee. The attendant asks him what he would like to drink. He takes off his backpack and sets it on the ground beside him.
“I’ll have a coffee. Just two spoons of milk and brown sugar.” Looking up from her coffee, Tina’s eyes enlarge as he fishes for something in his backpack.
“Wow,” Tina chuckles, “I don’t think I’ve ever met someone that has the same coffee order as me. All my friends call me picky because of how specific it is.” she softly smiles at him.
“No kidding. My friends usually get an espresso and I feel so… odd.” he replies laughing. The attendant passes him his coffee as he introduces himself.
“Hi, I’m Liam.” He says gruffly as he reaches his hand out to her. Shaking it, Tina smiles before responding.
“I’m Tina,” she hesitates before continuing, “and thanks by the way…” Liam looks up raising his eyebrows, confused as to why she is thanking him. Seeing his expression, Tina explains, “For helping me get onto the train.”
“Oh. Yeah, no problem.” Liam replies nonchalantly, as if he had forgotten about it. Tina goes back to flipping through her magazine until Liam speaks again.
“Where are you headed?” he asks.
Tucking a stray piece of hair that escaped her long and wavy ponytail she replies,
“London.”
“Me too. You have family there?”
“Yeah, my mom.” Tina replies as she ponders how naturally she’s able to talk to him. She glances at Liam trying to figure out how he reminds her of her dad. His posture was like her dad’s, perfectly tall as he sits with the right leg crossing over the left. Even though he looks nothing like her father, she searches for him in Liam’s face. Tears well up in her eyes and Tina takes a deep breath to prevent herself from crying. Despite her best efforts, tears start streaming down her face and mascara streaks down her flushed cheeks. Liam looks up from his phone and sees Tina breaking down. Opening his backpack, he fishes through its contents until he finds a tissue packet and hands it to her.
“Thank you.” she says before she wipes away her tears.
“Can I help?” he asks calmly.
“I’m okay,” she responds quietly. Feeling the need to further explain, she continues.
“My dad passed away a couple of months ago and I was remembering him. Actually, you kinda remind me of him.” She goes on, explaining how close she was with her father and how losing him has been hard for her. Hperventelling, she grabs another tissue and wipes her face. The pain of her father’s passing is still overwhelming. All at once, her memories with her dad come flooding back and she starts to shake. Unsure of what to do, Liam tries comforting her. Tina bawls away and sniffles as she cries for her dad. Feeling embarrassed, she curls herself up into a ball, bringing her knees towards her chest and resting her head on her knees. As Tina quiets down, Liam tenderly encourages her to take deep breaths and begins to tell her about his mom who passed away a couple of years back. He explains that although they didn’t have a close relationship like Tina and her dad, his mom’s death was still very traumatic.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” she sniffles as she tells Liam.
“Thanks. I’m sorry for your loss too,” he says quietly. “The pain gets easier with time, you know.” Pausing, he continues on, “We will always miss them, but they’re never truly gone.”
Feeling better, Tina takes out a compact mirror from her purse and cleans up the black streaks from her face. As she places it back into her purse, an announcement notifies the passengers that they have arrived in London. Collecting their belongings, they exit the train together.
“It was nice meeting you,” she says to him.
“Same here,” he responds, smiling at her. Turning around to leave, Tina realizes she never got his contact information. Turning back around to ask, she finds that he is already gone. Standing alone in the middle of the station, she picks up her luggage, turns around, and heads home.
Illustrations
In Digital Media, we were given free rein to create a project of our own using Illustrator. I really enjoyed creating this project because the end goal was to create a physical object.
(insert physical photo)
Using Illustrator, I created an embroidery patch with the Mountain View High School Fashion Club’s logo. I recently started the Fashion Club at Mountain View High School and wanted to use it as inspiration for this project. Fashion is something that I am extremely passionate about and I wanted to incorporate that likeness into my design.
Working with Illustrator for most of this semester has allowed me to become comfortable using the software; this helped make this project easier. However, I did struggle to create the sewing machine portion of the patch, it’s so small that it was hard to get all the details to be precise. Learning to navigate Illustrator’s tools (like the pen tool) to take advantage of the resources that the software provides to better my project, will benefit my future endeavors in teaching me to work with the tools I have. This project has allowed me to apply the skills that I have learned this past semester, such as creating geometric shapes with the pen tool, to create something of my own. I am really proud that the end result was what I had envisioned. I’ve learned a lot this past semester, especially incorporating the Elements of Art and Principles of Design to my work, and I think it reflects in my patch.
Music
In Digital Media, we used Pro Tools to create a Parody song. As I was writing the lyrics for my parody song, I struggled to find inspiration. As I started to listen to the song I chose, What Makes You Beautiful, by One Direction, the lyrics for my chorus came to me naturally. Eventually, I had lyrics for a song that was about bees. I used Pro Tools to take the vocals out of the original song so I could record my lyrics over it. It was challenging to get rid of the lyrics and it involved a lot of fine editing. I added different plugins in order for the original lyrics to not be heard. As I was recording my lyrics, I noticed that I wasn’t enunciating enough. To fix this problem I spoke louder so the mic could pick up my voice. I also changed the ambiance of my voice to enhance it and make it sound more full.
Honey I Saw a Bee – Lyrics
Verse 1:
I saw a bee
And it looked at me
We exchanged confused looks with each other
I swatted once then I swatted twice
To make sure that the bee was being nice
Verse 2:
All the bees had come together
All the bees except one
Chorus:
Honey I saw a bee like none before
The way it looked at me made me scream like a girl
But when it stung my arm it was hard to tell
That it died, oh oh
It was very much dead
If only you could see what I had seen
You’d understand why i screamed so desperately
I know you’re looking at me and can’t believe
That it died, oh oh
It was very much dead, oh oh
Because it stung me it died
Design
This past unit in Design we have been focusing on grasping the many different things you can learn from Illustrator. Our big project that we created was our narrative creature and background to coincide with our short story that we wrote in English. In addition to working with Illustrator, we also made moodboards, a collage of images and materials to organize one’s thoughts for a project, and applied the Elements of Art and Design to our work.
For our Narrative project, our first step was to create a moodboard that displayed the animals we were going to include for our creature and a color scheme to go with it. Looking at the final product compared to this, you can see how much has changed, which is part of the process when it comes to creating any project.
Since a big part of my story takes place on a train I thought it would be fitting that the background would be the train compartment that Tina and Liam share. I used linear perspective, a type of perspective that creates an illusion of depth on a flat surface, to create the background.
The short story that I was inspired to write in my English class, explores a glimpse into an important moment in the main character, Tina’s, life. It all starts when she almost misses her train from London to Paris, where she will visit her mother for the first time after her father’s funeral. In an unexpected stroke of good luck, a young man by the name of Liam, helps her onto the train. As she is expressing her thanks to the kind stranger, she sees much of her father in him and gets lost in the memories she has of them together. Liam, once again comes to her aid as he comforts her with his experience with death, through the loss of his mother. The two strangers who cross paths for only a short train ride form a bond through their shared losses and help each other through their own griefs.
Using Adobe Illustrator I was able to express my protagonist’s character. With the body of a koala, she is seen as soft-spoken, the wings of an atlas moth represents her uniqueness, the seahorse tail representing her independence, turtle feet to show her patience, and lastly the quail beak to embody her kindness. Creating the creature wasn’t difficult, but I was pushed to use my creativity to incorporate details for it to look right, and I would like to continue to work on that in the future. In the beginning when I first saw my creature I was skeptical, but when I added it to the background it fit so well. For the background, I created the train compartment using two point perspective. It was difficult to create the booths, specifically the shadow details on the seats. I really enjoyed creating the background and exploring linear perspective.