Introduction
Narrative, Telling stories, Weaving tales of woe and triumph. This unit was pretty fun, since this is something that isn’t that hard to understand. This unit was really about expanding into new applications and trying new techniques more than “Story”. Don’t get me wrong, we did tell stories, make fictional characters, and the like, But it was hard to feel that.
The new program that we used in Digital Media was Adobe Illustrate, and let me just say that it was *Chef’s kiss*. I loved to use it and the lessons to learn how to use it wasn’t half bad either. I made some Illustrations that I’m pretty proud of in that class and I might use it more. English, I think, was ok. I really am not that good at “Writing” than I am at “Coming up with the concepts”. But I do think that this course helped me learn how to be a bit better (At least) when it comes to writing down things and using little to no character dialogue.
Story
So story time. The assignment was to create a flash fiction, which is a very short story with limited dialogue. We were encouraged to think about world building through exercises like character starter sheets and have people ask questions about the world they live in. I decided to go with I character that I made up a while ago and used for my Puppet Animation project (More on this later). With most of the character and world building already done, It seemed like this was going to be easy project.
The thing was that I didn’t make this character with a short plot in mind, so I decided to make the story a sliver of it. Almost like a prolong to what I had in mind. Of course it wasn’t perfect, but I did a bit better than what I thought it would be. There isn’t really much to say about the English portion of this assignment.
So pro tools time. For the Jigital Media half of this project, we took the story that was made and made it an audio short story. There wasn’t much to add since it mostly depended on the story itself being made which took most of the time, but I did add background audio and music. There isn’t much to say about the audio version of the story (If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have posted it/ made it), But I did find a band called “The Gays ” which I used in the short story which is great. I don’t really remember much of the audio portion, but making the album art was really fun to make.
I first sketched it out, then using illustrator added details and certain things that I thought fit the theme of this story and character. It turned out well and I really liked it, I made it a disk case since that’s a big part of the story and the main character’s personality.
Breaking the Cycle by Aramis Duenas
After an exhilarating trip to the local TechHut, Curtis had set down his bag filled to the brim with blank CDs. All of them were destined to be filled with music that took small samples from Curtis’ favourite songs and movies, but for now they would be tucked away in his desk drawer.
After unloading the haul of CDs he brought in, he looked at his desk and couldn’t ignore the CD he had been using as a coaster. It was scuffed, beat up, and rough at certain places where the tape with the title “Confession” would have been. Everytime he thought had the guts to take it to school, he would immediately throw it back on his desk.
He pushed the Disk off to the side, trying his best to leave his stirring feelings undisturbed. Staring at the flimsy TechHut bag, he thought something was odd. How was the TechHut open if it was Saturday? Wait, what if—?
For the first time in a long time, he thought. And he thought, “It’s actually Friday today and I’m missing first period.”
He rushed around the room grabbing everything he needed in his mental checklist. He grabbed his empty backpack and poured into it everything on his desk. It must have all of the school essentials, right? After a long trip to the bathroom, to make sure that his flannel shirt and jeans matched with the dark matter that represented his body, he jumped on his bike and started pedaling to his high school.
Curtis started to unpack all of the mostly useless junk into his locker. Fortunately, he had some understanding teachers. Unfortunately, most of the knick knacks he had on his desk were now broken bits of plastic.
“What is that? Is that? A whole electronic keyboard?” asked Eyes, and rightfully so. Captain of practically every sports team and the undisputed king of John Doe High School, “Eyes” not only had everybody’s eyes on him, but had eyes covering his whole body.
“I see,” said Eyes, trying to make sure that his joke landed.
Curtis thought that his joke was so funny, he had forgotten to laugh. But suddenly his heart dropped: the Disk. He scrambled through his backpack to find the Disk he had burned his bleeding heart onto. It was a nightmare come true; the Disk had weaseled its way onto school grounds and was two steps away from breaking his heart.
“Hey, you mind if I take a listen?”
Curtis, in a state of mental limbo, stood in fear, being broken out by Eyes taking the Disk from his hands. Curtis had to make up a fib on the spot.
Curtis signed, “It’s a love mix that I’ve been working on.”
what?
“Ah, I see our country bumpkin here has got a serious case of the L-O-V-E bug. You know, I’m kinda an expert on this thing, they don’t call me ‘Doctor two-lips’ for nothing. I think…”
Through Eyes’ word vomit, Curtis couldn’t get a word in, he couldn’t even think clearly. Unable to focus, he had unknowingly followed him to his crush’s locker.
“…And that’s why putting this cd in his locker is totally the right course of action.” Said Eyes hovering the Disk over the slot in the locker that could ruin Curtis’ chance at any sort of relationship.
Curtis, finally able to think and snap back, grabbed Eyes by the shoulders with a death grip.
“Hey, I respect what you’re doing, but you gotta tell him sometime.”
Kinda embarrassed and flustered, Curtis stood there.
“Hey man, put ‘er there.”
Eyes came in for a hug, but before he could give it to him, Curtis grabbed both of his wrists.
“What?”
Curtis shook Eyes’ hands violently, trying to send some sort of message. Eyes’ hands were empty.
Curtis dashed to the locker, trying to pry it open, trying to take the Disk back
“Hold on, I know a guy.” Eyes’ sped down the hallway, fleeing from the scene of the crime. Curtis suddenly felt really warm, out of sheer embarrassment and because of the burning skeleton behind him.
“Excuse me, I think I forgot something in my locker,” said Adam Brunt, the boy he had his heart set on. He had never been so close before, and had realized how warm he actually was. He smelled like a warm fire on a rainy day; it would have comforted Curtis if the situation wasn’t so dire. His clothes, refusing to turn into ash—it was hard to read what was on the graphic tee.
Adam had started opening the locker. With every turn of the dail, his heart dropped. This all could have been avoided if he was more careful. No, if he had said something earlier. He should have established something, anything. In a sense Eyes was right: He should have done this on his own terms.
Before he had opened the locker door, the school ambiance was interrupted by—
“What’d you say about my face?”
It was almost like a miracle…
“Don’t worry about it, I’m gonna fix it for you.”
…but it was more like a favor from a certain jock.
A ring started to form around the commotion, pulling in almost everybody except for Curtis.He took the chance to swoop down and grab it before any more harm could be done.
After his awkward getaway, Curtis was finally relieved to have it back. Before he shoved his disk into his backpack, he took a piece of masking tape and wrote down “Adam”.
Not today, not even this week, but this year. This year he will talk to him, he will make himself known, and maybe even confess his feelings.
Illustrations
YEAH! NOW WE CAN TALK ABOUT THE FUN STUFF. I LOVE Illustrator. It’s great and it was practically made for me, on top of that, we get a banger end project. Through Illustrator, we can make almost any form of physical media that we want. It could be stickers, prints, clothing art. So I decided to make pins.
Originally I was going to make two custom made pin designs, one for my original character and Freestyle. However, I did finish that super early. So, I decided to keep going and make pins for other things that I thought wouldn’t get these pins. Some Include: Resident evil 7, Hawaii Part ii, Spookware, Stanley Parable, Beastars, ect.
While making these pins, I really had pretty much no problems. The only one came from the design of the “Ruins pin”. I have several sketches of trying to nail the feel of it, and even now it isn’t what I 100% wanted out of it. Even so, I still am extremely proud and exited to have them. When making the custom designs, I really wanted to make this abstract “muralistic” illustrations because I think that’s the benefit of Illustrator. As an outcome, I made the designs rather quickly. So I made pins of things that I thought wouldn’t get proper pins or the pins they had sucked. So that’s why you can see the Antique coin, 427 Door, and the Cherryton High badge. It was pretty much just tracing over, so it wasn’t too bad.
Music Production
Ok, now back to the not fun stuff. We used Pro tools to get rid of the vocals of a song to we could dub over it with out own lyrics, pretty much made a parody of it. How we did it was pretty weird, I don’t even know exactly how we did it, but it was something along the lines of reversing the wavelength of the song to mute the “strongest parts of itself” which would be the vocals. Then after that we recorded our songs using the studio, and slapped it on the track with some reverb and called it a day.
For the parody lyrics, I knew I wanted to do fly me to the moon so I just played around with the chorus to see if anything else fit and “New moon” seemed like a great fit. All I needed to do was find out what “New moon” was, which was a simple google search away and got back New moon in San Raymon. After that, I just snooped around for more details to put in my song and bada bing bada boom. Parody done.
Fly me to new moon,
In California, San Ramon
Let me see their Kung Pao Chicken,
Or Honey Prawns
In Hudson’s words, it’s average.
Nicolas’ words, it was “freshly”
Feel the “mellow vibe”, “authentic food”, “no alcohol”
It’s next to the country club, the smoke shop, and Walmart!
The rating is, 4.2
In other words, It sounds good.
[Piano intermission]
Fly me to new moon,
In California, San Ramon
Let me see their Kung Pao Chicken,
Or Honey Prawns
In Hudson’s words, it’s average.
Nicolas’ words, it was “freshly”
Feel the “mellow vibe”, “authentic food”, “no alcohol”
It’s next to the country club, the smoke shop, and Walmart!
The rating is, 4.2
In other words, It sounds good.
Animation
This is probably going to be my highlight. For the most part, all of these projects I have insane pride in. I was able to work in team Jungle (The name of our group) and my god, what a group. For the rest of the projects, it was a lot more miscellaneous. Leaning into other aspects of animation that isn’t necessarily “storytelling”. You could say that designing characters was a big part of this unit, which is an aspect of storytelling, but I don’t think it was strong enough to say that. With that out of the way…
Digital and Puppet Walk Cycle
(We added the picture of the puppet itself later)
PUPPETS BABY! I love it when we make physical stuff and this puppet is no exception. So first we had to design it, some of the qualifications were: Front view, side view, name and small description.
As stated before, I already had most of his character and design figured out BEFORE I even came to Freestyle. In fact, this was one of two projects that I had planned out ahead of time.
Anyway, we then used wires and plastic to make things like torso, feet, hips, ect. The exception to this was the head and hands, that was the problem. His hands crumbled the second he had them, so I replaced them with tinfoil. He became a lot more durable after that, After a few days, to gather a few materials, we began to make the details. I actually managed to sew a shirt and pants! It was crazy! Of course, I used glue to secure the loose threads which is why it might look more than a bit messy. I used felt sheets on the heads and hands to give him that classic Curtis fuzzy look that he needed and worked on his shoes, which came out a lot better than I thought.
For the last additional touches, I made hair using the sheets of felt (Looks more like a hat, but oh well.) and wrapped some towel rolls on his abdomen to make him a little more squishy and less like a wire monster.
After making the doll, we actually had to use it. I made a simple walk cycle using dragon frame. Just moving him a little, taking a picture and starting it all over again. Not much to say, I didn’t have a notable experience doing this
After doing the doll section, we had to do a walk cycle digitally. Compared to the rest of the students, I animate in a slower frame rate. Why? Because it’s faster. Not only working on it, but the animation itself. “Why don’t you just speed it up in after effects?” BECAUSE IT’S LAME and also because something is lost when I do that so I just have a low frame rate. Motion is still detected so it’s still good. Anyway, I drafted the walk cycle and lined it and colored so it turned it out like this:
I really like the bouncing hair.
Now, it’s time to slap them together. But… I need a background…
Hm.
Ok, might as well make the best background known to man.
The Background
This background is one of my magnum opuses. Details up to the 9’s, world building, graffiti, stockphoto skeletons. I collaged a lot of stockphotos together to make this fictional world together. I tried to replicate the “Spookware style” (As seen on the right) and I really love the way it turned out! There are custom made objects like posters and pictures, some that range from fairly noticeable to 10 pixels.
FIrst we have the skeleton magazine.
Of course a teenager would have something like this in their looker, and it looks like it was laid in there haphazardly too (No regard for a teacher seeing it, respect). This was the second little detail that I put in the locker and it’s probably my personal favorite, even though it is a little lewd. I don’t even know if I could or should put this on my website. The fact that I found a skeleton posing like that is also a shock to me because I just searched up “Skeleton stockphoto” and it just came up like that and I thought to myself that I couldn’t NOT make a joke about that. So it is now one of the funniest and greatest things that I made.
The next detail is the Eyes photo in the locker. Ah, Eyes, he really captivated the hearts of everybody in the school, students and faculty alike. He really is the perfect “cool kid”, with decent grades , flawless athleticism, and the leader of the band he’s in. And the best part is that he really is a nice person!
Anyway, back to the actual photo. Eyes has canonically given a photo of himself to every student and teacher in school, some throw it away, others forget about it, some burn it, some worship it, and some hang it up on their locker just because.
This was the first detail that I made. The background is from some random skatepark because I like to think that’s where he hangs out and the rest is pretty much drawn. This is the first time that I had to think about what the high school’s logo actually was. I was thinking about making it monster related, but I went with a deer because “John doe” (Which is also a name given to those who are unknown or want their identity concealed). I also thought it would be funny if it was a regular high school, except they were all monsters with no “Oh we’re monsters, humans are the worst”. Fun Fact: Humans canonically exist, but they pay them no mind.
These two are kind of good, but no as much of a “Knock me out of the park” as the other two. I do like the puns and twists that these two have, the movie especially, but I think the color of the poster throws me off. I think it was too much stockphoto, it became too much of a clash of styles that it fell apart. If I were to rank them, it would probably be: Magazine, Photo, NoTL, and then Spirt week.
The tape’s joke of “Night of the Living” is really funny (to me at least) and I got to use a spookware asset. We also have an insane streamer in the background and funny flower names. The tagline of this movie was the hardest part of the detail making, and I did a lot of research to try and make it the cheesiest I could make it. I definitely think it isn’t 100% there, but I’m really the only person that I know that like this campy horror movie stuff so I really couldn’t ask anybody for help.
The last big part was the graffiti. I made several little details like the “MILK GANG”, Garfield, and mongus. The best part is that I had Animation PM add something. Of course, not all of them, but most of my close friends. I even took a Freestyle alumni (my older sibling) out of retirement to make graffiti. I really did bring the whole scene together and make it feel like a real stereotypical high school.
Ending
After I made the background, I just found royalty free music and slapped everything together. I’m really not that proud of the final project, but i’m ok with that because i’m proud of everything separately.
Lip-sync Animation
So this project was the most simple out of the three. We had to find audio to lip sync, create a base, create lips, then sync up the lips to the audio. Very cut and dry.
Of course for my audio I had to choose something from the Stanley Parable (Please buy the Ultra Deluxe when it comes out). The question was which, so I looked throughout the transcript and picked out some of my favorites:
- Stanley was fat and ugly and really, really stupid. He probably only got the job because of a family connection; that’s how stupid he is. / That, or with drug money. Also, Stanley is addicted to drugs and hookers.
- Wooooaaahhhh! I’m- I’m here./I’m still here, here in this pile of rubbish. With you. YOU. Who thought he was so clever./Now look where we are. My entire game is destroyed. It was the only thing in the world that was mine and you’ve run it into the ground./What, did you think that would be funny? You just had to see? Didn’t I impress upon you how important it was to be like Stanley?/He actually knows how to do what I tell him to. He understands that if I say to do something, there’s a damn good reason for it!/That thought hadn’t even occurred to you had it? That there’s a world outside of you? You’re a child./Oh… my story… *sigh* If you just gone through the door on the left, you would’ve seen it. There was a whole underground facility. You would have destroyed it and been victorious./ It would have been so perfect! I worked so hard on it! I tried so hard-[screen goes black]
- If you didn’t want to see what I had to show you, then why did you come here? You had a choice you know. You could have gone through the door on the right! /You could have done whatever the hell you wanted over there! Why did you come this way?/Speak! Say something to me! Explain yourself you coward- [screen turns black]
- (Probably this one because no swears) Oh, of course. A three. Really. Maybe next time we can get you to form an actual opinion? You know… any level of critical thinking or engagement with your surroundings? Does that sound good? Think we can do that? Yes? Hmmmmm? Wonderful?
- You heartless bastard./Did you do it because you hate babies, or purely to spite me? Because if it’s the latter, well I don’t know what to do. I’m completely out of ideas. I can’t think of a single thing that might improve the experience for you.
- Though, here’s a thought: wouldn’t wherever we end up be our destination, even if there’s no story there? Or, to put it another way, is the story of no destination still a story?/Simply by the act of moving forward are we implying a journey such that a destination is inevitably conjured into being via the very manifestation of the nature of life itself?/Okay, Stanley, I need to follow this train of thought for a minute, just stick with me./Now we can both agree that the nature of existence is, in fact, a byproduct of one’s subjective experience of that existence, right?/Okay, now if my experience of your existence rests inside of your subjective experience of this office, is this office, in fact, the skeleton of my own relative experiential mental subjective construct?/Woah, woah, woah, woah, woah. Hang on, that got a bit weird back there. Well, I’d like to apologize. Not sure where I was going with all that.
- I’ll say it: This is the worst adventure I’ve ever been on.
After easily cutting out most of the list, due to length, I finally had my dialogue (Bolded (Italicized was second in the run)). I boarded the added movement that I wanted to do then made the bases.
I drew mouths after that. The thing I didn’t consider is that the various poses have the head turned at different angles and such so the mouth might not fit with the rest of the body. Which is fine in my eyes because it still fit pretty well.
I then synced it up in after effects and timed the mouth FRAME BY FRAME which kinda etched a little bit of my soul (Not really, it sounds bad but it wasn’t that bad.) I think I over did it with the lips, so it’s moving way more than it should and maybe some sounds should have been other sounds, but… It turned out great. Hopefully I can redeem myself some day.
Visual Narrative
Now this was the final project. And this was a BANGER of a final project. For this project we were split into 3 teams, the mighty fine folks on my team were Zeytin, Emma, and Kyle. Little known fact about them, they are absolute GODS at what they do. They were a joy to work with and my god, do they work well. Anyway, the project was to design characters, create a narrative, storyboard the narrative, animate, color, add sound, and finish before breakfast. Did we do it on time? YES WE DID, AND WE DID IT FIRST. Personally, I think we made the best animation of all time.
It took us, both a lot long and short to come up with a story. Something that was surprisingly consistent throughout the story making process is that Fink (our main character) is just really small. The first draft of the story was that he was walking down the sidewalk with a huge dollar. I don’t remember if there was any conflict, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t. Then we thought up of him being in some office job, but that didn’t take off. Then we started to get the draft that became the final idea.
chaos scene
