Explorations

Explorations Project

The Junior Explorations Project is a highly individualized end of year project where students explore a personal passion of theirs and improve upon their 21st Century Skills. My project mostly focused on the particular skills of Creativity, Self Direction, High Productivity and Risk Taking.

Within my project, I wanted to expand upon the needle felting skills I begun learning back when working on my stop motion puppet for Animation class. Below is my presentation explaining my project and process, and further below are the featured slides containing many work in progress and final shots of my project.

As I started to touch on in my recorded presentation, I really value the space I was given to grow not only in my craft skills, but also grow as a learner and persevere through this practically self-taught skill of mine. I gained a lot of confidence in myself and my ability to learn, and further fueled my passion for needle felting and physical crafted arts… I immediately started thinking of other more complicated needle felted puppets I could make to challenge myself further, of which I will be starting to experiment with over summer break…

Poetry Production

In our poetry unit, we had the poet Christine Moore come to our class and lead us through a series of poetry workshops. We explored making poetry based on random news articles, making cento poems (borrowing lines from other literature and compiling them into a unique poem), and Ars Poetica (poetry about the topic of poetry itself). None of my drafts from these workshops ever turned into finished pieces, but I greatly valued the opportunity to be pushed outside my comfort zone and try new methods of writing.

In the end, I chose to develop a poem completely unrelated from all the workshops we had previously done. I started writing about a story composed by me and a couple friends; If you recall my illustration project posted under the Narrative 1 tab of this website, the following poem is from the perspective of the character featured on that shirt. The main relevant points of that story and character are that there exists this industrial city built on top of a dragon, whose magic-infused flesh is being harvested as fuel. The character in focus in that illustration project and this following poem is that dragon, who is slowly dying because of the city. Within my poem, I focused a lot on imagery of machines and the air of hopelessness and pain associated with them for this story.

For the production of this poem audio, I went into the isolation booths within Freestyle’s Digital Media room in order to record 2 takes of me reading my poem aloud, so I could decide between clips later. And then I spent a good chunk of time sifting through the hundreds of sound effects collected and made available to Freestyle students. Some of those SFXs were clearly labeled, some I had to put my own labels on when I copied them to my own slowly growing folder of potential SFXs. I ended up with about 20 different sounds; ambient noise from cities, factories, cars, clocks, chains, various drills and other machines…

Then came the time to throw it all together. I ended up having to create 6 different tracks for my SFXs so I could layer them how I wanted… I adjusted volumes, panning the audio to shift between the left / right ears, and at one point I added a plug in to automate the chopping up and frequency shifting of a drill audio to have more of a tremolo to it.

After creating my poem in Pro Tools, I went to Adobe Illustrator to make a cover art for the audio. I sketched it out with the pencil tool first, then utilizing the skills I’ve learned in Illustrator to make various shapes I needed (it’s mostly the pen tool. its a lot easier to make straight lines by plotting anchor points via the pen tool than try to freehand them with the pencil tool). It’s honestly a bit surprising how many times I’ve found myself using the blend tool to make the effect of repeating lines; I never expected myself to use that specific skill so many times back when I first learned it… it’s quite useful for drawing smoke, I’ve found. I chose to try and draw an oil refinery to fit with the poem’s themes. Back when I was drafting the poem, I ended up going down various rabbit holes on Wikipedia and other sites skimming for knowledge on oil drilling machines. Exact technical details didn’t really make it into the poem in the end, as I didn’t find quite what I was looking for, but the ideas of drilling into the earth (the dragon) are there in the final product. Anyway I also wanted to try adding a heart & maybe a ribcage under the ground, but couldn’t get it looking how I wanted, and decided a more simple end product would be better.

The background sound effects and ambient noise worked to emphasize the themes of machinery and industrialization within this poem and the original story it’s in reference to. Majority of the sounds are directly from machines, factories, or cars driving throughout cities. The usage of these sound effects, most prevalent with the increase in intensity at the end, help drive the overwhelming and helpless nature associated with those things from the perspective of this poem. 

The main ideas I valued while choosing and mixing my sound effects for this production were staying in line with the main ideas of the poem, mostly leaning into the mechanical imagery. Back when I was writing this poem, I tried to emulate the ticking of a clock through my repetition of words. This is most obvious in the ending line, the “ticking toward tomorrow” phrase. When translating my poem into audio, I was able to make this connection a lot more clear through aligning my narration to the literal ticking of a clock. Various technical choices were made along similar lines, choosing sound effects related to what’s being described within the poem.