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In the Narrative Unit, Freestyle Students told stories of their creation through visual media. During this unit, every class was given different assignments to further our skills in visual storytelling. In English, we wrote flash fictions, or short stories, to map out what we would be accomplishing in our other classes. Based on this short story, we drew out a story board which we then translated into a graphic Novel. In Design, we made a comic board based on a specific portion of our graphic novel in Adobe Illustrator by first drawing the designated comic panels on a poster board and then scanning it into the computer so that it could be accessed and traced upon within Illustrator. In Digital Media, we made a website (the one that you are viewing as of now), an animatic, and an animation. The animatic was a short "skeleton" animation, that used the panels from our graphic novels to map out our animation. In the animation, we used Adobe Animate to create a fluid short film based on the story that we had written in English

During this process, we used several different applications. in Adobe Illustrator several times for both Digital Media and Design. In Design we used it to illustrate a comic panel while in Digital Media we used it to draw parts and scenes for our animation

This is a screenshot of my work in Adobe Illustrator

In Pro tools, we recorded our flash fiction as a voice recording and paired different sound effects to it accordingly.

In Adobe Dreamweaver, we used HTML and CSS to program and design our websites.

This is a screenshot of my work in Adobe Dreamweaver

Finally, we used Adobe Animate to animate our animatic and final animation.

This is a screenshot of my work in Adobe Animate
Story

In my animation, I attempted to create a more emotional and touching short film. In order to accomplish this, I tried to come up with a tragic story that ended in a relatively satisfying conclusion. Before writing my story, I was inspired by music video by Porter Robinson, "Shelter". In this music video, a story is animated about a girl who lives within her own virtual world of which she has complete control over. As she lives her life alone, one day she suddenly experiences memories from her childhood, revealing to the audience why she exists within the virtual reality. Even though I had to watch the short film a few times in order to fully comprehend the story, I found the animation extremely powerful, being able to tell an entire story within a short window of time, conveying several emotions through every second.

In order to make my animation convey the specific emotions I desired it to, I tried make the characters more appealing to the audience so that if anything happened to them, the emotions that the characters experienced would be inflicted upon the audience’s empathy.

A Daughter's Donation

As Noah walks along a bustling street with his daughter, wearing a crisp, collared shirt and a pair of nice dress pants, he encounters a person struggling to survive who requires assistance from others, just laying on the floor with a cup near his head. His face was covered in grime and mud and facial hair. His bushy beard fell down to the ground, turning gray and his fair was spread everywhere. The cup had only a few dollars in it, and the man continued to beg for more donations from nice hearts. Noah walks past him without a glance, but his daughter lingers around, questioning why Noah couldn’t donate even a little.

After the two get home, the father starts his stove to begin preparing a meal for his daughter. When he finished emptying a bag of noodles within boiled water, Noah goes upstairs and checks on his daughter to find her giving herself an eye exam by reading out letters from a poster on a wall. She is standing quite close to the poster and can barely read the letters. Noah smiles and turns towards another room to go fetch his daughter’s glasses. Just as he grabs them, the house begins to smell of smoke. The stove he had left on had caught a newspaper, one that he had left on there lazily, on fire. As his house was engulfed in flames, Noah rushes to his daughter and finds her still playing. He then frantically gestures for her to come to him where he could safely get her out. She slowly trudges towards him, making out his undefined form and feeling her surroundings as she goes.

As she made her way towards his outstretched arms, smoke billowed through the floorboards and the floor began to break away. Just as her daughter is about to reach Noah, the floor underneath her gives way and she falls through, past Noah’s flailing arms. The father frantically runs downstairs to look for her but the floor has already gone through horrible damage, having holes everywhere. Noah continues to desperately move furniture and obstacles around, trying to find his daughter, still clutching her glasses.

Noah walks down another bustling street along a yellow path set within a sidewalk and hears a small girl crying. The yellow path is covered in tiles each with small bulges. The girl waves her hand across her face and begins to cry even harder. Noah diverges from the path and walks toward her, bends down, and hands her the glasses that belonged to his daughter. He then returns to the path and walks to a crosswalk where the yellow path ends and from his pocket, takes out a white cane (used by blind people) and continues across the next block.

Illustration

During the Narrative Unit in Design class, we drew a comic book panel based off of our story that we wrote in English. To accomplish this, we first selected a portion of our story that we wanted to be used in the comic panel. After selecting the section from our story, we drew that part of the story down on a poster, as shown below, and then scanned it into the computer using the app "Genius Scan". Finally, once the scan was in the computer, we put it into Adobe Illustrator and traced over it in order to recreate the piece digitally, fixing previous mistakes.

This is the comic book illustration.

I am exploring the feeling of despair through loss. Grief and despair and depression are all common emotions people experience throughout their lifespan. Through my comic, I attempted to convey these emotions through a short story about a father losing his daughter. Through the story of a father losing his daughter to a tragic disaster, I attempted to convey a sense of grief and pain to the audience.

To construct this piece, I used Adobe Illustrator to digitally exhibit the scenes that were depicted within my story. During this production, it was challenging to only use the pen tool instead of using other tools such as the line tool or brush tool because if those tools were used, the printing of the comics would become significantly harder on the printers. One aspect of my production that I would change would be the conciseness of my story. Because my story was squeezed into only a few comic panels, I felt that I wasn’t completely successful in conveying the message that I aimed for through my comic. The aspect of this production that I am most proud of would be the scenery that I drew for the first few panels because of their perspective drawings. While constructing my comic, I grew in my time management and also in my proficiency of Adobe Illustrator.

This is a screen shot of my comic illustration workspace
Animatic

Graphic Novel Thumbnail
Click on image above to see my Graphic Novel
The Graphic Novel that we created served as a storyboard for our animation. It was our beginning layout and gave us the story that we would use to guide our animation. Each panel of the Graphic Novel showed the critical parts of the story that would help us map out our animatic and short animation. During this production, I learned a lot about how to use Adobe Animate and also progressed in laying out my final animation.

Play Video
Animatics are simplified animations, only showing the most critical scenes of the animation to act as a mock animation to see if any changes are needed in the story, flow, or art. It includes sound and is presented like a slideshow, allowing the audience to fill in the blanks between two frames.

Screenshot of my Animatic Workspace
Animation

In Digital Media, we were tasked with creating an animation based off of a story and a graphic novel, both of which we made in English. My inspiration for this short animation was the music video "Shelter" by Porter Robinson, a video that had an animation itself which illustrated the life a girl who was alone after her father tried to improve her life.

While creating the animation, I attempted to depict my story that would satisfy my own expectations for what I imagined it to be. Unfortunately, however, I believe that I lacked a bit in the animating and art itself. During the production, I found time management very challenging because I would find myself spending absurd amounts of time on one single scene that only lasted for a few seconds. Additionally, finding music to match the animation was very time consuming and difficult. All in all, however, I enjoyed producing this animation because I was able to gain experience from it and was also able to complete my first ever animation.

This is a screenshot of my animation workspace