Introduction
The central question for the Reflections unit is “Who am I?” Our goal in each class was to create something to at least partly answer that question. In Digital Media we created a personal mandala to try to answer that question in a more abstract and artistic way. English had us create a personal essay that we could use as our Common Application essay for college. The Film project was to create a 2 minute video essay about how we think.
This unit challenged me to really define who I am.
Mandala
In Digital Media we were tasked with creating a personal mandala. The mandala project challenged me to gain a far better understanding of a software called Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is a vector graphics editor that allows for the creation of the mandala to be far more efficient. We learned how to setup illustrator to copy and reflect our designs around a point so we could create the mandala far easier. This project also challenged me to express myself in a medium I don’t usually use; Digital art.
Artist Statement for Black and White Mandala:
For the printed mandala project I used a lot of symbolism and abstract shapes to represent who I am. In my piece there is a piano to represent my love of music, mountains to represent nature, Baseballs to represent sport and competition in general and a few more. I also used more abstract shapes in the center to represent room for growth.
I’m most proud of how the center area looks because it has so much movement and looks very unique. I spent a lot of time trying to create different shapes that were abstract but also reminded me of real things like fire.
Artist Statement for Colored Mandala:
For my colored mandala I tried to be far more abstract than my black and white mandala. I had created this design as an idea for my black and white mandala but I didn’t think it would work as well for it. The only idea I had when coloring and making the design for this piece was to make it pop and stand out. I didn’t want anything to look uninteresting. I used lots of bright and loud colors and used big strokes for my lines. Gradients were another tool I used to make the artwork stand out.
I grew as an artist through this project because it was a departure from how I normally create art in any medium. I usually have some big idea or message I have in everything I create but for this piece I allowed myself to let go a little bit and just try to make it pop. I think it achieved this goal and I’m happy in how it came out.
Move the slider to see each mandala
The mandala project was fun and relaxing to create. I turned on music and sort of let it create itself. A large part of both project I just let my mind wander with the brush tool and see what happened. I would delete what I didn’t like and keep what I did. The black and white mandala had more deliberate intention and symbolism behind it than the colored one but I still used this freestyle approach for it a lot. Overall this project was really enjoyable and I found myself making more mandalas past the ones I submitted.
Personal Essay
In English class we were assigned personal essay. We we’re given two choices for this project: write the Common App essay for college or a personal essay of your choice. I chose the personal essay, but I still followed the College Essay Essentials book. This book guided my brainstorming process by helping me understand my core values and learn more about myself. I used this project to create one of my supplemental essays for one of my college applications.
Film
The Write Shoot Edit project was one of the most fun projects I’ve done. At the beginning of this project we weren’t explained how the project would go at all. We were given 30 minutes to write a story with no other instruction. Our group came up with a story about a track runner and we thought it came out good. After presenting the stories to the class we were told to pass the story to the group next to us and that we would be filming that story next class. My group was kind of sad because we really want to film ours but the story we got we liked so we got excited. Our teacher gave us creative freedom in interpreting the other groups story so me and my group improved the story we got and began shooting. When we finished we were really happy with what we made and excited to edit this film. In hindsight we probably should have seen this coming but at the end of the class we were told we had to give all of our footage to the group next to us and edit someone else’s film. We we’re disappointed at first but the film we got was really funny so we got to work. That project is below.
For the 1 period film we were tasked with writing shooting and editing a film in one period. This was incredibly difficult as each part of the filmmaking process takes a lot of time. We also ran into problems early on as the idea we were going to do another group thought of first and started before us. This forced us to restart and have to come up with a completely new idea. The idea we went with was a character stealing his phone back from the phone locker. We went with this story because it would be easy to shoot and we were running out of time. Overall I really enjoyed the project because of how challenging it was, it really forced us to think creatively especially in editing where we were working with so few shots.
The Surround sound exercise was a brand new project that my class got to do. We first learned the basics of mixing in 5.1 Surround sound. Surround sound is audio that comes through more than two speakers. For this project we mixed 5.1 surround sound which is audio coming out of 5 speakers. After we learned the basics we were tasked with creating our own shot and mixing the audio for it in 5.1 surround sound.