Reflections

As we are applying for college and entering the world as adults, our first unit at Freestyle Academy was designed to help us with that process by reflecting and understanding ourselves by answering the question, “Who Am I?” Through this question, I learned more than I thought about myself, especially in my production of my Personal Essay and my Perspective Piece. Both of these productions taught me a lot about what some of my core values are. For example, from the Personal Essay, I realized how important and how much I value family in my life, something I have always valued but hadn’t grasped how important it was to me until the writing process.


Personal Essay

 

For my Personal Essay, I choose to write about a situation that was, well, very personal and close to home, thus, I choose to substitute it with another piece of writing. Instead, I wrote a response to the question, what brings me the most joy?

 

What Brings Me The Most Joy?

Music. Period. All aspects of it too. I am the happiest when I am with music. That can be me writing a song or making a new beat. But it can also be listening to music. I get so excited when new music comes out. Since I live on the West Coast, we get music “earlier” than most of the country. For example, if Drake is releasing a new album this Friday, I can stream/buy it at 9 pm on Thursday night because artists often release their music according to Eastern time. When an album is coming out that I am particularly excited for, I will plan my schedule and try and get all my work done before 9 pm on Thursday so I can go in my room and put on the album. I will turn my headphones probably too high up and just be one with the music. I listen to the whole album straight through and then go back to re-listen to particular tracks. When I am in that zone, the rest of the world melts right away. That is what I love about music; the power that it possesses. I believe that music is the most powerful thing in the world, dare I say more powerful than love. It can change your emotions or re-enforce your emotions. It can bring people from all walks of life together. It can make you cry, laugh, smile, yell, and most importantly, dance. To me, it is therapy. Through consumption but mostly through creation, music provides therapy for my life. I can express my emotions and thoughts and work through them on a song. Maybe I am going through some problems with a friend. I can work through that by maybe creating a new beat that pairs with the emotion that I am feeling. Or I can write about it and verbally express that emotion. I am so thankful that I have music in my life. As an anxious person, music plays a central role in my ability to lower my anxiety and reset my mental condition.


Reflection Design Productions

My aboriginal painting
My aboriginal painting

To learn and study line, we looked at Australian aboriginal paintings and their use of implied lines. As seen in the final product, there are no connected lines. All the lines in the painting are implied with dots of varying sizes. I greatly enjoyed making this piece. It was very therapeutic to sit and quietly paint these dots.

My collage
My collage

To look at and study shape, we created collages from magazine cuttings. It was fun picking out the pieces but it was a challenge for me to cut out the pieces. Once they were cut out, it was fun to look position them into my scene in a unique way. Our goal in this production was to put the objects in a juxtaposition, that is in a way where they have contrasting effects on each other. For example, look at the mountain range in the bottom left corner. The starfish “sun” popping out of the mountain creates a juxtaposition as a starfish normally wouldn’t be that size. That was essentially the idea behind this collage.

My monochromatic collage
My monochromatic collage

After we finished our collage, we were to also create a monochromatic painting of that collage as a continuation of our exploration and study of shape. Our first task was to create a color as a our base color for the monochromatic color scheme. Mixing paints together, I came up with a warm orange. From there were to trace the outline of all the shapes in our collage. The end goal was to have each shape be a different variation of our base color and for the focus of the painting to the shapes, should have very little detail. My favorite part of this project was the actual process of mixing the paint. It was enjoyable to create various tints, tones, and shades all from the same base color.


Perspective Piece

For our perspective piece, we were asked to write a 1-2 minute spoken piece about any sort of issue or topic on our mind. I choose to write mine on coastal elitism, something that I believe negatively affects the Bay Area too much. While I was hoping to simply just draw attention to the topic, I will admit, the piece comes off a little bit aggressive. Thus, I am sorry if anyone feels offended by this production. To make the production, I wrote it, recorded it in Pro Tools, and then put the audio in Adobe After Effects. For there, I put together a collection of images and transitioned through them using some of After Effects basic features of opacity, zoom, and rotation.

Screen shot of my After Effects sesions
Screen shot of my After Effects sesions
ARVE Error: Mode: lazyload not available (ARVE Pro not active?), switching to normal mode