Showcase

Arrange Marriages Documentary

My first project is a documentary book about arrange marriages and their impact on young women in the southern Montenegrin and Albanian culture. It consisted of 4 interviews of various women who are of Montenegrin background and had an arranged marriage explaining the process, the marriage and how it resulted years after.

For this project, I wanted to speak up about arrange marriages especially in the Albanian culture. About 98% of my family had arrange marriages, so I felt that it would be easy for me to gain access to various perspectives on the marriage itself, process, and traditions throughout history. In order to design my spread, I used applications such as Adobe Photoshop to edit the photos I took, Adobe Illustrator to design the design elements throughout the book and Adobe Indesign to create the actual book itself with all the writing, photos, and illustrations. I also used color schemes to construct my book which was red, gold, white and black which are the main colors that consist in a traditional Albanian wedding. I was proud of my illustration on page 14, 27 and 29 because they reflected the life of the wife, especially the sadness she goes through with enduring an arrange marriage. With this project, I was able to step past my boundaries and discuss a topic that often women don’t like to share their perspective on in my culture. Often women and men try to undermine the truth behind the marriage since it has been a tradition passed along for generations. This project is something I hold dear to my hear and will never forget because I was able to discover the truth about a topic I always wanted to know about but was too scared to ask.

Music of the World Album

For my second featured project, I would like to present my Zenith Project which was an international electronic music album that consisted of 5 songs half in English and half in the languages: Albanian, Montenegrin, Spanish, Arabic, and Portuguese. After I composed these songs, I created cover art for each of the individual songs and then an album cover art for the whole album itself.

Montenegrin Song

Arabic Song

Brasilian Song

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Spanish Song

Albanian Song

For the production of my cover and album art I used Adobe Illustrator. I also used a color scheme throughout the album that revolved around colors that are either neon or often found on electronic albums, festivals, etc. To create the music, I used the application Reason where i could create a beat easily, add instruments, or effects to make the song sound better. This project taught me a lot about how important detail is in an illustration and how much the color scheme can impact it.

Reflection of Growth

With my time here at Freestyle Academy, I feel that these two projects represent something I was passionate about and put a lot of time and hard work in carrying them out. With arranged marriages and the role of a girl being a wife in my culture being very prominent in my upbringing, it was something I wanted to discuss and shine light about the truth of it. A beautiful way of accomplishing that was through art because often as mentioned, a picture can speak a thousand words. Being able to share pictures that my grandma, mother and aunt had from their arranged marriages was a beautiful experience to embark on because it was allowing those to see what occurs during an arranged marriage and when they view the sad faces of the women, they can sympathize with the impact the situation has on young women. I was really fortunate and beyond grateful that my family was able to be strong enough to share their stories and not hide in the fear the community embeds on them. Being able to interview, get pictures of jewelry, photos, clothing, then create additional illustrations about the various aspects of arranged marriages and putting them all together to create a book was a very difficult but beautiful experience that I will never forget. In a similar notion about exploring different cultures, I was able to accomplish that through my electronic album. In this album, I researched many different types of songs in a certain language/culture to discover the type of instruments they use so I could incorporate them in my music. The whole purpose of having the songs all in different languages was to shed light on the beauty of music and how there is a shared love for it around the world. Thanks to Freestyle Academy, I have improved on my skills in Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Reason, and Indesign to create products such as the ones featured. Next year, I will be studying education at CSU Long Beach in Southern California. Despite not going into an art related career, I believe that the skills I gained through Freestyle Academy I will be able to apply them in my future to create art, to deliver stories to my students or the rest of the world.