The final unit during our junior year at Freestyle was Explorations. Explorations is essentially a beta test for the last unit of senior year, Zenith. Explorations tasked us to explore a subject (preferably related to our elective) and improve on a particular skill set that addresses various 21st century skills. In simpler terms, we were allowed to make anything we wanted in around the 2 or so weeks we had left of school in our elective class. English and Digital Media had more strict requirements, but the assignments themselves left for a lot of broad exploration within themselves.

My explorations project is a pitch book for one of my original stories. A pitch book (or pitch bible, show bible, etc) is a document that outlines the characters, plots, settings, and themes of what would typically become a television series. Essentially, pitch books are show pitches in a book format that are given to executives who can make your show happen. Additionally, if your show is picked up the pitch book can be used as a reference document as well, making it not only useful for convincing people to create your show, but keeping you on track whilst creating it.

My aim to this project was less to directly pitch, but rather to have a resource that I could show people whenever I wanted to explain the main details of my story but didn’t know where to start. I leaned towards more of a pitch book’s secondary purpose as a reference since I thought it’d be more useful for me in the long term.

The 21st Century Skills I expanded upon doing this project were mostly Creativity, Self Direction, High Productivity, and Risk-Taking. This project was a huge undertaking for a limited time frame, which is exactly why I started planning out and working on aspects of this project before explorations even started. I knew that working on aspects of this project ahead of time would leave me with less stress, thus playing into the Self Direction and High Productivity skills.

Additionally, I developed the skills of Creativity and Risk-Taking because I had to use a program I had only really used for a project once (Adobe Indesign) and be incredibly vulnerable to an audience about a story I love so deeply. I already have really horrible presentation anxiety, so the idea of doing something super vulnerable for my last project really raised the stakes. However, if I want to pursue anything as a storyteller in the future, I have to train myself to embrace and face those potential challenges, even if they make me feel like I’m going to pass out sometimes.

My process began with focusing on one of if not the most essential part of a pitch book, the characters. I already had fine tuned these characters in terms of general personality, backstory, etc before this project, so that wouldn’t pose a problem. However, if I was going to pitch this story, I was going to have to redesign most of my main characters because they had been in dire need of it since the last time I combed through their designs was multiple years ago. I not only wanted to challenge myself by redesigning something so fundamental (which already would pose a challenge), but I also wanted to showcase how I’ve improved as a character designer since I began working with these characters.

Below is some shots of my initial design. I first referenced various Pinterest boards I put together for inspiration, then I went on to sketch initial design concepts on a base. A base for people who don’t know what that means in this context is essentially the digital art equivalent of one of those dress up dolls. It is a blank slate for you to draw over and make designs from without having to worry about drawing the actual character proportions yourself. Doing this method helped me feel less anxious about my design decisions and overall was beneficial to my design process.

After I created those initial concepts, it was then time for me to create finalized character references. I am extremely proud of the final result of these, and I made a deliberate effort (as I do with all my reference images) to make them preservable enough to be used over long periods of time.

Then, I had to move on to the writing portion of the pitch book. I had to convey a variety of information about my story within my pitch book, such as the characters, synopsis, etc. This part was a bit more difficult for me, as although I had a lot to fall back on and use for the pitch book since I wasn’t exactly starting from scratch, it was still difficult writing out and arranging everything in a way that felt interesting and cohesive to read. A portion of what I wrote for a character bio can be found below:

Finally, everything had to be composed together in Adobe Indesign to create the final result. I took all of the assets I had drawn and all of the text I had written and began composing them together one at a time. I found that there were some pieces of information I could shorten or omit entirely, and I ended up discovering that a lot of my planned sections needed some adjusting in order to really work. Actually putting the book together taught me the importance of not sticking to your first ideas, since a lot of what I originally envisioned for the project quickly changed and evolved as I was actively putting it together. It didn’t help I was also on a bit of a time crunch, so I couldn’t exactly be gingerly with the information I was choosing to include. I was forced to include only the essentials, and anything else would be a bonus.

For the actual design of the book, I chose to aim for a purple/blue/white color scheme and leaned towards a galaxy aesthetic all throughout the book. I thought this fit since my story is set across multiple planets in space and universal travel is a main focus of the story, but I also just think that galaxies are really pretty and so I will obviously use that as an excuse to put it everywhere. Some snippets of some of the design elements of my pitch book can be found below.

Below is a link to a flipbook of the PDF of my pitch book. It isn’t perfect, but I hope you enjoy!

Additionally, here’s a video of me flipping through the pitch book if you’d prefer to look at that instead!

I valued a lot about the Explorations project. I think what I valued the most about it was the fact it allowed me to try something I’ve never done before and gave me an opportunity to share something extremely important to me with my friends. I was extremely nervous and honestly a little stressed doing it, but I think it was overall beneficial for me to do so. I am proud of myself for embracing a challenge and seeing it to completion, I am often pretty ambitious and can be hard on myself when I don’t do everything perfectly, but I am glad what I accomplished given the circumstances.

I benefitted as a digital artist through explorations through learning the importance of sharing your work and trying something new. While these are both skills I’ve learned all throughout my time at Freestyle this year, it’s been especially emphasized with this project. I also benefitted because doing this project allowed me to be in tune with my original work, something I’ve had a hard time doing lately due to obligations from other classes and needing to focus on the documentary project. I feel like I did the best I could with my project and for that I think I deserve to be a little easier on myself.

For explorations in Digital Media, we had to do a music recording in the recording studio. Between April and May, we had to schedule a time we’d be in the recording studio and match up with 2 or more people to record a song together. I chose to work with my partner Darian and my friend Katie. We chose the song “Take Me to War” by The Crane Wives. We chose the song because it was from a band we all liked and it was the most optimal choice given all of our vocal ranges and time frame.

When the day I scheduled us to go to the recording studio after school came, Mr. Flo showed us all the in’s and out’s of the recording studio. While Mr. Flo was behind most of the mixing and actual recording process, he still informed us of what we were doing so we could have a basic idea of what we’d be doing next year and even before that for our Senior recording project. We learned mostly about vocal equipment since we only sung for our song, but there is an option for us to record with instruments if we choose to do so in the future. After we recorded all of our vocals, we were tasked with putting the final mix together and choosing parts from each of our takes singing to create the final song.

Overall, the recording process was a bit scary at first but ended up being really fun. I feel way more comfortable recording in there now and I am genuinely excited to use it again not only for the Senior recording project but throughout my Senior year in general.

If you would like to listen to our final mix, you can find it below:

Additionally, here is our collaborative artist statement for the project along with our album art:

Our inspiration for this project was the song Take Me to War by The Crane Wives. The reason we picked to record this song was because it was from a band all of us knew and enjoyed, it was a song that would be easy enough for all of us to sing, and it was the most realistic choice given our limited time frame. The song is unique because of the sweetness of some of the singing, it is an inherently angry and defiant song.

We grew artistically and technically with this project by learning how to utilize the recording studio. We had very bare bones knowledge of the studio before, but this project taught us the in’s and out’s about recording in the recording studio. It also taught us all how to interpret recorded audio into Pro Tools. Overall, we confirmed that we all now had the ability and comfort to be recorded in the recording studio and now we have more confidence in recording ourselves for the future Senior music recording project. Some struggles we encountered throughout this project was the scheduling and picking of the song. It was only when we added Katie to our group that we finally figured out what we were going to do. Additionally, a lot of us were a bit anxious about being recorded in the recording studio but quickly loosened up the moment we started actually using it.

If we could change anything about this project, we would’ve given us more time. This is mostly because we would’ve loved to keep recording in the recording studio, and we likely won’t have time until next year to do so since the end of junior year is approaching. However, that isn’t this project’s fault and more just a consequence of the crunching deadlines junior’s face at the end of the year. We are all honestly proud of our performances in general, it isn’t perfect but it showed we were happy and having fun and that’s the most important part.

Finally, here’s a showcase of some behind the scenes photos of what we did in the music recording studio.

For explorations in English, we had to write a poem. Before we did that though, we had various poetry workshops with a working poet, Ms. Moore. We performed various poetry exercises and analyzed a variety of poems to build up our mental library so we could know what to pick and choose from to incorporate into our own poems. Some poet’s we studied were John Wieners, E.E Cummings, and we even took a look at some old translated Japanese haiku’s. We learned about different types of poetry (one example being Cento Poetry) and even made poetry based off various newspaper articles. By experimenting with various methods of poetry, it allowed us to get a broader sense of what poetry could be about and how it could be used as an art form. My main takeaways from the Poet-In-Residence visit was that Ms. Moore helped show us a variety of avenues that we could walk with our poetry down and for that I think it was extremely beneficial having her here. I also value the fact she went out of her way to come back to watch us present our explorations poems, her feedback and encouragement was really lovely throughout the whole unit.

That leads me into my Explorations Poem. The poem I wrote was called “♠/3 Ways to Tell a Joke”. It was a poem I based off one of my original characters (OC’s) from one of my main stories. Originally, I planned to write a collection of poems based off each main character from that story, but given the short time we had (and also the fact I had multiple other projects that needed more of my focus) I had to cut it down to just one. I am very proud of the outcome, but I was extremely nervous presenting and reciting my poem as I have horrible presentation anxiety. Thankfully, my audience was very supportive and I got some positive feedback.

You can read my Explorations Poem here:

Below, I talk about the intended meaning of my poem. If you don’t want The Magic™ spoiled for you and you’d prefer to come to your own conclusions yourself, now is the time for you to click onto a different page.

For those who’d like to know the intended meaning behind the poem, the meaning of “♠/3 Ways to Tell a Joke” is that it tells the story of my character, Kai. While not named in the poem, his struggles throughout the story are summarized in this brief poem. The reason the poem is called “Ace” is because in my story, each of my characters are assigned a symbol and an ace is Kai’s.

Kai’s character struggle is that despite being the comedic relief among his friends, he believes his humor is the only reason people value him. He struggles academically in school, and in the place he grew up in that practically meant he was useless. As a result, he turned to his social talents to keep him afloat believing that even though he was “stupid” by most people’s standards, he could at least be funny. However, this is obviously not true, as any Freestyle student would know that grades aren’t really what determines your worth or your ability to learn even if many people try to convince us they do. Kai harbors a variety of creative talents, ones not too dissimilar to those that might be employed at Freestyle, but most importantly, he is inherently deserving of connection and kindness.

The first two sections of this poem (Loudly and Softly) cover these struggles. It highlights Kai’s dichotomy between wanting to entertain, yet internally knowing people don’t value him as anything more than that. The third section of the poem (Proudly) is to me the most interesting section though, because it brings in Kai’s key relationship in my story, which is with his teammate and later partner Nate. The two connect despite having opposing personalities (Kai is laid-back and more relaxed whilst Nate is neurotic and worrisome) and Nate is the first person who connects with Kai on a real level. “Treated you with something more” is meant in the sense that while yes, Kai can be funny, he is just so much more than that. The indent of “Don’t tell anyone I told you this…” shows the breaking of the cycle, and of the formula of the poem. I tried to get across that it was that communication barrier finally being broken and the first step to not only feeling less alone, but finally being understood by someone.