In the first semester of our senior year at Freestyle Academy we worked on the Reflections unit. In the reflections unit we were tasked with learning more about ourselves, this unit was about discovering “Who I Am”. I struggled with figuring out who I was, or who I thought I was. This unit didn’t help me conclude either. What I did learn is that there’s a lot to be further learned in my life before I can confidently identify myself in any way shape or form.
Core Values
When I was making my Core Values video I wanted to try my best to match the words up with the beat. But I wasn’t quite able to match every single word to the music. So I wanted to start the video off with the first word “family”, and then at the end I wanted the words to fade out on best to. Sort of like a compromise for not being able to do all of them. Besides that I didn’t really have much of a plan for what I wanted. I thought that I could do some funny things with how to words came into frame, like what I did with money and how it took forever to stop spinning just for it to say money. The colors didn’t really have much significance besides I thought that they were good at contrasting each other. As for the music, I think ‘Fluffing the Duck’ is one of the funniest songs to ever exist. And I really wanted to use it, and I’m sure I’ll use it again at some point. One thing I found difficult was finding 7 fonts that all looked different but good at the same time.
Mandala
The Mandala project was the first assignment we were given for the reflections project in Digital Media. In this project, we were tasked with creating a mandala based on ourselves. This task was difficult as I had no clue what I wanted to base it on, I had to make something based on myself. This has been proven difficult in the past, so I expected nothing less with this project.
I spent a while thinking about what I should make my mandala, Ultimately I decided to go with a Studio Ghibli theme. As it is Japanese, and so am I.
Obviously my inspiration was drawn from the various movies by Studio Ghibli. So there is a ton of characters and such on my Mandala. I really struggled with coming up with an idea that could portray who I am, and I settled on focusing on my Japanese side. As a kid, I was very heavily exposed to my culture, due to my Grandma living with us. I would constantly be surrounded by Japanese media, like television programs, one of my favorites being Anpanman. My Grandma was my only means of being exposed to Japanese culture, she would constantly talk in Japanese even though I could barely understand her, she would make us various Japanese cuisines that I have no idea what they’re called, watch movies and shows with us, that were all in Japanese, and read us many children’s stories, exclusively in Japanese! So ultimately when she passed away in early 2023, all those things had gone away. My Mom still makes the same dishes my Grandma used to make, and while they’re still as good as ever, something in our lives is always just forever missing. But a little after she had passed my love for Studio Ghibli had resurfaced as I had found a handful of DVDs at her house. Watching them in Japanese reminds me of those times when she was still here with us. This is why I decided to make my Mandala Ghibli themed, I felt as if it was a good homage to the Japanese side that my Grandma had introduced and nurtured for me. Some struggles I had encountered when working on my Mandala were, obviously coming up with an idea for the Mandala. But the biggest struggle I had was my illustrator file was just very laggy and unresponsive. I’m not sure what the issue was but whenever I would draw a line or something on the file the thing would freeze for a couple seconds, then the drawing would appear. This was very frustrating and made it hard to work on it in on solid session. But I overcame this struggle and finished my Mandala.
My colored Mandala is relatively simple. Since my mandala was based on preexisting characters, I didn’t struggle with having to come up with colors so that came as no issue. However, a huge issue that I had encountered, that was also very prevalent in my black and white Mandala, was that the entire Illustrator file was just very laggy and delayed. Whenever I would draw something it would freeze for a second or two then the drawing would appear, rather than it being a fluid thing. Dealing with this while working on the black and white Mandala was bearable but still frustrating, and I had no idea how bad it was going to be with the colored version. When I started to color the lag became too much, It was so frustrating when I’d color it, wait for it the appear, not like the result, then I’d have to delete it, I’d then wait another couple seconds for it to fully delete, then redraw it, then wait for it to appear again. This would go on for a while until I finally finished, and over all I’m pretty satisfied with the result. If I could change one thing about it would be my background, it’s just a solid color and it looks very boring. I think if my file wasn’t nearly as laggy it would’ve been a lot easier to incorporate a cooler more interesting background. But I’d like to think I did the best that I could under the circumstances.
Laser Engraved Mandala
When figuring out where to take my photo of my laser engraved mandala I was very limited. We had been required to stay on freestyle campus so I had to get creative. I knew from the get go that I wanted to include some sort of grass like element to this piece as some of Studio Ghibli’s most prominent Scenes involve beautiful fields of grass. So immediately after leaving the Digital Media room I was hit with the harsh realization that, Freestyle doesn’t have a lot of Grass. Granted there is that little patch of grass in front on the Digital Media room, but it wasn’t quite matching the vibe I was looking for. I was looking for more, elegant longer blades of grass. The kind of grass that would blow in the wind. But my options were limited. It was either I use the bland real grass, or the slabs of turf that’s on the stage. And frankly neither of those options were really to my liking. So I went looking elsewhere in hopes to find a better alternative. Luckily, I didn’t have to look for long. Because along the stage, there are these bushes. No clue what kind of bushes they are, but they have these long green leaves on them. And when framed correctly, they look like large blades of grass. So I ultimately decided that this was by far the best option for my background. When taking the photo, whether it was intentional or not, I had framed it to where the mandala was still the main focus of the image but the greenery still had room to shine. I had taking the picture in such a way that the bush could appear as huge blades of grass, which in turn made my Mandala look like it was a lot smaller than it actually was. As for my engraved Mandala I had opted for a wood carving, my choice of wood was Bamboo. I had picked the wood because I had figured it would probably look the coolest out of all the given options, and I had picked bamboo as bamboo is a plant from Asia. May not be Japanese but it’s close enough.
Film
Reflections Video Essay
For my Reflections Video Essay in Film we were tasked with reflecting on ourselves and translating that into video form. The issue with that is I didn’t know really who I am, I still don’t. But during one of our pitch conversations Mr Taylor was pressing me, wondering why I couldn’t come up with an idea. In this conversation I was struggling to verbalize these words to him which gave me the basis for my final video.
No Video Yet
Swap Video
Mr. Taylor first tasked us with coming up with an idea for a movie in groups of three, we were then asked to create a storyboard for said idea. After finishing our story board we presented them to the class. After said presentation, Mr. Taylor told us we would need to swap storyboards with the group to our left, and that we would not be filming the storyboard we had created but rather the new one we had been given. The next class period we had the entire period to film, and after we had finished filming we returned to the classroom and Mr. Taylor instructed us to give our SD card to the other group so THEY could edit the footage we got for us. We then had to edit this completely new footage separate from our storyboard and footage we shot ourselves. We then edited and submitted that film and below is the final product.
1 Period film
This was the first-in-class project we were given as Seniors in Film, Mr. Taylor had given us the task of creating an entire film in one class period. This included coming up with the idea, filming, and editing. Me and my partners, Aahan and Nate, were instantly struggling with trying to come up with an idea. We just couldn’t come up with something that we could reasonably do in a single class period. But once we got an idea we got right to filming. Filming took a little longer than we had anticipated, so we had very little time to edit. We ended up not having enough time to add audio to our film which was a huge disappointment to us. But here is the finished project.
surround sound
This was a new project here a Freestyle, and we were lucky enough to be the first group of seniors to work on it. This project was a lotta fun to work on, although I did struggle with coming up with an idea. I feel like my biggest issue when it comes to projects is coming up with a solid idea. I always fail at coming up with ideas I am satisfied with in such a short amount of time. I find that I come up with better ideas when I’m alone and when I’m not restricted in terms of time. But once I got sort of an idea going we began filming, My friend Nate helped me film by acting as both characters. Some issues I had while filming were that my camera for some reason was choppy and everything looked laggy. And that the audio in the bathroom is really bad, but other than that I think it came out alright.