The Reflections unit throughout the three freestyle classes is like the name, meant to make you reflect on yourself. The timing of this is meant to help us with college applications because it allowed us to look at what we believe in, and then be able to present that in various ways like in an essay for english class, a short two minute video about something that is really important to us in Film, and our core values video that we made in Digital Media.
This unit taught me about how these important parts in my life have shaped who I am, and how I act everyday of my life.
Core Values Video
Here is my Core Values video. This was a amazing start to using Adobe After Affects, allowing us to learn how to use the effects both built into the software and creating our own. The content made us use some of our reflection abilities to find 7 core values that each individual has. This is a truly personal and unique experience as no person has the same core values as another. Additionally, this project made us use adobe audition skills that we started developing last year.
Mandala
The Mandala project I think was the best way to start off the school year for digital media. Not only did we get a chance to resharpen our illustrator skills which can be used for so many things, but it was also totally up to us, what we wanted to create. We had total creative freedom, which I think really helped me kick off my creativity in other freestyle projects and classes. I decided to create a Mandala that reflects Game of Thrones, a show that I have watched recently. I made one of a dragon, with an egg which definitely turned out better than I expected. And also the great thing about Mandalas are that they are hard to mess up, which is great for me, not the best artist out there.
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This piece for me was inspired by the Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon shows which I have been watching recently. They are two of my favorite shows, although the writers have gotten worse at their jobs, but I just love the entertainment and that is why I was inspired to create this piece. Regarding the name, that means “Fire” in whatever the language spoken to the dragons are in the show, so I just decided to go with that.
Overall, I am really proud of this Mandala project. It taught me how to use Illustrator much better and also create mirrors images which basically makes anything that you do symmetrical, meaning it is hard to mess it up. Both the illustrator files and the physical wooden piece, I will keep with me, and I love to show off to everyone. I can imaging putting that piece of art in my house when I am older because that is something cool that I actually created with my own mind.
College Personal Essay
This essay was super challenging me as I felt it was hard to capture a story about me that would say everything to colleges. After going through what felt like a million ideas, I settled on the biggest I had felt in these recent years. Raising a guide dog in training, Riviera. I also thought it was appropriate for an English project because I have brought her to school on numerous occasions. The thing about this was, I have a limit of 650 words to introduce the whole story, while bringing through the aspects of a story, that would make it interesting. That made it really hard because I simply was running out of room and had to sacrifice certain things I wanted to keep just because of word limit. But overall, I am really proud with my results in the end.
Film
This semester of film has been filled with a bunch of projects preparing us for our big narrative which was are starting to create. Starting form the jump, we instantly found ourselves creating narrative shorts, creating, filming, and editing, all in very short amounts of time. We have continued to hone our techniques while developing certain aspects like advanced audio. Overall, this unit I feel has been very valuable and has prepared us well for our biggest project yet.
This was our Period film as I talked about before. We were challenged to make a single short film in one period, which was super hard. That included coming up with a story, filming everything, and editing it all in under 2 hours. This was super fast paced and we just had to trust our instincts as really contemplating things resulted in losing the little and valuable time we had.
This Write Shoot Edit film was pretty cool. Initially we were tasked with creating stories. That it all Mr. Taylor instructed us to do, along with making note cards showing each scene. Little did we know, that at the end of that first period, he would give that story to a different film for them to shoot the following day. After filming a different story with the same group, unsurprisingly this time, he rotated that film one more time, so that we had to edit this completely different story and footage. In the end we edited this film that was especially challenging because we were not allowed to communicate the intended story to other groups, meaning we had to edit completely based off of what we thought the order should be.
The 5.1 Surround Sound project was definitely cool because we got to experience hearing certain noises in all different positions coming from different speakers. This translates straight from what Mr. Taylor always is talking about with film being a 3d experience in a 2d display. This audio makes the film much more immersive, and allows this exercise allows us to use it in any othre project we use sound with in premier.