Introduction
In this chapter of my Freestyle education, I learned how tell a structured and planned out story through prose, storytelling, narrative digital illustrations, and film production. As a student I delved deeper into the world of technology and improved my communication skills through the introduction of Wacom Drawing Tablets, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, After Affects, and Pro- as well as continued to use AVID Pro Tools to improve my audio skills.
What I valued the most about this unit is that I got to learn how to draw with a Tablet. If I am honest, I have little drawing skills and was completely intimidated by software such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. However, I’ve learned to overcome that feeling through practice and hard work. The errors I encountered became an outlet for me to push myself and grow, and now I can say that I truly enjoy using digital illustration and photoshop software. I hope to incorporate that into a future career someday.
Story
My assignment in english for the Narrative Unit was to tell a short fictional story in 1000 words or less. My place of inspiration for my story was Humboldt County, California. My story was heavily focused on nature and natural elements that are specific to that county in California, which is where my family is from.
I was inspired specifically by Six Rivers National Forest, and Old Home Beach in Trinidad. I produced the audio version of my story by first recording myself read the story, then uploading to Pro Tools. After editing out mistakes and trimming the ending, I then layered on audio to go along with the tone and plot of the story. Because my story was only being told through audio, I wanted to help bring my listeners into the story through real sound effects.
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What I valued about using audio to tell my story was that it was engaging and helped add a more human characteristic to my story which is important, considering that this is a fictional narrative. I like that it adds a sense of realness to my story and helps me focus on my inspiration for the narrative by drawing attention to natural elements in the setting.
Gone Swimming by Chloe Burcell
Illustrations
I was inspired to create this shirt design after a year of being stuck at home with my family. After spending a year in Quarantine with them, I wanted to make a shirt to commemorate this crazy time. During this process, I definitely had challenges in two areas of the process- the first being that I had made different versions of the piece and had trouble deciding which design I wanted! The second issue I had was with submission of the piece, the VPN can definitely be finicky and simple tasks like submitting files to the proper folder can sometimes have a learning curve.
If I could change one thing, it would be to add a second design on the back of the shirt or to add more viruses around the shirt. I am most proud of how much my family liked the shirt- they want me to make three more for them later on. I think t shirt design is fun and creative and I could see myself making them for social events and schools/work/teams in the future. I also think this gives me a lot more respect for the people who design company/school t-shirts because I did not previously realize how much work and artistic skill is required to do this!
Music Production
The Parody Project was a learning exercise we used to expand on our creative writing and audio editing skills. My partner Ben and I worked for several hours to write a parody of Oops I Did It Again by Britney Spears. We then recorded different parts of the song, and even had Mr Taylor (the film teacher) voiceover a few parts. Finally, Ben and I edited the song together. It was definitely difficult to remove the original vocals from the chosen song, but after figuring out how to layer audio and remove parts of the backtrack, we figured it out. The inspiration for my new parody lyrics was homework procrastination, which is something that both Ben and I found relatable and funny.
Film
This Freestyle Film unit was about teaching us the process of writing, filming, and editing a narrative story. Therefore they challenged us to produce our own 3-5 minute short narrative. I valued learning how to create storyboards the most, because it always takes up the most time and I am not a very patient person. I want to thank Mr Taylor for being an amazing and engaging teacher, my project partner Ben for having lots of patience with me throughout this learning process, as well as my brother and boyfriend for acting in the short together.
The next technique we learned was Griffith’s Pattern, which is a process used by a famous cinematographer to set the tone and location of a scene.
Our final technique that we had to learn was how to build a chase scene. This part was really important because it built on the ideas we had previously learned and was intended to help us create more climactic plots for our own narratives. We were asked to film and mini scenes one on one to reflect what we had learned. Finally, we were expected to present our videos to the teacher and the class to be critiqued in a “professional” setting.
After we had some learned skills, we created a narrative synopsis and storyboard to help create our own short films. This was probably the longest part of the unit, spanning over a few weeks as we painstakingly drew out all the individual shots and wrote out the full plot for the narrative.
Once we had finished filming shots, Ben and I uploaded, cut, edited, color corrected, and rearranged close to 500 shots together for many hours to create our final draft of the film.
