Explorations Project

Introduction

During May, the Freestyle Seniors presented their Zenith projects which were basically capstone projects for the year and they spent several months on them. As we watched them, we the juniors had to keep in mind our own ideas for a mini version of this for our Explorations project which for each elective can be whatever we want as long as it is related to our media i.e. design, film, animation. For Design, because it is described as almost anything, we had the most freedom, for me I chose to use India Ink to paint an Asian landscape artwork.

Process

I first watched videos on professionals painting their landscapes and I also viewed other paintings.

I then tried many times painting around 7 or 8 complete landscapes not including the mess ups or test runs. I mostly learned through trial and error on who to create different paint strokes with dry brushing, dark lines, fade into fog, and others.

In the end, I didn’t like how any of them turned out as I found them to hold too many mistakes and not represent my full artistic abilities. However, I did enjoy this project as I have always wanted to try this medium and am glad I had the opportunity.

This is what I deemed my final piece.

Music

Introduction

In this assignment in Digital Media, myself and Stephen Messner collaborated to do a cover of The Champs’ Tequila and Stephen brought in his musically talented friend Santi to play the guitar and bass. We were able to use the recording studio to practice being in the booth and producing music. The inspiration behind doing Tequila was a reel that Stephen saw of someone playing electric guitar over simple songs, like the Barney theme song. Stephen knows someone who plays electric guitar (and can improvise bass), and figured he’d be a good fit. The result? A silly and fun cover of Tequila, starring Santiago Tejada Castillo on electric guitar and bass.

This project is different from other projects we’ve done because we needed to reach out to other artists and have them come into Freestyle to record – our guests would come to us. At first, it was tough to schedule everyone to come in at the same time, but with enough patience, we were able to get things figured out and get all of the recording done in about an hour and a half.

I would like to say I grew however, I don’t think I challenged myself enough for this project and I could have done something more complicated. But it was still important to know how the recording studio worked and it was still fun to do.

Process

Poem

Introduction

In English, our final unit was the poetry unit and we were given the chance to learn and write poems from a guest speaker and professional poet, Christine Moore. She went through different styles of poems such as Cento and Ars Poetica. We practiced writing basic poems of each style and then moved on to our final poem.

Process

We first started with answering a question which was “does poetry matter?” and we learned about what separates poetry from your average writer. Then we talked about what makes it worth talking about by watching videos of poets reciting their poems in different ways.

Our first practice was taking a newspaper article and took parts of it and put them together to create a poem. I went a slightly different route as I took the Sunday comic strips and put those together. Then we moved onto a Cento poem which was taking quotes from other poets and putting those into our own poem. Finally we did an Ars Poetica which was answering what Poetry was in a descriptive manner using figurative language.

For the final piece, we took all of our information and I came up with my own completely original poem.

XC

The twigs bend and arch
They twist and shape themselves
with strength of paper.

The many colors
From different trees they stand
Lie in wait to start

A crack like lighting
These thin bodies take flight
To run forever

Gone and out of sight

I wanted to do something that wasn’t too serious as I knew most people would be doing something like that. So I decided to make fun of a sport that in my opinion deserves it for the most part. I wrote about how I thought how thin cross country runners were and how their sport is a little ridiculous to me. I have no true hate for their sport but I simply thought it would be funny to write about my personal opinions towards them.