Introduction
The Reflections unit was the first of Senior year. The purpose of it was to give us a chance to reflect on ourselves and our passions. Our projects in each class gave us a chance to do so. From designing mandalas to recording a personal video essay, this unit gave me a chance to learn more about myself. It helped me figure out what I wanted to study in college, and eventually do with my life beyond that.
Personal Mandala
For Digital Media, I made two mandalas. One was in black and white, and the other was multi-colored.
If the images do not display below,
On a Mac, press Command + (plus) then press press Command – (minus)
On a PC, press the Control + (plus) then press the Control – (minus)
The black and white mandala was made using Adobe Illustrator. It was drawn using a number of mirror and rotation commands, allowing for a much easier process. Here is the Illustrator workspace.
The black and white mandala was laser cut onto a live edge wood block. Laser cutters use a laser to burn the wood, engraving the design of your choice into the wood itself.
Artist Statement: My mandala is inspired by my Jewish heritage. I used the hamsa in my design, a symbol that is used to ward off evil and bring in good. The name of my piece is a phrase also used to ward off evil.
Here is the Photoshop workspace. We used Photoshop to assemble the image above.
Here is a clip of the laser cutting process. You can see the laser pass back and forth, burning the design in bit by bit.
For the colored mandala, I produced a video to present my design.
Artist Statement: My colorful mandala wasn’t inspired by anything in particular. I just wanted to get as many colors in the design as possible. I chose black as a background because it makes the colors stand out much more than a white background would.
Adobe After Effects was used to produce the video. After Effects is a program often used for visual effects, such as in movies. Here is the workspace for this project.
The mandala project was an interesting, although somewhat boring, Illustrator project. Drawing is by no means my strong suit, so an entire project built around drawing was never going to strike my creative passion. That being said, I do quite like the finished laser cut piece,
College Essay
In English, we wrote our college admissions essays. Here is the essay that got me in to college:
Film Production
Personal Video
The main Reflections project in Film was to create a two-minute video essay. The purpose of this essay is to give the audience a look into my mind, and see how I think. Mine was about my love of history and archaeology, and why I find it so fascinating.
The reflections video hasn’t been posted to youtube yet.
One Period Movie
Throughout Reflections, we’ve had a handful of smaller projects. These projects expanded on certain skills that we’ll need in the upcoming Narrative unit, the largest one in the Film course. Of these projects, the hardest one was the One Period Movie. Our task, in groups of three, was to write, film, and edit a short movie in the space of one period. We had just two hours, which meant that planning was of the utmost importance. I teamed up with my friends Isaiah and Gordon to create the project sitting before you. This was incredibly challenging. We were figuring out the story and what shots we need to film as we were filming them. We had almost no time to edit at the end, rushing to get the video clips and the sound effects lined up before the time ran out. In the end, I think the project turned out pretty good, especially given the time we had.
Swap Movies
The most chaotic project we worked on was the “Swap Movies”. Splitting up once again into groups, the task started out quite simple: come up with a story, and draw out a storyboard for it. We wrote a simple story about a high schooler who was trying to get the attention of his crush, but kept on failing in increasingly comical ways. At the end of class, each group shared their stories. It turned out that we would be filming these stories, which wasn’t surprising. Although, we wouldn’t be filming our own stories. We swapped storyboards, and in the next class our task was to become directors, and film someone else’s story. As you might now expect, we switched once more for the editing, editing a movie which we neither wrote nor shot. The final results were three movies of varying coherence, which every member of the class worked on. Here are the movies:
In the film industry, a director will usually follow a script someone else wrote, not their own. The same is true for writers and editors. By having each of us do a different segment of each film, we get to experience what it might actually be like in the industry.
Surround Sound Audio
One final little project we did was learn how to create surround sound videos. Surround sound is made by setting a different audio track to each speaker. The system I designed the video for is called 5.1. It means there are five speakers and one subwoofer. Each speaker is told to play a different track. If a character on screen is walking from the left to the right, the speakers will play footsteps moving from the left speaker over to the right speaker. The purpose of this video was to give us a chance to learn how you can make surround sound videos ourselves. It won’t work as intended for you, unless you happen to have a 5.1 speaker system set up at home, but you’ll get the general gist of it.