Introduction
For the Narrative 1 unit that we do in the 2nd half of freestyle as a junior, we face the question “How well can you visually tell a structured story?” To answer that, we did a variety of projects to showcase our new skills that we are learning. in all 3 classes, we expand or write stories and create various types of media from them. For example in English we wrote a short story, In Animation we create a small animation in a group of people, and in digital media we bring our stories to new forms. Reading further though this page will allow you to see all of these in much more detail.
Short story – English
In english, we were challenged to write a professional short story that Shows, rather then Tells. We accomplished this by observing many famous short stories, and then brainstormed our own stories. Below you can see part of my brainstorming process trying to flesh out the main character of my story. Timmy Hues.
When creating this story, I wanted to emulate a bedtime story, so I created an almost stereotypical story of a young boy who runs into the forest and learns a valuable lesson in the end.
Please click play to see the audio version of my story!
Timmy’s Big day
When Timmy Hues woke up this morning, all he could think about was how today was the day that his mother would let him play in the forest without supervision. He thought about the ant nest as he zoomed down the stairs and into the wooden fenced backyard, almost hurling himself outside of the gate leading into the forest. As he raced ahead, Timmy’s face widened with excitement. Speeding up farther away from his house until the tall trees blocked his view of the house, he finally felt as free as a fox during summer.
Suddenly, Timmy stopped. He looked around, searching for the nest that he had discovered just yesterday. Finding a thin stream of ants converging on the redwood tree in front of him, he knew that he would have fun all day. As he shoved his hand into the moist brown dirt he starts to uncover the center of today’s journey. An ant nest! As he was ready to shove his hands into the mass of flowing black dots, he tripped backward. Stunned for a few moments, he reached out and tries to grab a branch to pull himself upwards hoping to right himself, until he notices that the branch he grabbed was a bright green snake! Startled with the rough, slimy texture, Timmy gave a loud yelp, then started scrambling away.
All of a sudden, the forest felt to Timmy as though it grew colder and darker, and when the snake started hissing, Timmy took off deeper into the forest. The farther away Timmy ran, the shadows seemed as if they grew longer, the young boy thought he heard something out of the corner of his ears as if someone was calling out to him. Frightened, Timmy sped up even more. With the bushes flying by, his foot snagged on an exposed root. After his face slammed into the wet grass, Timmy wondered how he did not break any bones.
After a minute, when Timmy’s limbs stopped feeling cold and numb, he jumped up, and looked around, trying to figure out where he was. Surrounding him was a massive grove of trees, full of moss and flowers hanging from the branches. Looking at the sun, it was only around 12 o’clock. Timmy’s shoulders dropped with relief, and whatever was in the forest would have left him alone by now. Amazed, he looked around in what was the right place to play for the day.
As Timmy started to lose himself to his imagination, everything seemed to go right for the first time today. But when the sun started to lower, Timmy’s imagination started to wane, and he knew he had to go back to his house. Gathering up his courage, he braved the forest once more.
When he took his first couple steps, Timmy remembered what drove him into the grove in the first place. There were animals in the forest that he knew were just waiting to eat him. Panicked, he turned around and ran back into his safe haven, and before he knew it, he was back in the grove, too panicked to enter the forest again. He knew though that his mother would worry if he was not back soon. Timmy knew he had to face his fears, but how? As Timmy thought about this, he tried controlling his breathing, thinking about Sheepie, (his favorite stuffed) animal, and even called out for his mom to come to find him. None of this worked. Either he would run back into the safe grove, or not be able to step outside his temporary safe place.
Suddenly, the bushes started rattling with the sound of a large animal ready to eat him! Cowering in fear, Timmy dropped to the ground, trying to find a place to hide when 2 ears popped out of the rattling bush. A fuzzy little bunny hopped right out of the forest into the grove. Startled for the second time today, he let out an ear-piercing shrink, startling the unassuming bunny.
Once Timmy caught his breath, he realized how funny he was being, and the snake that he thought was in the bushes was actually a bunny! Resolving to himself that he will try one last time to leave the forest he sets out from his haven into the source of his discontent. Amazingly, the forest seems a lot less dark than it did before, and he thought he could remember the way back home, something that he struggled to do before.
As he was tiptoeing through the forest trying to make as little noise as possible, he heard a stick snap. As he jumped into the air ready to make a bolt for the end of the forest, he prepared himself, remembering that it probably was not dangerous, and was more scared of him than he was of it. As he looked around the tree where he heard the noise, he saw it was a deer! Proud of himself that he did not get scared, Timmy was in much higher spirits than he was a few minutes ago, and when he saw his house, he knew he was back home.
Illustrations – Digital Media
In digital media, we learned the difference between Vector and raster art, and why it’s important. To further our technical skills, we learned Adobe Illustrator to create vector art and learn important tricks to help us with image editing. Once we learned the basics, we did a group “Exquisite Corpse” project together. My part the the 2nd section, the dragon body.
Illustrator Choice Project
For our illustrator choice project, we were given many mediums to choose for a final project, and I chose stickers. When brainstorming what to create, I decided to do a bunch of things that ‘screamed’ Eli. Because of this, I did many things related to my cats, theater, and one joke that has been brewing in my head over the past few years.
My artists statement for my stickers is:
When I started this project, I had no idea what to do. After thinking for a while, I remembered my laptop had a lot of extra room for stickers, so I started thinking about what I would want to have on my laptop. I eventually settled on a bunch of cool designs that feature me or my cats. WHile playing around with illustrator, I realized that the spiral tool was not an even growth in size, but more of an exponential growth, so doing some research later, I found out how to do even growth of a spiral, which turned into my name!. I also practiced rasterizing a vector image by taking a photo of artwork of my cats, and tracing it with a pen tool. This was very interesting because I had to visualize what strokes would be on top of other strokes to fill correctly. I believe that I improved my pen tool skills a lot during the creation of this piece. I also wanted to make stickers for my family. My baby brother is into cars, so I made a car sticker for him. Lastly, I wanted to do my own take on the ‘mystery spot’ bumper sticker that you see on many cars here in California, so I did my own ‘rational zone’ version. I tried to keep it both close to the original, but still unique enough to be my own. I think I am very proud of my diverse works of art, and how everyone I did grew in some way, which does not always happen. This time I pushed myself to try new things.
Music
For music production, we were challenged to create a parody song to a song of our choice. I decided to create a parody to Your Welcome from Moana. I have had a few verses in my head for many years, but this allowed me to expand my lyrics to encompass the whole song. We were specifically challenged not to use a karaoke version of the song, and instead use the original song and turn it into a karaoke song. We accomplished this in many ways, but the technique that I found the coolest is Inverting the phase, where you flip the waveforms and then combine it back in, to make a 1 – 1(because we flipped it) equals 0!
Elijah, make way, make way Elijah, it’s time you know The Small CIty of Mountain view is all you need
The people are riding trains They ride with an Ancient phone (Who needs a new phone? This old phone is all we need)
This tradition is our mission And Elijah, there’s so much to do (make way)
Don’t trip on the Google Bike, that’s all you need
We code everything we make (we make) We type, and we use spell check (ah-ha!)
The people they come back from there work
I wanna work
Please dont skip school
You need a good education
Your classmates will need a friend, and there you are
There comes a day
When you are going to look around And realize that College app are closer than you think!
Consider the Iphone X (the what?) Consider its screen
We use each part of the Iphone X, that’s all we need
We all learn from the WiFi
Just fact check everything you read
We all use windows or IOS
I guess there is Linux too
Consider the Iphone X
The Case and the Screen (ha!)
The city gives us what we need
And no one leaves
That’s right, we stay We’re safe, and we’re well provided And when we look to the future, there you are
You’ll be okay In time you’ll learn just as I did
You must find happiness right where you are
I like to teach the students
The diversity and the brains
The students are mischievous I don’t like how they misbehave
The city may think I’m crazy
Or say that I need to give less homework
But once you know what you like, well There you are
You are your Family’s child, Awesome and humble
Mind what they says but remember You may hear a voice inside
And if the voice starts to whisper To follow the farthest star Elijah, that voice inside is who you are
We learn from the wifi, The wifi is everywhere
You can choose apple or Google I guess there is Linux too
The city believes in us The city believes
Costco gives us what we need
And you can see I’ll build the way
I’ll have my friends and family to guide me And when I think of tomorrow, there we are
I’ll lead the way I’ll have my homework to guide me
We’ll build our future together there we are
Cause every path leads you back to where you are
You can find happiness right where you are
Where you are
Animation
In animation, we were challenged to design characters physically, then digitally, then create a walk cycle of the same character. Then after that we were challenged to create a lip sync animation. After that, we were put into groups to create a minute long animation in a group of 3 that has no dialogue and you can still tell what the story is.
Firstly, we created a mockup of a character we wanted to animate. Then we do a rough sketch, then we model them with modeling clay and wires.
We then took our model and animated a walk cycle. This can be very tricky depending on how you made your puppet, so I am very thankful I made mine extra study with doubling the amount of stitches.
After that, we created a similar mockup, but in 2d. We put a green screen behind this one and the previous video because in the next project, we would put them together.
Here we have both my physical animation and my digital animation together with sound effects and a background. I hope you enjoy!
Here we were practicing Lip Syncing of a audio clip of our choice. I chose a clip titled ‘music is powerful, man’. This was very challenging because the person that I drew was for a front angle, and most lip sync charts are for side angles, or at least the ones that I was comfortable with. I am very proud of this one though because in my opinion, it looks fairly realistic, maybe with too many mouth movements actually.
For our final and most challenging project for animation, we were put into groups of 3 and told to create a story without dialogue. Even though we had a very open ended assignment, this was very challenging because we had to come up with a story that everyone wanted to work on. we started brainstorming by creating as big as a list as possible full of random ideas. most of these ideas were bad, but even a bad idea can spark an idea for something better. Eventually we decided on creating a story where two puzzle pieces fall in love, and want to get to each other. Essentially, this is a very disney-esque story where we have 2 characters meet, get seperated, have to try and get back together, but it does not work the first time. eventually in the end everything works happily ever after.
We first had to decide on the logistics of how the story is going to flow. Interestingly, we skipped the storyboarding phase, and instead just wrote own general scenes and what happens. We then decided that I will take the beginning, Alexis will take the middle, and Arthur will do the ending scene. the only other thing we decided is that the story will all be in greytones besides for the main characters, who will be bright colors. This will be until the ending scene where they meets, and color is released back into the world.
We animated the scenes in photoshop, with puting the scenes and audio together in premiere pro.
Altogether, I think this animation was very successful, and that we all grew as a team!