Narrative 1

During the Narrative 1 Unit I got exposed to all the necessary skills I needed to tell a good story. Ranging from graphic design, music, story writing and more. This was from projects that involved making my own stories and learning to create something from nothing. This unit was far more challenging than the previous conceptual unit since it required extensive planning and a more diverse skillset. I was prepared to this unit for next year when we redo narrtives.

During this project I began to think about how complex sound can be and how layering and incorporating sensations from sound can be more impactful than an image. In videos and movies, without any audio, many struggle to convey emotions; many people make careers out of knowing how to edit sound. This project opened my eyes to remind myself that you can always do more with sound, and there’s more purpose to it than just music. For this project, I think I should’ve slowed down the way I spoke and taken more time to properly annunciate my words. At times while editing the narration for it to intro and outro softly, it was hard to work around because I was talking so fast. I think I would record paragraph by paragraph next time instead of one go and take a moment to think about the emotion of the paragraph I was about to read. However, I’m most proud of the SFXs I put in. It was my favorite part of the project as it inspired me to think creatively and get that feeling that the story was really coming together. I liked the ideas I would come up with and thinking of work arounds, such as if I couldn’t find an audio of heel clicking, maybe I should substitute it with panting to signify my character is moving

The inspiration for my music was to just have fun. I’m a novice when it comes to music so I like clicking random beats and making melodies from mistakes piqued my interest. However a lot of the music in my inspiration probably came from how I listened to a lot of house music and hip hop at the time. However I got bored of a consistent beat so the last 2 sections I wanted a church vibe, so I included organs and the piano. I’m proud of my first 3 sections and how while they were different they cohesively blended from one to the other. I actually really enjoyed listening to the first half of my interstitial, it sounds like something I could take inspiration from later. It’s not as hard as I thought it would be, and it encourages me to play around more with virtual instruments. I don’t have to be a pro at everything to make music, I can slow down the beats per minute or speed up to my liking and even draw in the notes. It opens a whole new world for music.

For this illustrator project, I knew I could go all out and try and make an impressive lamp, or candle shade, however since I’m still a novice I wanted to create something reliable. Looking back I wanted to make something I’d use frequently and was just cute, nothing to show off. When reflecting on my day-to-day life, what I deem as cute is my dog Phoebe since she encapsulates a chapter of my teens. So I knew I would want to include her in my design.

When I was re-doing the design I wanted lots of color, so I explored many different textured brushes to create a fun retro ambience of minimal furniture. I made it very intentional to explore brighter crazier colors so my dog would pop out since she’s only black and white. I used a circle to make the rug and created a gradient on it for extra fun texture in my layering to continue to make my dog a focal point.Now that the project is done, I’m thankful I cared enough to redo the design since I think my old one was too easy. I think the mug is small and cute, and something I’ll happily have on my desk to hold my pens and pencils. I’m looking forward to making harder, more detailed objects like a chandelier in the future. It’s really fun to know I can create a 3D object from a screen. I really appreciate the creative freedom that illustrators have.

….and I also did a fun exquisite corpse project where I designed the head of a body where I didn’t know what it would look like.

Chase
Griffith
Suspence

The suspence scene was a fun project to help practice building the tension in a scene and practice the 180 degree rule, which is another guideline to help audiences understand the direction of action between characters in a scene.

The chase scene was another project to utilize the skills we learned during the griffith and suspence projects and to understand film continuity and it’s impact on your story.

The griffith exercise was meant to teach us that sequencing clips going from bigger such as a long shot into closer shots such as a close-up lets an audience understand the geographical relationship of the scene while getting the proper emotion of characters.

During this big film unit, we did a few exercise to prepare for our big narrative project including the projects above

….all these projects seamlessly lead up to the big narrative project where in my film class we partnered up to create a story. This process took months, of storyboarding, pitching, dailies, and finalizing to create a short story. Me and my partner wanted to make a story about friendship and how lasting companionship comes with trial and error, after some story edits.