Introduction
For the explorations unit at Freestyle, we had the chance to explore a new topic or skill for four weeks and then later present our production/creation. For my project, I knew I wanted to incorporate some of my own previous passions, a specific one being music and video editing. I love listening to music, and usually when I am waiting for new albums for my favorites artists to drop, they also include a lyric video. Watching the creative control lyric videos have inspired me to create my own! However, soon into the process I realized how hard and time-consuming it is, so i resulted to simply doing practice lyric videos as a way to learn how to use Adobe After Effects for these lyric videos.
Process
For this process, I began by looking through the internet for inspiration. Soon I decided that the more difficult motion graphics was something I wouldn’t be able to do with the small amount of time I had, so I resulted to typography. A lot of the examples I saw had a simple background and a still image graphic, with most of the effects being with the lyrics. I soon learned this was called typography and I became invested in learning the cool effects After Effects offers!
My vision for my lyric video laid with the song As It Was by Harry Styles. The entire album is centered with a home-y feeling, funiture, feeling comfortable etc. I took some graphics of the furniture on the album cover and knew I wanted to start with that. I felt my first sort of block with the intro of the song, but I ended up using it as an opportunity to work with keyframes and movement with rotation and scale!
Here you can see a little bit of my process while making the lyric video. After Effects, although super confusing to work, I loved the software and am excited to work with it for my senior year!
Down here, you can watch the actual presentation happen! Although I was nervous, I ended up feeling pretty good about it 🙂
REFLECTION
Overall, I really enjoyed this project as a whole. I learned a lot about myself in this creative process and I really liked using AE. I hope this sudden passion can contribute to some future careers I can apply to because it was a lot of fun working on something like this! I also love this song, so I’m happy I have something of value to it now.
POEM SECTION
This year in English we had an opportunity to do a 3-day poetry workshop! I love writing and reading so I really enjoyed the various exercises we did while we had this workshop. In the end, we had to chose one poem as our final explorations poem to present to the class. Inspired by the cento poem I created as a workshop, I decided to take similar ideas and write my own.
This was my Cento poem. For this exercise, we had two sheets of small poetry that we were then asked to pick apart and connect with other lines. I wanted my poem to reflect a little on personal experiences with my mom being a Mexican Immigrant to the US and me being her eldest daughter and a first generation student in high school, hoping to pursue my career in art based occupations in a 4 year University. A lot of my experience as been feeling burdened by the weight of expectations, not from her, but from myself. She choses to preserve my peace, but she’s unaware of the many overwhelming thoughts to do my best for her, which is why the poem ended with “I was wrong,”. In the end, it’s up to everyones interpretion, but I really loved the way it came out and I knew i wanted to explore it more for my final poem to recite.
This was my final explorations poem, which slightly resembles the cento one! I added an em dash as a deeper touch towards the meaning of the poem. I decided to name it, “I’m luck, I was wrong.” because of the placement for the em dash meaning a lot to me. It felt very freeing to be writing about something so personal to me because the love and admiration I feel for my mom is something I couldn’t explain in words. Overall, I just LOVED the poetry unit!
Video Production of Poem