Introduction
For the Conceptual assignment in Freestyle, Juniors are assigned prompts which challenge their problem solving skills and develop their ability to communicate a message to answer the question, “How can I use unconventional forms to express myself?” By being given an unconventional prompt and not being allowed to communicate a message through your art directly, risk-taking and creativity is greatly encouraged, allowing complex opinions and intents to be told through a visual media. By initially learning about how to use many different tools, such as a DSLR Camera, Tascam Audio Recorder, Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premier Pro, and Adobe Audition, students develop their options and ability to create what they want.
Throughout English and Digital Media, my capacity to think and learn new things has been challenged, and this is clearly shown my how difficult I first found these classes. I was thrust into an unfamiliar environment and told that I had to learn completely different things than what regular schoolwork requires. I had my opinions and ideals challenged by Mark Rothko when reading “Red”, and struggled to learn about how to use Adobe products for the first time. Despite this, I’ve really enjoyed my time in these classes so far, and have grown due to the copious amounts of challenge. I definitely could write better speeches about Yayoi Kusama and create better videos about her art installation, but I was able to create these things in the first place due to what I was taught by these classes, and for that I am grateful.
Art Reflection
At the beginning of the year, the whole group of Freestyle students went on a field trip to the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art, or the SFMOMA. We were tasked with finding a piece of art that we felt a sense of awe from, and were to write notes about our initial thoughts and feelings about it, as well as taking a few photos. We would then write a speech about our experience with this piece of art and make a video about it using the photos we took and the speech as a voice over.
“Dreaming Of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love”
While making this video, I was incredible challenged, and I really appreciated that. Instead of going straight into an easy activity, we went into an interesting project instead. Although it may not seem like it, this was incredibly tedious. The basic video was easy, as we had just done practice on it, but the captions took a long time due to the amount of text there was. I do think that this was a good representation of my work in Adobe Premier Pro so far though, as it was of fairly good quality and showed many of the skills I’d learned so far, such as camera zoom, fades, inserting audio and video, and making it interesting to view.
Parody Introduction
The next assignment we were given was to create a parody song with a different topic than the original and edit it in Adobe Audition. I chose the song Hot To Go by Chappell Roan, and made my song about getting takeout for dinner. I first made my lyrics by changing key words in the original lyrics to change the meaning, and then changing other words to change the context of the song. After that, I recorded the me singing the lyrics to a karaoke version of the song, and edited it by adding echos and reverb. I was also tasked with writing my artist statement, as shown below.
In my parody, I decided to use an upbeat song so that I could use energetic lyrics, and so I chose Hot To Go by Chappell Roan. I also decided to use superficial lyrics about deciding what to eat for dinner so that people would immediately understand that the song was a parody. Using Adobe Audition, I edited the song to practice the basic skills I learned and make the song more fun.
By changing the volume at different points, I was able to moderate the volume of the parody and make certain points have more emphasis. I also decided to add a mild echo to the whole track, and add a larger echo to certain parts to both enhance chunks of the song and practice the skill I learned in the basics practice session. While recording, I struggled with keeping an even pitch, and I also forgot to turn on the 48V button, so most of my recording time was wasted, but now I’ll know in the future to always check it before panicking. Thanks to the parody song, I was able to both improve in my usage of Adobe Audition and knowledge of when to add effects, and create something new and interesting.
Design
In my design elective, we learn to use many Adobe products in order to create visually pleasing and communicative photographs and illustrations. So far we have mostly don introduction work to learn the basics about Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, but later in the year we will learn about InDesign as well. So far, Design has been very enjoyable due to my fun classmates and teacher, as well as the interesting coursework. For me, combining my traditional art skills and interest in digital medias culminates into this class being one of my favourites.
Name Photography
The first major project design students did was taking photographs of objects in the environment that looked like letters and spelling your name with it. The most difficult part of this was not the photography, but the limits of where I could walk with my camera.
Conceptual Photo
During this assignment, we were told to think about representing a feeling or action through a non-direct object. We first started out by working as a group to find different ways to represent emotion. My given prompt was to, “Explore the feeling of hostility through viewing an eclipse.” I really found this difficult because I had no clue how to represent this. I asked around my group, and ultimately decided I could simplify it by thinking about anger and natural beauty rather than hostility and an eclipse. This brought up the idea of using a gemstone whose worth is being unfairly judged.
Upon thinking of this topic, I immediately thought of using some kind of beautiful natural resource in order to represent the eclipse. When discussing with the class, the idea of using a gemstone or geode for this photo to represent the eclipse stuck out. I could represent the natural beauty of the world using the eclipse, but I also had to incorporate hostility into the photo. In order to do this, I came up with the idea of using judgment to represent the hostility I feel towards unnecessary judgment. In the world, everything has to have some kind of value for a large majority of people to care about it. If art had no value and people didn’t buy it, artists wouldn’t be able to make art for a living. Using this, I decided to move away from the idea of more law-based judgment and into an idea of business-based idea of judgment, where things must have value, and used a measuring tape in order to represent this. By making the measuring tape twisted into a ball, I presented the idea that this judgment itself was twisted. In addition, I used a background of dry grass and concrete to show how the world had been drained of its life and resources because of human development and greed. I also purposely shot when there was a lot of light to bring out the yellows of the photograph. All of this came together to show how people judge the world’s natural beauty and resources to exploit it for their own gain.
When editing this photo, I really didn’t do much to change it. Although I used the contrast and saturation to make the work more dry and lifeless, I didn’t want to edit it too much and make it unnatural. When messing around with the editing, I just looked plain wrong when I changed too much. I learned that if you change too much in Photoshop, sometimes it won’t look better, you need to have restraint and not change too much or else the original intent of the photo will disappear.
