Introduction
During this unit, I was tasked with writing a Flash Fiction story in English that would go on to be recorded as an audio file in Digital Media and illustrated into a Narrative Creature using linear perspective in Design. I learned how to use Adobe Illustrator as a key tool in my Narrative Creature, as well as learning to use Pro Tools and Adobe Premier Pro for audio editing and production.
The most valuable thing I learned from this project wasn’t actually a technical skill, but was perseverance. I struggled so much with writing a story with a unique personality and true character. I think that I also learned that changing your plans and not staying too rigid in your thinking was a good lesson for me, because my character, Jonas Billiard, ended up acting much differently than I imagined due to the limited words I had in the short story.
Story
In English we were given a few weeks to work on creating a persona for our character and a logical story to happen while narrating the story from a first or third point of view. I found this really challenging because I chose to narrate from a third person point of view, so I found it really difficult to show Jonas’s thoughts. Despite this, using the tools given in class to help grow my story was really useful.
I think that the audio production was interesting, I liked recording myself and adding sound effects. The effects were annoying to find though, because I had to look through files listening for just the right option. Other than that though, I feel like being capable of adding effects to recordings could be really fun for future projects.
A Normal Day by Griffin Polika-Engle
When Jonas woke up, he was certainly alive, it just didn’t feel that way. As he rose from the couch, he slumped over to the restroom, removing the makeup and blue contact lenses that were still on after last night, revealing dark eyebags and grey eyes. He then trudged over to his room, where he changed into a different silky suit than the one he was currently wearing, this one a dark blue rather than pure black, one of three differently coloured suits in his closet. Jonas then slid on his accessories, one by one, a watch on the left wrist, a chained necklace, and another watch, this one slightly broken, the unmoving hands pointing in random directions without a care for the time, placed on the right wrist.
As he looked out at the view of the city below, the lights slowly flicking on one by one as the sun rose, leaving a vivid green stain on the surrounding light blue sky. Jonas sighed, then turned to the dark steel elevator that would bring him down to his office after a few minutes of walking amongst his colleagues. He looked over to his left watch, and lurched into motion after looking at the time, leaving the room for that foreboding elevator promising him a safe passage into monotony.
Looking down through the window separating himself and an untimely fall to death, Jonas watched the now-lit buildings grow larger and blur, and as he went down with the elevator as a dizziness and loud ringing masked any thoughts. Gripping the railing of the elevator, eyes not working from the blurry black spots covering up that pleasant green sky, a muting of the clunking of the elevator and a numbness leading to the fumbling of his bookbag. The only feeling was a click only felt through the force he had to apply to open the bag.
A dull, pulsing pain in his shoulder and ankle, the only sense in what had seemed like hours, but Jonas knew it was only a few seconds. A piercing screech and stabbing, a bang, and then– nothing.
The slow, slow regaining of senses as Jonas realized he was on the floor, dark wet blood seeping into his collar. Three orange medicine bottles, the only real perk his father gave him for working. Some pills in his hand, and some in his mouth. With a gulp, they were swallowed, and despite them being used recently, the numbness was already sinking in. Reaching into the open bag, he pulled out a rag, ripped from something, silken frayed edges catching onto the bag’s zipper. He began wiping his head and neck, then the floor, with the stained white rag. Despite this, his white undershirt was stained with that same darkness as the rag.
The elevator had come to a stop, and as Jonas rose from his spot on the floor, the doors opened, nobody waiting for him, as always. As he started walking to his office, he checked his clothes for any damage. There was some glass from the broken watch, as the face of the watch had been shattered a bit more, and the hands had suddenly jolted into different positions, sometime earlier than the previous position, but Jonas hadn’t bothered to remember the time it was earlier due to this changing having happened before. His suit was slightly wrinkled, but with a bit of fixing up, it and his tie was restored to its previous condition.
The elevator dinged, ringing out, and Jonas limped forwards, leaving the elevator in search of one of the few empty meeting rooms in the hallway. Walking past tens of hundreds of people, all in meetings, yet through the glass seemingly leering, watching, staring. He didn’t know when, but his hands had clenched, nails biting into palms. They were mocking his face, his wealth, his clothes. He continued his walk, fists clenching and releasing, continually cutting into his palms.
Jonas finally knocked upon seeing an empty room, nobody responding, and with a swing and slam, he was in meeting room 309, one he knew nobody would be in. Still, the glass wall provided no safety from the gazes of the workers that were always, always, always watching. As he reached for his bag, a faint buzz and vibration was heard from his pocket. Foregoing the bag for the pocket, he grabbed his phone, and upon seeing a message, opened it immediately.
It read: If you are seeing this, it means I am currently injured and unable to manage my work or finances. Jonas, this means you will be in charge of those until I am healthy.
Smiling, Jonas read and reread the message, and despite sitting in the corner of a meeting room on the floor, began to quiver with excitement.
“From… Father.”
He stood, bruises meaning nothing, grabbed his bag, and opened the door. The workers that were watching him earlier were all looking at their devices, concerned and seeming small, their gazes no longer paralyzing. They were small now.
He began tearing off the golden chains of the necklace and ripping the working watch off, stowing them in his bag. The broken watch was jolted by the sudden movement of his hands, and began ticking once again.
“I don’t care. Please, for my sake, for my sanity, stay hurt forever Father.”
I grew artistically by allowing myself to be capable of adding sound effects to audio recordings and by being able to record voice overs by myself. I definitely feel a lot more confident in my recording abilities and now know I can easily add sound effects to audio tracks. I struggled with getting rid of minor audio issues like scraping or other small sounds in my recording. I ended up looking back on previous lessons to figure out how to fix them. If I could change it, I would make the beginning music a bit quieter, longer, and add a bit more variation to it. I’d also lower the sound and find other matching music to add to the track at the beginning. I’m most proud of my choice in sound effects because I think they all match the sound I was looking for and are all audibly unique from each other. You can tell what each sound effect is meant to be given the context of the story. I will use the ideas from this project to add sound effects to future recordings, fix minor issues in the recording, and find matching sounds for future sound effects. This definitely made me appreciate sound effects more, because I took 30 minutes looking through the assets to find the matching sound effects for the sound I wanted, and it was super tedious. Props to people who do this often or for fun.
Illustrations
In Digital Media, I drew a few different things using Adobe Illustrator, but I’d already learned how to use it in Design, so these were mostly for fun and to test myself.
For the Exquisite Corpse, I drew the tentacles. I was able to draw a few of each type and then copy it multiple times in Illustrator. I wish that I had done a better drawing, but I honestly didn’t really care about the assignment and wanted to try out the pen tool’s squiggliness capabilities.
In this project, I was tasked with creating an illustration in Adobe Illustrator that would be carved or printed onto a physical object like a piece of glass, shirt, or mug. I don’ really have much space in my room, so I decided to make wooden wall art. At first, I wanted to draw an armoured claw, but I ended up changing directions due to the size of the actual printed piece being much larger than I initially thought. I decided to move from something more demonic to something that was a more impressive figure. I chose to make an angel with large wings and eyes to show something more otherworldly. I also gave the angel a spear to represent the changes of fate that can happen at random. To make this more of a larger idea, I also gave the angel armour that looks like the eyes to show that they are actively doing things in the human world. In order to make this, I went through a few iterations of this figure, some with a tattered cloak, some with a fully carved out body, and some without the eyes. When actually designing this, i was trying to draw the parts that would be carved out of the wood, so it was kinda hard to wrap my head around. The most difficult part was designing which parts would be carved out instead of designing which parts I wanted to keep, but overall this was a really fun exercise in using Adobe Illustrator and drawing digitally.
I think that this process was overall very fun. I really enjoyed slowing down and making something unique while using the skills I’ve learned throughout the year. This was my chance to chill and have fun, and I think that I did that successfully.
Music Production
For this project, I had to use Pro Tools to make, edit, and arrange audio files and instrumental audio created using MIDI software, or a Musical Instrumental Digital Interface system to use digital instruments to make music. We had to either make one longer soundtrack or five to six short form soundtracks. I chose to do the single longer option because I thought it would be easier, but I wish I had the chance to try a bunch of unique things instead.
For my music I started by putting the drums into the Pro Tools file using MIDI in order to create a good base layer. I then gradually amped up the sounds over the course of the song. I wish that I’d fixed some of the issues with the track though, because after exporting the final product the drums were way louder than everything else. This wasn’t very apparent in the actual editing process, so I don’t really know what went wrong. But next time I would just test it by exporting the music then listening to it.
My inspiration for this music was mostly the innate chaos of allowing people who don’t really know how to make good instrumental music to make an entire song. I Am honestly most proud of being capable of creating this music, even though I myself do admit it sounds like a cacophony of screeching birds. I really value this project despite my song’s quality because I learned how to make music using a really complex program, and now I can use Pro Tools to make music for videos or other projects.
Overall, I think that using audio elements like MIDI instruments are really useful for being creative when producing audio, sound effects, or music in general. I can also see how Pro Tools itself could be used for making music and arranging audio files. I think that in the future, I probably won’t use it often, but that’s mostly because I don’t really work with or like working with audio. Despite that, if I need to work with creating or arranging audio, Pro Tools seems really useful and in-depth for that purpose.
Design
In Design, there were two major parts of the Narrative assignment. The first was to create a “Narrative Creature” that had different animal parts for each character trait our Flash Fiction character had. The second was to take a photograph with a model using props and special lighting equipment to create mood lighting scene at the climax of the Flash Fiction’s plot.
For the Narrative Creature, a main part was to make a linear perspective background. Linear perspective is the process of using straight lines and a horizon line to give everything a consistent drag towards the background. This was really challenging, because at one point in time I had about fifty lines all pointing towards the center because of my cityscape background. This did give me a migrane every time I looked at it, but it also looked pretty good afterwards.
Drawing the actual creature was the next step. For my character’s traits and animal parts I chose a tortoise shell for loneliness, dream fish eyes and tail for charisma, crow head for obsessiveness, moth wings for doubt, and deer antlers and legs for stress. I then grabbed images of these parts off the internet and traced them onto and Adobe Illustrator document. After drawing all of my parts, I lined them up and coloured them using the colour fill tool.
In order to put all of the parts together, I flipped the creature, which I named the Crothise, to look towards my background’s sun. I then fiddled with the proportions until I finalized the design.
Overall, I’m really happy with this project. It was probably the biggest assignment other than the documentary, but I actually drew all of it.I like my colour choice and animal choice, but I do have some regrets. I wish that I had changed the background so that the majority of the buildings I painstakingly drew were not covered. I also wish that the bald spot in the background right next to the wings was covered by those wings. despite this, I put a lot of effort into it and it paid off.
For the narrative photo, I got someone from my design class to model as Jonas from my Flash Fiction project. I used props like a notebook, satchel, glasses, and keys splayed out on the floor to make the bag look like it had been dumped out on the floor. I also made my model sit in the corner of the room in order to emphasize isolation and sadness. Furthermore, I also used purple-blue lighting to show fear and sadness. I also used a bit of yellow-orange lighting to show a spark of hope.
Ultimately, I think that this was successful. I really like the resolution on my model’s face, and I think I used the props in a way that fits the scene. I do wish that the clothes were lighter, but if I’d changed my camera settings to make the clothes lighter the coloured lighting got worse. The lights were really fun to play with, I hope I get to use them more in the future.