Hannah Barnett

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Conceptual

Introduction

In the conceptual unit, I got to explore and learn many new programs such as Premiere Pro and Adobe Audition. I also got an introduction to photography, and learned how to use many features of a camera.

In my first quarter at Freestyle, I learned many new skills and found new ways to express myself. As I got used to being at Freestyle I began to understand what it means to be a student here.

Art Reflection

For this project, we first took a field trip to the SF MOMA art museum. We were instructed to find a piece of art that we found “awe-inspiring,” then reflect on it. When we got back, we then started developing our reflection into a short script. In Digital Media, we learned how to use a recorder and Adobe Premiere Pro to turn our script into an art reflection video about the artwork. This project allowed me to dive deeply into a piece of art, and discover its meaning and purpose. On the more technical side of things, I got a good foundation of how to use Adobe Premiere Pro as well as how to create audio recordings

The photo depicts the Adobe Premiere Pro interface. There are multiple clips in the timeline, and one of them is open to show the motion keyframes it has. The video preview shows a black-and-white blurry photo of 3 large speakers. In front o the photo is white test that says "Shrines to Music"
Some behind-the-scenes of my art reflection video

I value the opportunities this project gave me to examine an artwork thoroughly and formulate my thoughts on it in a concise manner. I appreciate the opportunity it gave me to visit an art museum and see many different works of art. Finally, I value the practice using Premiere Pro that I got.

Parody Introduction

I started off my Parody Song process by choosing a topic to write about. I chose to write about the struggle of catching the freestyle bus. Then, I chose my song and started writing lyrics. This went pretty quickly because I was feeling inspired. When I got to class, I downloaded the song audio and started adding markers to point were I would say specific lyrics. I did this to help myself stay in time with the song. Then I started recording audio, doing multiple takes to get the best one. Over the course of about a week, I edited the audio to fix the volume, as well as add effects like reverb.

For this project, I created a parody song using Adobe Audition. I chose the song “Soul meets Body” by Death Cab for Cutie and wrote my lyrics on the daily struggle of trying not to miss the Freestyle shuttle at lunch. I started by writing out the lyrics, then recording them and putting them with the instrumental track for the song I chose. To finish the song, I added effects such as reverb and pitch shift to make it blend in with the instrumentals better, sound more like the original song, and to make it more interesting to listen to.

When coming up with ideas for my parody song, I tried to think of things I encounter every day, or very often. I ended up choosing to write about the shuttle to Freestyle Academy that I take every day. Specifically, I was inspired by an experience I had during the first week of school where I forgot that I needed to take the shuttle and just barely made it. The shuttle leaves around 20 minutes into lunch and I sit at the very far back of the school which gives me only around 10 minutes to eat and talk to my friends. This can get quite stressful, especially if my teachers finish class late or don’t let us pack up before the bell.

When it came to creating the song, everything was very new since it was my first time using Adobe Audition. I had to spend a lot of time messing around with different effects to figure out how they work and how to get the sound I wanted. My main struggle was trying to figure out how to fine-tune the reverb parameters to get the right volume, delay, and number of echoes. By the end of the process, I had pretty much figured out which presets to use and which parameters to change for the effect to sound right. I also learned how to use a few other effects, such as chorus and pitch shift. If I could go back and change one thing, I would probably do even more recording takes so that the timing of my lyrics would match up exactly with the original timings. overall, doing this project gave me a really good foundation on how to use Adobe Audition and also how to record good quality audio. I think I’m most proud of my use of effects, since I was able to put my own spin on the original song in a lot of places. I’m also very proud of the lyrics I wrote. Originally I was super worried about what to write about, but in the end I was super inspired and was able to write all of my lyrics really easily.

Parody Lyrics

  I want get, to the shuttle early

Eat my lunch, in time for the journey

Maybe talk a bit with friends, watching the clock

And then leave, leave so I get there in time

Cause on my wrist, the minutes are ticking

Down til’ I leave, for a far off destination

So that I may have a chance of catching the shuttle

To take me to Mountain View high

I cannot guess what I’ll discover

Class time I missed, since I missed the shuttle

But I know if I eat fast, I’ll have another

Day where I get there on time

I don’t believe it’s true

That I have time – to talk with you

The shuttle leaves at 1:02

And I need to tie my shoe

Gotta go, the bus is here

Freestyle really isn’t near

Catching the bus is the most stressful part of my year

Gotta eat lunch quickly

Gotta eat lunch quickly

Gotta eat lunch quickly

I don’t believe it’s true

That I have time to talk with you

The shuttle leaves at 1:02

And I need to tie my shoe

Gotta go, the bus is here

Freestyle really isn’t near

Catching the bus is the most stressful part of my year

Catching the bus is the most stressful part of my year

Catching the bus is the most stressful part of my year

Catching the bus is the most stressful part of my year

My parody of Soul meets Body by Death Cab for Cutie
A screenshot of the Adobe Audition interface. There are three tracks shown. One of them shows green audio that has many cuts. The next one shows short, purple, audio clips that happen sporadically. The final audio clip is yellow and shows continuous, uncut audio. A purple clip is selected in the screenshot, and effects menu it open to show that it has multiband compression, convolution reverb, a pitch shifter, a DeEsser, and a chorus effect
Behind-the-scenes of my Parody Song

Design

For the conceptual unit, my design class assignments have focused on the basics of design, art, and photography. We have mainly worked with Photoshop to enhance our photos.

So far in design, I’ve really valued the opportunity to use professional-grade equipment in my projects. I also value the time we’ve spent on learning the basic elements of art, design, and photography. These lessons have helped me gain a good foundation of skills that I can apply to both school and personal projects

Alpha Name Photography

For this project, we were tasked to take photos of objects that looked like the letters of our name. The objects we chose couldn’t be things that intentionally had the letter in their design, so it was a really good creativity and observation exercise. Our teacher told us that the project would help us “see” and not just “look”

The image is a long, black rectangle featuring 6 evenly spaced rectangular photographs. The image is in black and white. Each of the photographs is of a certain object or thing, and together the photos appear to spell out the name "Hannah" The first photo is a section of a wooden fence that looks like a capital letter H. The second photo shows a side of a compost bin that looks like a capital letter A. The next image shows three chocolate bars in a basket whose placement looks like a capital N. The next photo shows a close-up of a house's exterior with wooden beams that look like a capital N. The fifth image shows one section of a gear that looks like a capital A. The final image shows intersecting tree branches that look like a capital H
Here’s the project I created. Does it look like my name?

Conceptual Photo

For this project, we were given a randomly chosen phrase. I got the phrase “Uncertainty through helping a stranger” We then had to choose a small selection of objects that worked as metaphors or representations of the parts of the phrase. Then we had to photograph the objects, making lots of conscious decisions on how each element of the photo like the lighting and layout represented the theme

A portrait photo of a teacup that has cool blue lighting. The teacup is blue and on a saucer. It has brown tea inside. There is a white dice falling into the cup, with tea splashing upwards. Beside the teacup in the saucer is 4 dice, one large red die, 2 small yellow die, and a small white dice

My conceptual photo

I am exploring the feeling of uncertainty through standing up for a stranger

The two objects I chose were dice and a cup of tea. The dice represent uncertainty; rolling them produces an uncertain, random outcome. Sometimes, people will use chance like flipping a coin or rolling dice to decide on something they are uncertain of. The cup of tea represents standing up for a stranger. To me, standing up for a stranger is a way of telling them that you care for them deeply, despite the fact that you don’t know them. When I thought about ways we care for people, I thought of giving somebody a warm cup of tea or soup when they are sick. In the photograph, I chose to show the dice splashing into the cup of tea. Oftentimes, standing up for somebody is almost a reflex, you do it quickly without thinking because you see injustice. It could be described as “diving headfirst” into something, and just like the dice, it comes with a sense of uncertainty. I chose to shoot the image close up, to represent that when standing up for somebody, you care for them as if you know them closely. 

The specific shot I chose had a few issues with the lighting, so I had to learn how to fix them in Photoshop. This was a completely new experience for me, as I had never really used Photoshop to adjust image lighting. The first thing I did was edit the curves using an adjustment layer. My goal was to make the image a bit more lighter and exposed, since I originally shot it late at night. I had never used the curves tool before, so it took a bit of trial and error before I figured out how it worked and how to achieve the look I wanted. Because I shot the photo indoors, the lighting was very warm and I had to apply a filter to fix it. I chose a cooling filter, and had to mess around with it a lot to get it to look just right. In the end, I decided on giving the image a neutral but slightly cool color tone. I chose this lighting because I wanted the dice and teacup to look very clean and shiny.