Introduction
In this unit, we explored storytelling throughout all of our classes. We learned a variety of new techniques and programs. Some of these include Pro Tools for music production, Adobe Illustrate for creating vector graphics, using lighting setups in photography, and creating audio in Adobe Audition.
I think this unit taught me a lot about what goes in to a work of art. I got to use very extensive programs such as Pro Tools that really reveal how much work goes into things like music production. In my design and English classes, I learned about the importance of “intention” when producing artwork. For example, my short story in English required me to tell a story with every detail. In design, I had to make sure each decision I made contributed towards the message I was conveying.
Story
This was an English class assignment where we were tasked to write a “flash fiction” short story using visual storytelling. This meant that instead of relying on dialogue to tell a story, we had to represent it with visual details. We began the project by reading some examples of flash fiction and analyzing them. We focused on the character and how they developed. This lead into the first steps of creating our own story, where we had to develop a character who would change when put under stress. At first, I really struggled to come up with a meaningful story and character to write about. Eventually, I decided on representing something that I experienced myself; making the push to try something new, and discovering something you’re really passionate about. For me, this was joining marching band at my school. For my character, Audrey, the activity in question was her school’s yearbook club. Once I was set on my idea and basic plot, I felt ready to dive into the actual writing process.
After the writing was done, we had to take the project to Digital Media and create a sort of audiobook for our story. This was done in Pro Tools, a program used for audio and music production. We read the story in a recording room, then added background music and sound effects. This was a bit tricky for me, since I’m not too comfortable with using Pro Tools.
The Yearbook
Read ‘The Yearbook’
Audrey sat in the library, alone and in silence, flipping through various flashcards with formulas and properties on them. Next to her was an unfinished sandwich, and behind her was a shelf containing the school yearbooks. As she quizzed herself on math, she found herself wondering why she had waited so long to study. Her math test was next period, and it wasn’t like she had any after school responsibilities. Despite this revelation, studying math didn’t seem any more appealing than it had in the days prior. Ignoring the urgency of the situation, she set down her flashcards and looked around the room for a more interesting way to spend her lunch. Setting her sights on the shelf behind her, she grabbed the previous year’s yearbook and began to flip through the pages.
Landing on the credits page, she was reminded of the time somebody gave her a flier advertising yearbook club. Picturing her own name on the page, she imagined what her year would have been like if she had said yes; her free time sacrificed to go to various events, the annoyance of needing to collaborate with others, and the exhausting work that came with creating an entire book. But skimming through the passionately arranged pages also made her question if the Yearbook Club could have been the extracurricular she was looking for. Images and stories of school events she shrugged off as boring pulled her in, absorbing her in moments long passed. Even the most insignificant moments were captured, and made important. It was a catalog of the past, and the only mention of her was the small, unflattering picture from photo day. Her train of thoughts came to a screeching halt as the bell sounded, disrupting the still silence of the library. She jumped to her feet and rushed outside, her gaze catching on a faded flier as the door slammed shut behind her. The text on the year-old poster was just barely readable: “Sign up for yearbook in room 215.”
Audrey raced to class, loose papers shoved in her unzipped backpack threatening to fly out as she winded through the hallways. Suddenly, she found herself coming to a stop, her momentum almost knocking her over as she found herself at the intersection of the 200s and 300s hallways. All she had to do was turn left and enter her math classroom, room 301. It was right in front of her. She looked through the window and saw her teacher, taking attendance. Looking at the clock, she realized that there were mere seconds left until she had to be in class taking the test.. Inside her head, the series of events became very clear. Open the door, take the test, inevitably fail, and then figure out a way to get her continuously slipping grade back on track. She struggled to turn the doorknob, her sweaty palms slipping off of it no matter how hard she held on. Audrey froze up as the bell rang, resonating throughout the halls. Before she knew it, she had turned in the complete opposite direction, And found herself standing in front of a room in the 200s hallway. She looked up, collecting herself as she realized that she was now standing in front of what served as the yearbook room: room 215.
She looked at her reflection in the window. Her long hair was messy and a bit tangled, she had dark circles under her eyes. She reached for the doorknob, out of breath and a little shaky. As she wrenched open the door, she formulated a new plan. Sign up for the yearbook club, bolt to class, then take the test.
She was surprised as the door swung open with ease, realizing that somebody on the other side had been waiting to open it for her. The room was full of unfamiliar people, their loud talking and laughing filling her ears. She saw the teacher, sitting at her desk with an empty platter covered in cookie crumbs. Pushing through against the swarm of students filing out to get to class, she considered forgetting the whole thing and leaving with them. It was nothing like she had envisioned, so loud and energetic. The teacher noticed her wide, fearful eyes and gently motioned to the sign up sheet on her desk. It was too late to turn back; she shuffled up to the paper and picked up the pen. With a deep breath, she scrawled her name down in the last slot.
Breathing a sigh of relief, Audrey quickly pivoted towards the door, finally on her way to math class. As she was about to open the door, she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned around, face to face with another student. “This fell out of your backpack,” said the girl as she held out a crumpled up homework packet. Audrey muttered a quick thanks, and kneeled down to put it back inside, taking the care to straighten out the pages a bit. The girl knelt down too, meeting Audrey’s gaze. “My name’s Alyssa, I’m the yearbook club president this year. Our first meeting is Friday at lunch, see you then!” Audrey smiled at her and stood up, brushing her hair out of her face and straightening her sleeves. She left the room and strode to math class, holding her head up high.
Illustrations
This unit included a lot of work in Adobe Illustrator. We spent a lot of time learning the basics, such as creating symbols, using the pen tool, and experimenting with different effects. This happened at the same time as I was learning Illustrator in Design, so I became super comfortable with it. Despite going into it not really enjoying Illustrator, it has become one of my favorite Adobe softwares.
This image is from a collaborative project we did called “exquisite corpse”. Using Illustrator, people in groups of four all created one section of a picture. This was the picture I worked on. I did the second portion of the drawing. I actually struggled a lot making this, because there were so many different illustrator techniques that I wanted to use. In the end, I kept it simple and used symbols for the leaves and a textured brush with the draw tool, something I had recently discovered.
For this project, I chose to create an acrylic character stand. The illustration on the stand is based off of an artwork I worked on for an art contest, but never finished in time to submit. The winning design was to be turned into a scale figure, so I wanted to have a physical version of my artwork even if it wasn’t from the contest. I already had a partial illustration that I had drawn in Photoshop, so most of the work I had to do was vectorizing the art in Illustrator.
As much as I enjoy working with Illustrator, drawing in vector is a lot harder than drawing in raster. You have to be a lot more exact with every shape and in order to fill something it has to be completely closed. I had a feeling this would be a big challenge for this artwork, so my plan was to break the drawing into small, individual parts. Keeping my layers organized was also a super big priority. I started at the top of the drawing and slowly made my way down. I created each part with the pen tool and labeled its layer. Keeping things grouped and in separate layers was also important because certain things needed to be in front of other things. For example, I split the hair into a front hair portion that went on top of the head layer, and a back hair portion that went behind it. To make things easier for myself, I turned repeated elements such as the frosting dollops and bows into symbols.
Overall, I am very satisfied with how the result turned out. But if I had the time to keep working on it, I would definitely shade it more thoroughly. Clipping masks don’t work the same way in Illustrator as they do in Photoshop, so creating shadows that went over a shape while still sticking exactly to their edges was really hard to do manually. To save time, I only shaded the major areas of the drawing such as the hair and dress. If I were able to go back and keep working on this artwork, I would definitely add shading to the whole piece, and maybe find a better way to do it.
Because part of the drawing I created for this project had been done in Photoshop, working on this assignment really taught me about the differences between the two. The best way I can describe this difference is to say that when working in Photoshop, you are much more independent. You can freely sketch, draw, and color all sorts of pictures. You can even use tools such as the blend tool to emulate using real paint. All of this can be done without worrying about making closed shapes or perfectly placing anchor points. But when it comes to making adjustments to your shapes in Photoshop, you’re also on your own. It doesn’t give you the same flexibility to manipulate anchor points, angles, and fills.
Music
For this project, we got to experiment with music production in Pro Tools. We could either make multiple short segments of audio, or one full song. I chose the former, because it would allow me to use a greater variety of sounds and instruments. I started the creation of each of my segments by creating a drum beat. Then, I tried to figure out some sort of melody and went from there.
For this project, I was inspired by the different meanings and feelings invoked by different colors. Each of the six portions of music are supposed to represent different colors. For each color, I started off by just thinking to myself what I associated it with. I used that as a starting point to decide the BPM, drum beat, and what instruments I would use. Once I had those foundations down, I pretty much just messed around with different melodies and patterns until I had a clear idea of what it would sound like.
In this project, I think I’m just proud that I was able to create something that sounded pretty decent, and that achieved what I wanted. At the beginning, I had a completely different idea that I completely scrapped after a full day of work because I realized that I just really hated how it sounded. I was pretty scared to start again, since I thought I would experience the same thing again. But after trying out a new process of doing things, I learned how to keep building onto the music. After completing the first section of the music, I listened back to it, and was actually really shocked by how cohesive it sounded. I was able to move forward with more confidence, and although I had a few struggles along the way, I’m very pleased with how I was able to work through them and create something that I like.
For this project, I think I value the insight it gave me into music production. I never really thought about how all the different instruments and layers came together beforehand, but in the short time I worked on this project I actually noticed myself listening for the different layers and beats whenever I listened to music.
Design
In my design class, we worked on turning our narrative story into various works of visual art. We focused on representing characters via things you can see, such as lighting and props.
This is the final artwork I created for the narrative background project. The animal seen in the picture is from a different assignment where we adapted the main character of our story into a creature. I chose to set my drawing in a library, since it’s where the first scene of my story takes place. We had to draw the background using one or two point perspective. I chose to do it in one point perspective, meaning all of the objects converge at one vanishing point. Drawing in perspective is something I really struggle with, so it was pretty hard when I had to draw each of the books individually. In addition to the actual scene, the color palette of the drawing also relates to my story. Using inspiration from an adobe color book, I chose a blue and brown color palette to represent the mood of my story and this specific scene.
This is the creature that I created for the narrative creature project. I named it “The Otelow.” It combines an otter, a turtle, a raven, a cat, and a stickbug. Each of the animals represents a certain part of my story’s main character, Audrey. The color palette is very similar used to the one used in the background, the main difference being the reddish pink color.
My story is about a girl named Audrey who decides to join her school’s yearbook club. This scene takes place at the very beginning of the story, where Audrey is in the library during lunch to study for math. She flips through a yearbook out of boredom, and is interested in joining. As she rushes to get to math class before the bell rings, she decides to go to the yearbook room instead in a moment of panic. Once there, she struggles to push through a crowd of people in order to finally sign up and get to class.
To decide what animal parts to compose the creature of, I found five key characteristics of Audrey and decided what animals represented them best. A stick bug tail and cat head represented the traits “leisurely” and “calm” respectively. I chose a tortoise shell to represent stubbornness, and an otter’s body to represent protectiveness. Lastly, I used the beak of a raven to represent independence. I also had to choose colors to use. I decided on blues and browns to represent the somewhat somber tone of the beginning of the story. In illustrator, I began by creating the otter body and giving it color. I used the “roughen” effect to create fur texture on the shadows, and later created tons of individual fur tufts to blend the features together better. Something I struggled with was that it looked too much like a cat. In the end, I decided to just remove the ears entirely to make it look a bit more unique. I also struggled a lot with the background. I’m not the best at perspective, so choosing to do a library with lots of books might not have been the best idea. But I was finally able to finish it, and I’m pretty happy with the result.
This photograph is from the narrative portrait assignment, where we had to photograph a scene from our book. We had to use a model, props, and a lighting setup. I really struggled with this project, since I ended up having a severe time limit on the day of the photoshoot. I didn’t end up getting enough photos, so I had to recreate the setup at my house and use a friend to reach the minimum numbers of photos we had to submit in the contact sheet. As for the final photo I chose, it was one of the few photos I was able to take in the location I had planned. I had very few options, since the photo being in a classroom with a whiteboard was pretty important. I had to fix the image up a lot in Photoshop, especially when it came to minimizing the amount of grain the photograph had.