{"id":54,"date":"2018-10-03T21:55:18","date_gmt":"2018-10-03T21:55:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.freestyleacademy.rocks\/~HasmikG\/?page_id=54"},"modified":"2019-02-11T21:35:55","modified_gmt":"2019-02-11T21:35:55","slug":"conceptual","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/freestyleacademy.rocks\/~HasmikG\/conceptual\/","title":{"rendered":"Conceptual"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/span><\/strong><\/h1>\n

The goal of the Conceptual unit was to create work where someone must use their mental skills to piece together the connections or true meaning of each piece of work. In English, I wrote some poetry. In Design, I took several photographs to illustrate my thoughts and stories, and in animation, I created a short animation based on my poems.<\/p>\n

Photo Haiku<\/b><\/span><\/h1>\n

In English, I had to write a short haiku based around an image I took. This haiku has two meanings. The literal meaning is it’s about a wolf who’s chasing a rabbit because he’s starving and needs to hunt to survive, but he’s also lonely and doesn’t wish to harm the small creature. The figurative meaning is that there are always two sides to one coin, especially out in nature. Although it may seem sad when an animal is killed, one life is traded to help another thrive.<\/p>\n

\"\"Conceptual Poem<\/b><\/p>\n

In English, I had to write a short poem using all the different approaches I’ve used in my previous poems<\/span>. In this case, I followed the same action as one of my old poems, exploring an emotion through an experience. With this poem,\u00a0I\u2019m exploring the feeling of <\/span>being an introvert<\/strong> through the experience of <\/strong><\/span>living through the eyes of my spirit animal<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n

I am a turtle.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That is what I am.<\/span><\/p>\n

I am slow and I am small,<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet I never back down.<\/span><\/p>\n

The race is still on,<\/span><\/p>\n

And I never slow down.<\/span><\/p>\n

But those are just stories,<\/span><\/p>\n

There is so much more<\/span><\/p>\n

To this slowpoke that I speak for.<\/span><\/p>\n

I live in a shell and hide from the seagulls.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those hundred birds that won\u2019t leave me alone.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is why I hide,<\/span><\/p>\n

To keep them at bay.<\/span><\/p>\n

My feet stay on the ground,<\/span><\/p>\n

Right here where I am safe and sound.<\/span><\/p>\n

I watch from afar as they land on the beach,<\/span><\/p>\n

Chatting to themselves about what to eat.<\/span><\/p>\n

I am the turtle<\/span><\/p>\n

And the turtle is me.<\/span><\/p>\n

If I step out of my shell,<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019d go out to sea.<\/span><\/p>\n

To the sea of the web,<\/span><\/p>\n

Where my fellow turtles live.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of all the creatures in this world,<\/span><\/p>\n

They are the only I understand.<\/span><\/p>\n

They\u2019ve been through the same,<\/span><\/p>\n

Which is why I can see,<\/span><\/p>\n

Why they\u2019re only expressive,<\/span><\/p>\n

To other turtles just like me.<\/span><\/p>\n

Persuasive Speech<\/b><\/span><\/h1>\n

In English, I had to explore a serious topic related to George Orwell’s 1984<\/em>\u00a0and then present it to the class.<\/p>\n

How the Media is Brainwashing You<\/strong><\/p>\n

A human rights activist named Malcolm X once said that, \u201cThe media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses\u201d (Malcolm X). The media has been around for a long time now, but even back before the age of iPhones and computers, the media hasn\u2019t always been used for the benefit of the people. The topic I bring up today is media brainwashing. We\u2019re not children anymore, and we know that not everything on the news is 100% true. The media can make people think a certain way, and sometimes, those thoughts can have a drastic effect on a person\u2019s way of thinking about themselves and the world around them. The outsized influence of the media coerces us into buying what they want, creates an impaired body image, and influences our thoughts through fake news.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some people think that advertising can be an easy job, but in reality, only the smart advertisers know how people\u2019s brains work and how develop ads that are suited to the viewers to convince them to buy whatever they are selling. It\u2019s been statistically proven that \u201cafter watching a video, 64% of users are more likely to buy a product online\u201d (Schroeder). For example, I\u2019m sure you all have seen those M&M commercials where the M&Ms look and talk like people. That is what you call anthropomorphism, or giving objects human-like traits, to make you more inclined to buy them. Simply put, \u201cthe more human a product is, the more connected we feel to it\u2026 \u2018and thus buy the advertised product\u2019\u201d (Stinson). Speaking of advertisements, can we talk about those disclaimers at the end of commercials that start with \u201cside-effects may include\u2026\u201d and then it\u2019s just a vomit of words? How is anyone supposed to understand that? Some commercials do spell out the warnings, but it\u2019s in like 6-point font and basically unreadable without the use of a microscope. Advertisers are required to put these warnings in their commercials for legal reasons, but it\u2019s not like somebody\u2019s going to actually stop and listen to or read them. It\u2019s the equivalent of fine print on an important contract. You sign it without reading it, and then- BOOM! Now you signed your soul over to the Illuminati because you didn\u2019t read the freaking fineprint! But now I\u2019m getting off topic.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s talk about magazines. When we were younger, many of us probably believed that models and actors looked as \u201cflawless and perfect\u201d as they did on magazine covers, but now that we\u2019re older, we can see that it was nothing but good photo editing. This ends up creating unrealistic body images that people try to achieve, and that only ends up hurting them in the process. In an article written on Huffington Post, Lori Day states that \u201ct<\/span>hree of the most common mental-health problems<\/span> among girls,\u201d which are eating disorders and depression, \u201care linked to the presentation of women in the media\u201d (Day). In <\/span>1984<\/span><\/i>, when the main character, Winston, is eating in the canteen, he looks around and remarks that, \u201cNearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls… How easy it was… if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal-tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree — existed and even predominated\u201d (60, Orwell).<\/span><\/p>\n

In other news, how many times have you read something online or seen something in the news that was later proven to be false? These \u201cfake news\u201d stories have been around for quite a long time, even going back to the late 19th century. Nowadays, many people have using the media as an excuse to state their own opinions as viable facts, and much of the audience just believes them without another thought. A common way fake news has spread is through social media. \u201c\u2018Facebook, Google, and Twitter function as a distribution mechanism, a platform for circulating false information and helping find receptive audiences\u2026\u2019 \u2018It\u2019s curating news and information that will keep you watching\u2019\u201d (Carey). Of course, I\u2019m not saying that all of social media is bad. I mean, imagine what our lives would be if it never existed. Most of today\u2019s information comes to us via social media, and then it\u2019s shared between people until everybody\u2019s heard about it. But, like I said before, this kind of news isn\u2019t always true.<\/span><\/p>\n

To summarize it all,<\/span> we aren\u2019t living in <\/span>1984<\/span><\/i>. We have citizenship and the ability to make choices in our lives. We should be using the media to help benefit society, but many people use them just for attention or money. Even our very own President doesn\u2019t always use his Twitter account responsibly. But that doesn\u2019t mean that things always have to stay this way. We are the future of our world and someday, we will be the ones to decide what our society will be like and what kind of media is shown to the next generation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Photography<\/b><\/span><\/h1>\n

In Design, I was tasked with taking two different photos and edit them using Photoshop.<\/p>\n

The first one was a transportation photo. I needed to take a photo of an object that could be used to get around from place to place. I chose to take a photo of the wheel of my bike with the sun shining behind it to represent how important the wheel was to society, even though it may not seem like it. Without such a crucial invention, who knows where we would be today.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The second one was similar to my conceptual poem. I was meant to explore an emotion through an experience through an image.\u00a0I am exploring the feeling of <\/span>anguish<\/b> through <\/span>following your instincts<\/b>. Birds are free spirits that don\u2019t like being trapped behind walls, or in this case, behind a window.\u00a0I used a fake bird to make it appear as if the bird was losing its spirit after being trapped for so long.\u00a0<\/span>To emphasize the anguish the bird was feeling, I drew blue veins moving up across the bird\u2019s back to show that it was being consumed by the sadness that it can\u2019t fly freely. The fact that the bird is fake in itself also brings out the anguish, because even if it knows that it\u2019s not alive, it still wishes to fly freely, just like real birds.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Zoetrope<\/b><\/span><\/h1>\n

This was the very first animation I made. Makes sense since zoetropes were some of the very first forms of animation to appear.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Flipbook<\/b><\/span><\/h1>\n

In Animation, I had to make an animation with simple shapes using the basic animation principles.<\/p>\n