Introduction
In this unit, we learned how to use visuals to convey a message. From writing a short story, to creating our own illustrations and making a story using animation, we learned a variety of skills. Out of all the applications we used, Adobe Illustrator was particularly important. We used it for our short story album covers, illustration projects, and even a little fun group project.
Story
The challenge for writing a short story in our English class was that we had to use mostly visual descriptions for our world rather than using dialogue to progress the story. My story only had a few lines of dialogue. The main inspiration for my story was John Logan’s “Red”, a play we read in English. It follows the relationship between an abstract expressionist painter and his young assistant, which I used for my story as well. What got me really interested in the story was how the story was so compelling yet it only had two characters. The other aspect was that it was very dialogue-driven, as it was a play. Although, for this assignment, we were instructed not to include much dialogue, so I tried to create an interesting dynamic without much dialogue. In the end, it was a fairly weak attempt, but I still think I learned how to paint pictures better using words.
Blood Shed
Illustrations
One of the best projects in Digital Media so far has been the Illustrator Project. We had a variety of options from stickers to patches to candle shades. I chose to do a night light and some stickers. I based both on characters from video games. I mostly used the brush tool to create these, except for the star, for that, I wanted something more precise.
I was intrigued by the night light because I am often in my room when it is dark and I like using lights to add color to it. My idea for the project was to use images from video games I enjoy playing. My first thought was Super Mario Galaxy, as the game revolves around collecting stars and those are seen during the night. Specifically, I chose to do the grand star, which can be seen at the end of each world. It is both a literal and figurative light, not only does it illuminate, but it also represents how you are one step closer to stopping the villain.
Since I had extra time, I decided to do stickers of characters from different games and even my friend’s story. I chose these characters because of their colors, unique hairstyles, and them being cute as well. The strawberry haired-girl(Madeline) is from the game Celeste. In the game, her hair does not have that pattern, but I thought it would be fitting, as she already has red hair and collects strawberries throughout the game. The magenta-haired guy(Kazuichi Soda) and blue-haired girl(Sayaka Maizono) are characters from a game called Danganronpa. I chose to do Maizono because of her happy expression being so comforting, and Soda because even though he looks intimidating, he’s a bit of a scaredy-cat. The guy with the ghost mask and the girl with the gray-orange hair are characters that my friend designed(he gave me permission to make stickers of these). The character with the green head is the character that the player controls in a game my other friend made.
Music Production
For one of our assignments, we had to make a parody of a song with our own original lyrics. I decided to do a parody of “Let it Go” from the movie Frozen because it is fun to sing and is a well-known song. I didn’t have a specific source of inspiration for the lyrics, I just wanted to make it sound like an evil person was singing them. In terms of writing the lyrics, I used the original lyrics as a reference to try to keep the syllables consistent. To remove the vocals, I got rid of the parts of the audio that were at the highest volume, leaving mostly the instruments.
Make it blow(up) Lyrics:
Verse 1: The smoke glows white on the desert tonight… the red lights flickering. A prison of endless sand… the death of our beloved king. The beasts are prowling like the darkness that’s inside… couldn’t hold them back God knows I tried… Don’t let them in, don’t let them see, be the soldier you were meant to be. Must lie, don’t cry, don’t let it show… Well now they know…
Chorus: Make it blow, make it blow… can’t hide the truth anymore. Make it blow, make it blow… light the fuse and seal the door! I don’t care what the press will say! Let the flames rage on… the heat never bothered me anyway.
Animation
For the first project in the Narrative unit in animation we created a puppet. We first created a wired frame, added clay, and then clothes on top. However, before we created the puppet, we created a concept digitally on Photoshop. I decided to use the character I created as one of the characters for my short story.
The first step in animation for this project was creating our stop motion walk. We used a nail to keep the puppet steady and a green screen so that we could key it out later when we composited it.
Next, using the digital design as a reference, I used Photoshop to create a digital walk cycle.
Finally, I put these two animations together in Premiere Pro as a single video with music and a background.
The lip sync project was the first fully digital animation we did. I wanted to do a funny voice line, so I decided to get my audio from The Simpsons. Specifically, a very famous scene known as “Steamed Hams”. I chose this part of the scene because Skinner(the speaker) is scheming an evil plan.
For our last animation project of the Narrative unit, I teamed up with three of my classmates to create a story without any words. We had a difficult time deciding what we wanted to create, so we made a compromise so that we were all able to do what we wanted but still tie it all together. Our idea was to create four people listening to music on a subway, and the viewer would see what was going on inside all of their heads. This way, we were all able to create our own scene, but the subway would be their common area. It unfortunately did not turn out as well as we wanted, because we ran out of time and had to go with what we had.