Introduction

During the Narrative 1 unit, we were assigned to do the Visual Narrative Project. We were also assigned to create different projects each in our three classes, by learning how to use the softwares, techniques, and other skills that we might use for future projects. The idea for this unit emphasizes the idea of the “showing, not telling” method through our visions of our words and illustrations.

In English, we’ve learned that writing a story can take time and can be used to represent symbolism. In Digital Media, we learned how to use software like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, and ProTools. In Animation, we created stop-motion projects by using our cameras.

Throughout this unit, I progressed and learned how to value my skills on my writing.

Story

Character Questionnaire

Plot Map

Flash Fiction Brainstorming

We were first assigned to brainstorm our own characters, I tried to come up with a character that has as much depth as possible. My first character was originally named “Kuyami”. I tried designing him to look like an anime character, but then I thought he seemed a little clichéd and sounded too similar to other characters that already exist… so I came up with a very different character that actually worked. I named my new character Kenny Wang, a 13-year-old boy living in San Fransisco who uses a wrist watch to transform into an electronic-themed superhero named Electron Boy!

What inspired me to come up with this story was how I like going to San Francisco with family and thought how superhero stories aren’t doing anything new anymore, so I used the aforementioned city as the setting to make it distinctive.

Story

My story “Electron Boy” follows a 13-year-old boy living in San Francisco named Kenny Wang who discovers a wrist watch on one of the shelves inside a thrift store. But unbeknownst to him, he’s being chased by a mysterious man in a hoodie trying to track the watch he has when he starts following him around. Kenny runs to a dead end where the man will catch him, but once he notices the watch sparking, he presses one of the buttons on his watch and his clothes change to an electronic-themed jumpsuit and has electronic-themed powers.

Narrative Audio

San Francisco, it’s the city of the century; having the yummiest food to very amazing places. It feels like you might want to go there, or someday live there. But here’s the story…

Among the skyscrapers, a 14-year-old boy named Kenny Wang and he’s with his mom at a thrift store in Chinatown. 

“Remember Kenny, we’re just donating some things that we don’t need anymore”, his mom said, carrying a stack of very delicate plates and silverware. “I know that, mom, I’ll be careful”, Kenny replied. Kenny wanders through the shelves, looking at stuff such as telephones, radios, and old vinyl record players. However, when he walks to the next shelf, he hears a tiny whisper emanating from a small and dusty box on a table. 

He sees the box, and looks at it curiously. When he opened it, there was a wrist watch inside. Kenny takes the watch out of the box and puts it on his wrist. But it wasn’t just an ordinary wrist watch, it had a very unusual look to it, as it looked more science fiction-like; it had a greyish-white color to it, it had a shiny casing, which looked like it was platinum, and the watch face was all dark and digital with golden markings. 

Kenny thinks about buying the watch. He decides to take it out of the box and puts it on his wrist. “Wow”, says Kenny, flabbergasted. Unbeknownst to him, a very tall man in a hoodie appears, he was wearing a maroon jacket, brown pants, and he was wearing a mask with an X symbol on it covering his face, looking out with very deep dark eyes, staring at Kenny and notices the watch he has on his wrist. The hooded man sneaks up behind Kenny, but he turns around slowly. “Huh? Uh… Hi! Uh, who… are you?”, he said to the man. The man doesn’t say a word nor doesn’t respond, but he immediately grabs Kenny’s left arm, aiming for the watch on his wrist. “H-Hey! What are you doing?”, he cried. Kenny pulls his arm back and walks away to another aisle, while getting suspicious about the man. 

However, the man doesn’t give up and starts to follow Kenny around the store. Kenny goes to his mom to tell her about the man following him. “Not now Kenny, I’m still busy sorting these plates, but don’t worry it won’t be long”, his mom said. Kenny gets away as fast as he can from the man. Kenny runs to the back alley outside, but he reaches a dead end. Kenny didn’t know what to do, but the watch on his wrist started to spark a bit. “Why is it doing that?”, said Kenny. He observes closely at the watch and sees a power mode on the upper left of the watchface.  

When he turned it on, it looked like platinum was coming out of his body, causing him to transform into an electric-themed superhero. “Wh-What the?!”, said Kenny. With this new appearance, Kenny is wearing a grey-blueish jumpsuit with a lightning strike in the middle, and vision goggles around his face. The man gives out a little gasp and starts tackling Kenny, whom he still runs away from.

The man started speaking to Kenny in a soft but unsettling voice…

 “Hand me the watch”, he said. Kenny got confused, as he didn’t exactly hear what he said. The watch on his wrist sparked a bit, as on the watch face it featured a button with a shock label. Kenny didn’t know what it meant, so he pressed it and a junction box got powered up, shocking the man from behind. “Woah! What did I just do?”, he said.

The man grunted, and started to tackle Kenny again. However, Kenny looks at the button and presses it again, powering up another junction box over another wall, and the man gets shocked again. “Kenny! Where are you?”, his mom yelled out, looking for him. The hooded man notices and runs away, hiding. Kenny looks for something on the watch to turn back to his normal clothes. He sees an off button on the power mode, and presses the button.

He turns back to his normal clothes and goes to his mom. “Kenny! There you are! Now c’mon, we’re leaving”, said his mom. They both left the store and went into their car, driving home. Kenny was thinking about the man he faced a few minutes ago. “Who was that guy? Why does he want my watch?”, said Kenny inside his thoughts. He didn’t know what the hooded man wanted, and felt like it didn’t make sense for him to get attacked by a stranger.

“Maybe I’ll see him another day”, said Kenny, moving on. “But who knows, I’m a superhero now, so I’ll have to come up with a name”, said Kenny also. He then tries to think of a name for his superhero persona, “…maybe, Watch…Boy? No, no… WiFi Guy?, no, doesn’t sound right… El-Electron Boy?… *gasp* Electron Boy! That sounds right!”. Now he came up with a name, now he is more than just an average kid and will have to live this new life. Meanwhile, the man spies on Kenny inside the car from far away, desiring to take the watch away from him. “Someday soon, I’ll get that watch from that boy! He’ll see…”, the man said, vowing about Kenny’s watch. The hooded man walks to the street and follows him to his house, hoping to take the watch away from him…

It took me about several weeks to finish the story on time. While writing the story, I tried various ways to not make it sound boring, like having the villain coming from the future, or the main character trying to kick the man hard, but I realized I got a little carried away so I had to scrap those. Not only that, I also even wanted the plot to continue to his house and eventually having him to face the villain again when he meets him in the middle of the night, but I suddenly realized that it made it too long so I shortened it.

What I’m most proud of this project is that I put a lot of writing into this story and it was also very tough . Sometime in the future, I hope that I’ll write my own story to become a famous author one day.

Illustrations

Exquisite Corpse

The Exquisite Project is an assignment where you collaborate with others to make 4 different panels of whatever we draw from using Adobe Illustrator. For the first panel, I drew a half-colored dragonhead with green scales and yellow horns, and the tools I’ve used were the pen and gradient tools.

It was alright doing this project, as I got to work with other students in class, but it would’ve been better if I’d actually make the dragon’s head look less colored because it wasn’t supposed to look like that. Never mind about that, because I hope that I’ll learn how to use the gradient tool properly.

Illustrator Project Choice

Artist Statement

What inspired me to do this piece of art was that my family regularly had a collection of cups featuring art on it, so I drew a wooden heart tangled on vines, and also featured flowers with eyes sticking out from behind.

The flowers were half-inspired by the flower-like species, the Demogrogon from the Netflix series, Stranger Things. While it wasn’t too hard to do on paper, it was pretty hard to do on Illustrator when using the pen tool. After I was done doing this, Mr. Flo helped me to make my art into a mug. 

I’m most proud of doing the flowers because I wanted them to look very distinct to the heart and the vines. I hope I’ll get to do more like this in the future.

Experimental Music

It Begins

Artist Statement

For this piece, I was inspired by the melody of dramatic instrumental music in movies. We start with orchestra and drumming notes in a slow rhythm. The notes eventually get higher until it stops, and after a few seconds, choir and drum notes start to play, with the former getting lower and the latter getting louder. 

I am most proud of my music because it can feel like that you’re about to face something huge that’s about to happen.

Animation

Digital Puppet Design, Bio, and Poses

My puppet is a reptile-like alien that comes from a planet called X91-01 who is a former soldier of a galactic organization and now works at a space saloon.

The process of making a character from using a physical object made me feel good because it was such a challenging task for me to do with getting used to using a digital program. Over time as I got to know more of its features, I’ve gotten the hang of using the tablet and knowing how to control the pen too.

Composite Walking Cycle Animation

However, the unit didn’t stop there, because our next step was to to animate our characters do a walking cycle frame-by-frame on Photoshop while also making our puppet versions doing a walking cycle using stop-motion similar to the conceptual unit. For the stop-motion walking, we used screws, pegs, and a green board so the character can stay in place and not fall off. During the process, we’ve took individual pictures of the character moving before sending it to Dragon Frame and Adobe After Effects.

Additionally, we’ve also learned how to merge stop-motion and 2D animation together on one video. We were assigned to use the same characters we’ve made for our video. For the final process, the video required to merge the 2D and stop-motion videos together to create the video where both animations are simultaneously walking in different directions whilst passing by each other.

Lip-Sync Animation

Shortly after, we were assigned to make another 2D animation using a digital software (where the top one is Photoshop) to create a lip-sync animation. I’ve chosen my character to sing half of the song Stargazing by Myles Smith. I chose that song so I can make a quick choice to create the video. I’ve created a set of different mouth shapes on Photoshop so my character Ivan matches the lyrics and gives the illusion of him singing along.

This video challenged me a little, like trying to make the mouth structure match the lyrics and exporting it were such difficult tasks for me to overcome on After Effects, but once Mr. Cho has helped me on how to do it, I’ve felt alright.

Visual Narrative Animation

The final project of this unit was to make a visual narrative animation in a small group of students, and this was probably the hardest one for me. We were assigned to create a 1-2 minute with a story that we worked on for 5-6 weeks to get done. In order to progress with the project, we had to work together on who’ll do each job and get it done. Being the prop designer and colorist of the group was very hard for me to do, as I was struggling to keep the frames in order and was glazing off on the internet more. Looking back, while I was at least coloring all of the frames, it caused a lot of stress between my group mates, especially in the last few weeks when we ran into several issues and challenges along the way.

Despite this, we were able to create a very passionate group project and I learned an important lesson about not looking at other stuff when pausing work. In the end, I think this animated video turned out good for what it’s worth, even with all of its flaws.