Introduction

“How can you find, explore, and/or expand your passion?”

Our final project at Freestyle Academy was the Explorations unit. We’ve had to explore our passions and use them for our essays. However, it was really challenging for me because not only did the unit last for about 2 weeks, but also I was pretty nervous that I would never complete it in just about that quickly. This project was also the first sign of the senior Zenith project by next year.

Process

My process first started when I didn’t know which kind of topic that I’m gonna present for my slideshow because I was still working on my Documentary project at that time for a pretty long time. I got pretty anxious that I needed to complete it when it was the time to present our slideshows. In the end when I did finish the project, I had to do it fast, so I chose the topic of storyboards. I thought of storyboarding as a pretty easy topic for me to pull off, because I think of them as a guide for artists to know how the scene will be executed, either animated or live-action.

I only had about four days to complete the slide show because the presentations were due at the end of the semester, which worsened my determination on completing it, so I had both of my parents help me complete it.

Final Production

When the slideshow was all completed, I was relieved that I was able to finish it with the help of both of my parents. I sort of enjoyed this project because the limitation of this project has gone fast.

Reflection

After doing the presentation of my slideshow, I felt relieved that I don’t need to worry about this unit anymore. Despite this being stressful, I didn’t think it was all that bad because it was only about choosing a simple topic related to animation that I had to do, and storyboarding succeeded as my topic for my presentation, because it’s used to know what the scenes in any media will look like and how they’re drawn. Looking at the Zenith project, I hope that I can do better than in this unit.

Poem

For English III, we were assigned to create a poem. Prior to getting started, we’ve had various workshops after having a meeting with Ms. Moore, who’s also a poet herself. I’ve thought learning about poetry was very interesting, even though I was struggling to find something that could be useful for a poem. What I’ve especially liked was how that the topic for a poem can be open-ended for whatever we can write about. During the poem assignment, we’ve got to learn different forms of poetry and how they can be used like cento-poems, free-verse, etc. and we’ve also got to learn more from other poets like E.E. Cummings, John Wieners, and traditional Japanese haikus. In addition, we’ve also learned some poetry based off from news articles as well.

Experimenting with various methods of poetry, it allowed us to expand our ways of telling poems and gave us the sense of what poetry can be like and how it’s also used as an art form. My main takeaway for the Poet-In-Residence was that Ms. Moore helping us showing a variety of avenues of how to improve our poetry skills has inspired me to find a certain topic that could work as a poem. I’ve especially loved how she was present when we were doing our presentations.

That all led to the Explorations Poem. I’ve actually made two poems. The first poem (which I forgot to name) I’ve written was based off of my experiences when using the internet, where I’ll get several advertisements annoying me to death, especially if they run for too long. However, it didn’t really work when the audience besides the teacher barely gave me any feedback. I wasn’t gonna give up, because I’ve done a second attempt called “Commercial“ that involves a similar topic, but it’s about commercials on TV, specifically the ones about medicine and health. After doing it another time, the audience responded positively and was more successful than the previous attempt.

Here’s my Explorations Poem down below:

Music Recording

For Digital Media, we’ve had to come together in groups and do a music recording inside the recording studio of a pre-existing song. This was a collaborative assignment I’ve had to do with my other classmates Maarten and Mark. When I’ve first heard about this project, I thought we would be playing instruments, but it turned out that we’ve had to sing an already existing song for the recording. For the song, we chose the song Fireflies by Owl City, because we all love it and we decided to use it for our session.

When we all went inside the recording studio, we’ve had to make sure our microphones are on and we’ve had to make sure to remember all of the lyrics, which was somewhat hard for me to remember. While Mr. Florendo was behind our recording, he also informed us to remember these steps while doing a recording together. During the recording, both me and Mark were tasked with singing all of the lyrics from memory, and while some were memorable, some were a bit of a struggle for me, and whenever me or Mark got stuck, we’ve had to try again. After we’ve recorded all our vocals, we’ve had to put them into the final mix and had to choose which parts we would keep and ones we wouldn’t.

Here’s the final version of the song:

Artist Statement

For the music recording project we wanted to do a cover of Fireflies by Owl City Because we all really like the song and we all wanted to make an excellent performance of such a nice song. Overall, our main takeaways For this project was definitely scheduling is the most important part because our group came together definitely at the last minute which definitely provided someone with a challenge but it also brought together people who probably wouldn’t have worked together normally.

When it came to actually performing, we all did quite a job to be proud of, especially the vocal performances from both people and also Jack, who made the album cover, did an enjoyable job of making that cover. Really overall, this project was quite the fun experience that I think we all benefited from and definitely gained some excellent skills from Including.

(From Maarten B)

Session photos