Narrative 1

Introduction

Over the Native unit my class mates and I learned in-depth how to create a visually pleasing, and story based Narrative. We went through writing a Narrative story, filming a narrative story, audibly telling a narrative story, creating songs. We throughly went through and learned many modern based programs and equipment to create these pleasing pieces of art including, Wacom Digital Drawing Pad, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Animate, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Avid Pro Tools, HTML/CSS, and Google Apps.

I valued the experience of learning real time “Show don’t tell”. This unit will give me experience that I will take on for the next year and a half of freestyle and the rest of my Film making/ story telling career. Learning how to describe/show the emotions of a character rather than just telling the audience, so and so began to cry, rather than so and so was sad.

Story

During the short story unit in english we went through a-lot to complete this project. We were told to create a character based story with a climax, character abyss moment ( where everything has gone wrong for the character), and a happy rise for the character toward the end to help greaten the character development of our story. To do this we created a plot map (as seen bellow). My inspiration for this project was about a rapper I have grown to like named Lil Nas X (Montero). I wanted to create a fiction story about him with hints of real events that happened in his life using my character questionnaire (as seen bellow). This story would later be named “Montero Had Made it Big!”

“Montero Had Made it Big!”

I produced the audio version of this project by finding voice actors to help the story flow, finding sound effects to cary the story, and recording myself as the narrator in our freestyle studio. I valued finding quality sound effects that would help the storys audio experience.

Written Version-

Montero was a kid who would admire great artists at the time like Eminem and Dr.Dre and wanted to be just like them some day. Growing up, Montero and his best friend Dre would make song after song in his parents’ basement. They would jump up and down with joy to get 1 view on their song! They had a constant smile ear to ear while making music! They continued to do this until they both graduated high school. 

One random night Montero went to the basement and tried making a song on his own just for fun. He loved it so much he showed Dre the next day. A few days later the song was up and ready for the public to see.

The song was an absolute overnight sensation! Montero had made it big! Record companies called him left and right. A few weeks later Montero moved to LA to pursue his dream. Dre was devastated. Montero had left him behind and wasn’t answering his calls. Montero didn’t look back, Dre was a nobody to him no     w. Montero was making millions off his song and didn’t let anyone get in the way. Kids looked up to him, flexing his money on all different types of social media. 

Montero would keep this up for a while, making more hit son gs. Montero was living his dream. Montero was the happiest he had even been. Dre was home and sad that his best friend had left him in the dust. Montero saw nothing wrong with it, Dre didn’t help him on this song. Montero could do it on his own and make more money by himself anyway. Montero was big on social media now too, tweeting daily about    all his new stuff and his ideas on things. That is until Dre found his social media.

Dre had a way to get ahold of him now, and he could see all the things Montero had said over the past couple of months he had been gone. Montero had never even brought Dre up. Dre was devastated! How could his best friend do this to him? Dre taught Montero everything he knew about making music and the least he could have done was thanked him. Dre sent a tweet out to Montero “Hey Montero is me Dre, I’m the one you forgot about after ur song came out. I taught you everything you know and you couldn’t even send a simple thanks. You left me behind and never even reached out again. Signed, your good old pal Dre.” Dre, hopeful that Montero would see the tweet, waited for a response. Dre’s tweet was blowing up. Thousands of people retweeted “Montero how could you do that to ur friend”, “Fame got to his head”, “You are an awful person”. Dre felt awful, he didn’t mean to ruin Montero’s career. The next day Dre in finally had gotten a private message from Montero, “ Hey Dre, I’m so sorry for what I have done, I have been an awful friend and I would like to regrow our friendship.” Was Montero just saying this to regain his good name or was he truly sorry? 

They had talked it out, Dre and Montero both truly believed they had made up. They announced to the public that they were on good terms and that Montero had learned a huge lesson and would grow from it. 

Intention statement–

“Montero had made it big!” is a flash fiction about an upcoming rap artist who had an overnight sensation, leaving everyone who had helped him and loved him to move to LA and make millions meanwhile closing out all of his friends and family at home until he happens to learn a big lesson. I chose to write this story in a 3rd person kind of bibliography standpoint because it would show the emotion and feeling of all the characters involved, not just one. The protagonist, Montero, started as a humbled young man making music in his basement until he had a spike in popularity and left everyone behind. The setting, their parents’ basement and later in LA, is important to the protagonist’s development because anyone can make music in a basement and it shows his humble beginnings. Meanwhile LA is where all the big stars move/ live with the best connections to make bigger and better things. The conflict becomes more complicated when Dre mentions how Montero has been treating him on social media getting massive attention. At the climax, when Montero was being “Canceled” for how he’s been treating his friends and family gave Montero a very important realization. Ultimately, I chose to resolve the conflict with a simple Direct message back from Montero because that’s all Dre wanted/ Needed, and all Montero needed to snap out of all the fame that has gone to his head in the last couple of weeks. During peer review, my readers enjoyed the topic of my narrative , but suggested that I make the Narrative sound less like a distinct personal biography of Montero and more like a story about his troubles and life. I took out the mass amount of extra details of context that were not needed in the first paragraph and added in more show don’t tell. I tried to emulate the Play “Red” by John Logan because I liked the emotions of the conflict toward the end of the Play and wanted to try to make my readers feel that as well.  I also took inspiration from the article “Thank You, Ma’am” (by Langston Hughes) because I like the way she described the characters and setting and painted a clear picture of the situation.

Illustrations

In this unit we primarily used Adobe Illustrator to create unique and modern art pieces. We learned the ins and out fo this software and made a variety of different creations ending on a masterpiece of our own that I decided to print it onto a shirt!

Illustrator T-Shirt Design–

Music Production

The music Production unit was a fun one for me! I got to learn how to produce music using the software Pro Tools! We turned songs into instrumental tracks, mashed different songs together to sound natural, and finally produced a parody of a already made song! We first found a song my partner and I, Eric Shacal, liked and would like to recreate. We copied the original lyrics and changed them to give it our own twist. We sung the song together in the freestyles studio over our pre vocal removed track. Finally we, edited the audio to add sound effects and fix errors! Our inspiration was my Short story main character, Lil Nas X, who created this song with one of Eric’s favorite rappers’ Jack Harlow.

“Shac and Dees Baby” –

Film Elective

Ask flo about uploading list of work, and no story board

Griffith Pattern Scene

This project was made by Milo Rathbun and I to simulate the expert film making skills of the late revolutionary film maker in the beginning of the 1900s. These skills will be used in almost every film we make in the future and are very important in movie making today.

Suspence Scene

This project was made my Yhali Sheba, Tyler Crissman, and I. The project was intended to teach us good film making techniques for suspenseful scenes and examples of “show don’t tell”. We even took a risk for the shot by asking one of the school security guards if we could use his gold cart for the most suspenseful part in the movie!

The Chase Scene

This project was made by my buddy Luka W and I. We used many takes to add suspense to the film and used an apple to be fought upon.

Narrative Synopsis

Act 1

(Mid day) A rich teen kid going to the casino, montages of nice cars, nice outfits, walking into the casino throwing his coat at the bouncer. People admire him as he walks. They know who he is immediately as he walks in. Walking up to the poker table we meet the dealer. Snapping for the bartender to get his drink. Throws Tips the bartender a lot. He puts down a  stack of money and the dealer/ casino worker immediately gives him chips.

Act 2

Dealer starts dealing cards. It’s poker. Main character is winning a lot. Time lapse of chips and drinks and people moving showing the changing of time. He has a big stack of chips, and he starts losing. Time lapse ends for a moment to show him starting to lose. Loses a couple hands and another time lapse starts of chips going down. Gradual decline. Drinking is more emphasized while he is losing. As he drinks more, he gets more sloppy, hair is messed up, shirt unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up. Time lapse ends, he has like 2 chips.

Act 3

Realizes he has nothing left, and puts in a ring, watch, and finally his car. Dealer calls the boss and the boss accepts the bet. Suspenseful scene where he gets a good hand (blackjack). He has a 20, and he is very happy, he thinks he has won. The dealer has a 21, and he loses everything. Same but different dolly shot of him leaving the casino but now he has nothing, he has no confidence and he is slouched over. Tries to get into the car, realizes it’s locked, and walks home. Final shot him walking home at night.

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The Narrative Synopsis was Tyler Crissman and I’s first idea of what our Narrative film would look like.

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The Storyboard

We then created a story board of each and every shot of the film to make production easier. One of the drawings is seen above but we made over 100 of these drawings.

The JR Narrative Trailer

Being my first every trailer I think it came out pretty good! This was a one minute project of something that would entise the viewer to watch our narrative film! Were you enticed?

All Out – By Jack Dees and Tyler Crisman (Our JR Narrative Film)

The Jr Narrative film was our biggest project yet spanning over several months! We learned the ins and outs of Narrative film making without dialogue, and this is what Tyler and I came up with! I think we did a super good job even though the set was a very ambitious task!