“How can I use unconventional forms to express myself?”
Our projects this semester emphasized creativity through poetry, music, art, animations, and web production. challenging students to express their opinions through a distinct personal aesthetic. We learned how to use technical communication skills by learning a variety of modern professional equipment and applications such as DSLR Cameras, Tascam Audio Recorders, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Animate, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Audition, Avid Pro Tools, WordPress, and Google Apps.
I appreciated the conceptual unit because it helps us develop ideas that we can later apply to bigger projects. I think it’s important to know how to develop an idea with genuine meaning and execute it into a visual or auditory product.
Poem Photo and Recording
In English we explored expressing concepts with poetry. We were assigned to read a poetry book called Bright Dead Things by Ada Limon. We wrote a several poems, a free-verse, a poem based off an object, and a haiku. The photo to the left has my object poem and a poem recording mix that was created in protools. It will play when it is clicked.
Our poetry unit helped us general create ideas, the poems were also used to help us understand the mediums we were working with. We used Photoshop, Premiere, and Protools to express our poems. This unit has helped not only with ideas but helping me learn digital mediums.
In the poem recording project we had to record our poems on our Tascam recorders and then edit them with other sounds effects in Protools. The Protools mix is shown above, we learned how to edit sound. For example we learned how to ease in and out sounds effects.
Haiku Project
For our Haiku project we had to create a haiku that displayed some connotation of seasons. We started by creating a still haiku photo to experiment with the concept of our haiku. Then we had to create a premiere video, the requirement was to have background music, a recording of our voice, and text going in and out somehow on the shot.
Elements & Principles of Art
The Elements & Principles of Art project was to help us learn visual rules of design. It is important that we learn what generally looks good and what doesn’t, this way we can bend and break the rules and principles in the future.
Animation Works
Here we have our elective works, in junior year animation we tend to focus of traditional 2D animation. Most of our projects were done under a down-shooter. I will further explain each project as they are shown in this page.
We started most of our projects on paper and then digitized them by taking images of each frame. We have to draw every frame in consequential order to animate them.
Exquisite Corpse
An Exquisite Corpse is a project where one person starts a drawing, and then have the other person continue the drawing. We did this with animation, where everyone was assigned several keyframes and they had to fill in the frames in between. So the Junior Exquisite Corpse is a collaboration of all the Junior animation students.
Down-shooter Animations
This set up is what we use to typically shoot animations that are traditional, a camera is put up on a stabilizing device and it can evenly and consistently. This way we can maintain lightning and position on all of our frames.
Zoetrope Animation
Flip Book Video
In the flipbook project we had to made a 92 frame animation on notecard like papers. We had to animate abstract shapes to display an emotion, the emotion I picked was the feeling of nostalgia.
Direct Technique
The direct technique project was where we could choose between several experimental traditional techniques to create 5-10 second animations. The techniques were to animate with charcoal, whiteboard, sand, paper cut outs, or paints.
I chose to use charcoal to animate my first direct technique. After each charcoal drawing, I erased and drew the next frame. This process is very damaging to the paper you are drawing on so in the middle of my video I switched papers.
Paper cut out animation is simple, you create paper cut out puppets and take a picture every time you move them to create a frame animation.
Phenakistoscope
A phenaksitascope is a method of animation that was originally use for entertainment. Our phenakistascopes were 16 frames (slices) and we animated them in photoshop.
