My Project
Introduction
There’s no better way to end junior year at Freestyle than to do a project where you get to freely explore your passions. In the explorations project, we focused on a specific 21st century skill (involving problem-solving and being creative through technology) that we are passionate about and want to learn more about. Upon getting to know about this project, there were hardly any limitations compared to other projects, as we got to work with practically any medium as long as it was school appropriate. When I was thinking about what skill I wanted to do, I was overwhelmed by the amount of freedom I had, which meant a lot of brainstorming to do.
Some ideas I initially had was to do a detailed drawing focused on a theme, or a 3D model of a structure, but that seemed too time-consuming and I wanted to save these ideas for the Zenith project (where you make your own project based on your Freestyle elective class) next year. I eventually settled on creating a one-second animation through digital art involving human postures to improve my skills on animating. Animating does seem time consuming, but creating an animation that lasts only one and a half seconds is still okay. I chose this topic because I wanted to explore how to use Adobe Animate (and maybe also have some beef with the Freestyle Animation students).
Process
I know it sounds weird to create an animation as a Freestyle Design student, but my design teacher Ms. Parkinson talked about how design involves literally everything, so an animation counts for this project (unfortunately not for the Zenith project though). Through brainstorming this animation on human gestures and movements, I had ideas such as someone playing basketball, diving into a pool, or doing crazy stunts. My inspiration for creating this animation was from searching up “Action Sequence Photography” on the internet, where there are all the frames of human movements in one image. Through looking through these photos online, I found one of a person snowboarding across a gap, which was what I wanted to re-create in my animation.
After choosing this idea, I went into my sketchbook and I drew out the different postures and frames of the human figure snowboarding. This, was a major challenge because I had to draw the poses individually, and when the human rotated or there was just a different point of view for the viewer, it was hard to visualize the correct posture to draw. However, I did use my prior knowledge of drawing human poses by outlining the rough “skeleton” of the human before adding details to my sketches.
When it came to animating digitally, I wasn’t sure what software to use. When I went onto Adobe Creative Cloud to see all the apps available to me, there was one app that stood out to me: Adobe Animate. Upon seeing this, I just assumed that the Freestyle Animation students just used this app for their animations, but apparently they used Photoshop, as they had a feature to animate as well. So I first had one of my friends (who’s an Animation student) teach me how to animate in Photoshop, and I eventually understood how to do it, but I wanted to try out Adobe Animate too. So I went on YouTube and looked up a five minute crash course on Adobe Animate to learn the basic features such as the keyframes, drawing tools, and the onion skin tool where you get to see a rough outline of the previous frames you drew.
After the tutorial, I went straight to transferring my sketches to my Adobe Animate project. I first drew out all the rough human “skeletons” in each frame before refining it by adding texture and color. I also created a color scheme, which consists of pink, blue, and purple colors. I wanted the snow to be light pink because white just felt a bit too plain and boring so I wanted to change it up a bit. After a lot of editing, I also added some snow particles and the snow mist trails to add some extra effect.
Final Production
After about a week or two of work, I have finished this one and a half second long animation. As my first time using an animation software, I think it turned out great!
Reflection
Although my project seems relatively simple, I was so glad I got the opportunity to try to animate an object through digital art and present it to my peers. I also felt accomplished that I was able to get my feet wet in more Adobe software, like Adobe Animate and the timeline feature in Photoshop. Even thought there is still a lot for me to learn in this particular skill, I feel more inspired and unstoppable when it comes to creating an animation in my personal projects.
Music Production
Introduction
Growing up, my favorite and only video game I played was Minecraft. I enjoyed the fact that the game had no solid rules or boundaries, as you could build anything you imagined using the vast variety of blocks they had in the game. Aside from the graphics and the game features, another part of the game I enjoyed was the music. Something I liked about the music was it really fit the vibes of the game, and it was just peaceful, not too overboard or intense.
When I was introduced this project, I paired up with my friend Albert, who also enjoys playing Minecraft. This meant when we picked our song for this project, we decided to pick a Minecraft song as it fit both of us, and that the song wasn’t too hard to play. It was also pretty convenient because we both have experience playing musical instruments, which is the piano and the cello, which allowed us to easily play the melody of a Minecraft song.
Process
When we picked Minecraft as the topic for our music, there were many famous Minecraft songs to play. The game had many songs depending on what game mode or dimension you were playing in. The pieces in the game also used a variety of musical instruments: The piano was used in the Minecraft song “Sweden” by C418, the hand pan that Freestyle has is used in the Minecraft song “Aria Math”, also by C418. Eventually, we picked to play an excerpt from the Minecraft song “Sweden,” and found sheet music for it that suited me and Albert.
We recorded our music in the recording studio, where Mr. Florendo was our “recording engineer” where he would help us record and upload all of our takes into Pro Tools. In the studio, we did some warm-ups, tuned our instruments, and then set up the microphones around our instruments so we could record. After our best take, I went into Pro Tools to edit the track, making the piano part (the melody) louder and the cello part (the harmony) quieter, as well as adding transitions.
Of course, every good piece of music has an album art, so I created the album art in Adobe Illustrator, where I drew a Minecraft player opening a chest, along with a monster sneaking up behind it.
Result
This is the result of our music production. The sounds of the instruments in the recording felt very “pure,” in other words, no echoing or extra background noises, which is something I am proud of!
Artist Statement
For this project, we chose to play an excerpt from “Sweden” by C418, a Minecraft song, as Minecraft was our favorite video game growing up. Since this song was relatively simple, we went on a scavenger hunt online to find sheet music that was suitable for both a cello and piano player, as those are the instruments we play. During the recording session, we learned to configure the microphones in the studio while Mr. Florendo was our recording engineer to help save and upload all of our takes into Pro Tools. Finally, we edited our best recording in Pro Tools, making the piano (the melody) louder and the cello part (harmony) softer, and added a fade-out transition at the end.
Our takeaway from using the recording studio is that it really is a professional workspace to record live instruments as you can get the pure sound of what you play. In contrast, when you use a low end microphone or just basic tools, there’s background noise, echoing, and other factors that affect the pitch of the recording. Because of all the advanced equipment in the recording studio, it inspires us to create more audio or music production projects in the future. Along with that, it makes us value other people’s audio productions because they have to use similar equipment like what we have at Freestyle to produce their music.
Poetry
Writing Process
Let’s be fair, I don’t think a lot of people are familiar with poetry, and I’m also quite unfamiliar with it. I feel like it’s hard to define what makes a good poem, which makes me get stuck when writing one. But, I am super thankful for our awesome poet Ms. Moore to come into our English class to run a whole week of Poetry workshops, where she helped us explore poetry techniques, showed us examples of poems, and even wrote a poem herself for us to read.
In our workshops, we started off by writing a whole list of things followed by an adjective, and then we shuffled the adjectives around, which created some strange but unique word combinations. We also wrote a cento-poem where we take phrases from published poems and rearrange it around to create our own. Ms. Moore also wrote her own poem that was about poetry, which involves a lot of parallel structure and imagery, which was another source of inspiration for my poem.
Poem
Even though my cento-poem that I wrote in the workshops was not that bad, I wanted to create a poem that was original, one that I wrote myself. My poem is inspired by my first time going to Japan, where my favorite part was their food. I wanted to write a Haiku about that particular aspect of Japanese culture. So without further due, here is my poem. Please click on the sushi icon to read it!