Narrative One

For the Narrative Project, we explored the question:

How can I tell a visually structured story?
In this Visual Narrative unit, we exercised our storytelling skills by writing short suspenseful story, and then expressing the story through the form of creating visual art and audio, by learning how to use Adobe Illustrator and Pro Tools. In Adobe Illustrator, we learned the different features such as live paint, patterns, and the pen tool, to create our story illustrations, and in Pro Tools, we learned how to edit our voiceover to polish our story narrations. This unit allowed me to explore the elements of what makes a successful narrative. I was glad I was able to experience the phases of designing my character by listing its appearances and personalities, and listing out what the character wants versus what is preventing them from what they want. Then in Digital Media and Design, I valued learning how to use Adobe Illustrator because I was able to apply what I learned from that to my own designs, such as making the Open House Poster for Freestyle, and participating in other Poster contests.

The Visual Narrative project ultimately started in our English Class, where we read many short stories—most notably, The Metamorphosis–where we identified what the main character wants, what is preventing them from getting them what they want, and a series of existing conflicts that exist in between. In the Metamorphosis for example, the main character, Gregor, unexpectedly gets turned into an insect, freaking his family out. Since he was the only family member who could go to work, he wasn’t able to anymore, which prevented his family from earning money. When reading the book, I learned that Gregor faced many conflicts, like being treated as if he wasn’t part of the family, creating a feeling of suspense. We also read other short stories and watched some short animations on the same types of concepts, giving us inspiration to write our own story.

My flash fiction story that I created was inspired by one of the animations we watched in English class, called “Paperman” where this guy has feelings for this women, so he keeps attempting to fly paper airplanes from the building where he works to the lower levels of the building on the other side, where that women lives. However, many factors prevent him from reaching his goals, such as his boss forcing him to work and not get distracted, and the birds that flew by that knocked his paper airplane down when it was about to land at the right place, creating a sense of urgency. Because of this, I was inspired to write a story that was a bit similar to this, but in a very different setting. My story was about this high school teenage girl named Crystal who hopes someone would ask her to Prom, and she even already had a good looking dress to go along with it. However, the day before, when she gets home from school, she notices that her closet is shockingly, and unexpectedly, emptied out. Because of this, she has nothing considered “good-looking” for her to wear, creating a feeling of anxiety, panic, and hopelessness because it decreases her chances even more of a guy wanting to take her out.

To develop my character, we created a character questionnaire, where you list out as many features of your character as possible, like their physical appearance, their hobbies, their background, what they want, their top secrets—basically the point of this is so that you know your character as if they are your best friend or family member. Then, we made a plot map, where we brainstorm the exposition (what ignites the conflict), how the conflict escalates, and how it gets resolved.

Bullet points of questions relating to the character, and my answers to it for the protagonist I am creating.
This is a section of my character questionnaire, where I brainstorm my characteristics of my protagonist.
My Flash Fiction plot map written on paper. Here, there is a story mountain with the sequence events from left to right.
This was my first iteration of my plot map. My original ideas was for my character to be a man trying to attract someone, until I changed it.

After creating the plot map and brainstorming our character qualities, we moved onto writing our full short story, and revising continuously by adding sensory details, and showing, not telling.

Eventually, when we finished our short story, we recorded it in Digital Media by using Pro Tools, another audio editing software similar to Adobe Audition. The original plan was to only record the first paragraph, and the use artificial intelligence to replicate our voice to finish the rest of the narration, but the AI tools we were going to use costs money (capitalism yay) so we recorded our whole story, by adding emotion (varying tones and pacing) and expression. After recording, we implemented audio effects to our narration, such as normalizing a track, audio transitions, adding sound effects and music. I added some music to the beginning and the end of the story, marking the exposition, and the happy ending. In the middle, I added sound effects such as a door slamming, the clock ticking to represent the frustration and anxiety that my main character was facing in the situation. I also put some meme sound effects appropriately such as the vine boom to show the absurdity of the character’s antagonist’s actions. Upon finishing, we also created our album art for our story narration in Adobe Illustrator, where I drew a dark bedroom and a closet in 3 point perspective, along with my protagonist kneeling on the ground in despair, which illustrates the beginning of my story.

Something I value about going from writing my story to the audio version of the story is that I get to hear my story come to life, as I can put in all the emotions, and then hear the emotions and the narration, along with the music and the sound effects rather than just staring at a blank screen filled with words.

My Story: The Unexpectedly Empty Closet

Transcript

When Crystal happily got home from school, she gently walked into her bedroom, and opened her closet doors. She stood there with her mouth dropped and gasped as she thought this could not be happening. Her closet was fully lifeless and hallowed out. All she saw were the clothes hangers dangling from the top. Surely this wasn’t real and had to be some kind of nightmare. She started to sweat, and her heart started racing as she rushed into her dad’s room. Her voice cracked as she was asking her dad where her dresses went. Her dad frowned as he took a deep breath. He slowly said that she didn’t necessarily need those dresses, so he sold them, so that he could afford a new computer that he really wanted. 

“Why did you return them? And without my permission?” Crystal asked as her voice grew heated. “I mean, I never took your stuff and sold it, so that I could buy myself new dresses! You know, this is the reason why mom left, because you only cared about your own needs!” As her dad opened his mouth and fumbled with his words, Crystal walked out of his room and slammed the door. The sky was slowly fading into a darker blue. The sun was going down into the next day of May 30th, the day of Prom. The clock was ticking loudly in her silent room. Crystal leaned against the wall and slowly slid down as tears started to come out of her eyes. Those shiny rainbow dresses of her’s allowed her to stand out in school. It was the reason why she had a lot of friends. It could have helped her get someone to ask her out. But now, it felt like her opportunity to even go to Prom had been shattered. 

The next day, she walked to school with her head looking down on the way there. She was wearing a regular hoodie, and a pair of jeans rather than a dress. The hallways were crowded with couples who were already holding hands with each other. When she looked left and right of her, knowing no one was by her side, she avoided eye contact with other people and quickly strolled through the crowd. 

When class started, she sat there in her chair, burying her head with her arms. That was when she felt the weight of someone land right next to her, alongside with a gentle deep breath and a hand land on her shoulder. She lifted her head, opened her eyes and saw someone with short black hair wearing a tuxedo holding a sign. It was a boy in her class named River. He said that he always liked people who didn’t go overboard with how they dress everyday and that he liked people who showed their real personalities and who they really were. He warmly admitted that she was a perfect example of that, and that she seemed to be a really kind match for him. At last, he gently placed his right hand onto her hand and presented her the sign that he was holding. She read over the sign as her face glowed with happiness, and agreed to go to Prom with him. 

This is the Pro Tools interface for editing my short story narration. There are different tracks, one for the narration, one for music, and others for sound effects.
Behind the Scenes of editing my short story narration. Here are different layers of my audio production: my main track, the music track, the sound effects, and the audio levels.
This is the Adobe Illustrator screen, where I made my album art. Here, I have my layers panel open, and the canvas with my album art next to it.
This is my process of creating my album art. I used a 3 point perspective, along with a monochromatic blue color scheme.

Conclusion

In this project, I exercised my story writing and storytelling skills by designing out a suspenseful narrative and narrating it. My story was about a girl who is preparing to go to Prom only to realize that her closet is emptied out, which means her dresses are gone. I grew in this project by narrating my story, by adding expression and sound effects through using Pro Tools. I learned a lot about using Pro Tools in this project because I learned how to record my audio, normalize a track, add fading transitions, music and sound effects. The result was my story narration that had a lot of mood thanks to my added sound effects. 

Some struggles that I came across was configuring the settings in Pro Tools. Pro Tools was completely new to me, so I was overwhelmed by the amount of settings and buttons there were, which meant that I had to do a lot of learning to know how to create, edit and bounce a track. I also fumbled a lot with my narration in the recording room and had to re-record because I stuttered, or I kept rubbing my hands on my pants on accident which resulted in the recording picking up the sound. To overcome my unfamiliarity with Pro Tools, I asked Mr. Florendo and ChatGPT for help so that I could find the settings and adjustments that I needed for my audio.

Something that I would probably change is to add even more expression to my audio, because after listening to it, I feel like it could still use some re-recording to add mood and expression to my story. I would change this by going back into the recording room, and talking louder, as well as yelling when one of my characters in the story gets angry in the dialogue. 

Upon completing this audio production project, I realized that I can definitely apply this to other projects, such as making my own edited voice overs for my own videos that I make, or a video for an organization. I am involved in quite a few clubs at school, and if I am asked to make a video or a voiceover, I would be ready to do it, or as Mr. Florendo phrases it “being UNSTOPPABLE.” This project changed my perceptions of other people’s work because I realized that people have to go through the same process of editing their audio and adding sound effects to their video, so that they could attract an audience to listen to their work. 

Here comes my favorite part of the Narrative unit: applying the skills I learned in Adobe Illustrator to create art pieces (aside from the Short Story Album Art) such as the horizontal exquisite corpse and the physical product creation. The exquisite corpse is where you draw something without knowing what other people are drawing, and then you combine your art with other classmate’s art to create an interesting “corpse.” Then the physical production creation project is where we used Adobe Illustrator to create or decorate our own products, such as stickers, mousepads, outfits, mugs, wood lanterns and much more. This project was my favorite one yet because you could essentially make your own accessory to take home, and you could make more at a low cost.

In addition to the exquisite corpse, and the physical product art, I also got to learn how to customize section banners in wordpress by creating banner art in Adobe Illustrator, and then using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to implement them onto my webpage.

For the exquisite corpse, I made an illustration of floating islands the sky, with apple trees, and a waterfall, which symbolizes regeneration, health and hope. Then I applied what I learned, such as using texture effects, repeating patterns, drop shadows, the pen tool, and the live paint tool.

This is our exquisite corpse. My part on the very left are connected floating islands with apple trees, and the art on the right are abstract art and aquatic life.
Our exquisite corpse: My floating island connected to some abstract art and aquatic animals.

For the Adobe Illustrator project, where we got to create our physical product, I decided to make a mouse pad, as I am a gamer after all. Since I commonly play this mini-game called “Bedwars” —where your goal is to defend your bed and break enemy beds—I wanted to illustrate the game on a mousepad. I decided to keep the color scheme rather simple, just having light blue and white. For the design I wanted it to be symmetrical, but for each side, the colors are inverted (what was white on one side is blue on the other, and vice versa). Upon finishing, I sent my art to Mr. Florendo for him to finalize the product for me to eventually be able to take home.

This is the Adobe Illustrator interface, where I made my mousepad art. Half of the image are light blue and white colors, and the other half are the same colors but inverted.
Behind the scenes of making my mousepad art. The canvas size is proportional to the size of the final mousepad, and the layers are on the right where I draw each element.
Closer look at my mousepad art. This image depicts a player holding two swords, while standing on a bed defense. In the background, there are players in the distant islands.
This is my final exported image. Notice how the left and right sides are symmetrical, with inverted colors, making this a cool style of design. You can see that there is a player standing on the bed defense holding up two swords, and there’s distant islands with players too.
This is the final product: The mousepad, with the graphic I made.
This is my awesome final product. The image I exported got heat pressed onto a mousepad, and I will eventually be able to bring this home!

My Mousepad Artist Statement

For this Adobe Illustrator project, I decided to create a mousepad, as I enjoy playing video games. Even though I do have a mousepad at home that has a picture of me on it, I wanted to make one with my own design, one that I felt more comfortable sharing. I decided to make my mousepad based on the minigame I play called “Bedwars” where your goal is to protect your own bed, break your enemy’s bed, and defeat your enemies. I made this project in Adobe Illustrator by using the pen tool, live paint, and the blend tool to make patterns. Then, when I finished, I sent my carefully created artistic mousepad graphic file to Mr. Florendo for him to heat press onto a mousepad, creating the final product.

Besides video games, my inspiration for this project was based on the “Positive Negative Space” project I did in Freestyle Design class. This project was basically about creating a symmetrical graphic, where whatever you cut out on one side gets pasted onto the other, meaning you only use two colors. I decided to apply it to this project because I felt like the Positive-Negative space concept was very eye-catching, and shapes were easier to “cut out” and “paste” in Adobe Illustrator as you didn’t need to have the precision of using a knife to cut out the shapes. I also implemented a one point linear perspective into my drawing, as those were the skills that I practiced for the Narrative Creature Project I did in Freestyle Design class. 

In the process of creating the mouse pad, I improved in using many tools in Adobe Illustrator, especially the pen tool, and the live paint bucket tool. It took a while to master the pen tool as the anchor point algorithm felt confusing at first, but then I figured out ways to adjust the anchor points created by using the pen tool. I also learned that since Adobe Illustrator is a vector based program, you have to use the live paint tool to fill a shape, not the brush tool, because that creates too many anchor points which crashes the computer. Overall, I felt more confident in creating illustrations and experimenting with different styles, which motivates me to create more products like the mousepad I made.

Upon completing this project, I felt very excited getting to see my final product that Mr. Florendo helped put it together, and I was super proud that I was able to make my own “accessory.” This project made me appreciate other’s art, because I know that there are YouTubers out there who sell a lot of their merch, so I realized that they had to go through the same process of using an illustration program, and then having their art get embedded on a T-shirt, mousepad, water bottle, and much more. I also feel much more motivated to create more products like these in Freestyle Academy at a low cost as I can send them to some of my friends and my family. I can also apply this to my future life, as I know there can be companies out there who are in demand for someone with illustration skills to enhance their company.

Conclusion

Looking back at this Adobe Illustrator focused project, I realized some differences between Photoshop and Illustrator when it comes to creating art. I learned that Illustrator uses vector art, meaning whatever you draw can be flexibly resized without the image losing quality or being pixelated. In addition to that, creating organic shapes in Illustrator requires the use of the pen tool, and then using the fill tool to color it, rather than using the brush tool to fill in shapes like Photoshop. Because of the flexibility that Illustrator offers when it comes to making illustrative art, I look forward to continuing to use my skills to make posters, decorate physical products (like the mousepad), customize my website, and make art in general.

For the Experimental Music project, we got to create our own melodies by using the virtual instruments in Pro Tools, including, but not limited to drums, pianos, violins, guitars, bells, and much more. Since Mr. Florendo said that we were allowed to be as “off the wall” as we can be, this allowed us to explore music freely without having to worry too much about the laws of music theory. In this project, we got to choose to either do a whole song (a consistent melody) or interstitials (several different excerpts of different melodies in different speeds that we made).

Since this project was about exploring music, I decided to make several interstitials with different tunes and rhythms to explore the different kinds of melodies that I could possibly create. And since I wanted to experiment with different melodies, I made my music to be about exploring and getting lost. The process of making the music itself was not that easy. I was unfamiliar with audio production software to begin with, so I was often overwhelmed by the amount of settings and musical instruments to choose from. But it was interesting getting to play with the different virtual instruments, especially the piano as there was a connected electric piano keyboard on every desk in the digital media room, making it more efficient to play around with the melodies. I settled on using the piano, string instruments, and the drums for my melodies, giving my music a classical feel. After exporting our music (I forgot to mute the click track, will fix soon), we created our album art in Adobe Photoshop (we didn’t learn Illustrator yet back then), where I drew a person who got lost in a cave with sunlight focusing on it, showing the feeling of exploring, just like how I was exploring music.

My Experimental Music Artist Statement

My Inspiration for my music was the theme of exploring and getting lost. This is because I don’t have much experience with creating music, so I had to do a lot of exploring and test out many different virtual instruments. In addition, I listen to a lot of instrumental music during my free time, and the background music from the video games I play, so I took inspiration from that to make up my melodies. 

A big thing that I was proud of for this production was my ability to eventually create several different interstitials, or in other words, melodies. I felt like the separate parts that I played using different instruments really worked together most of the time when I combined them together for my music. I am also proud that doing this project allowed me to become more familiar with all the features in Pro Tools, such as starting a track session, setting up the virtual instruments, recording, and exporting. 

Lastly, what I value about using Virtual Instruments is that it gives me the ability to play a super wide variety of instruments without having to buy it or knowing how to play the physical version of the instrument. I feel like this just unlocks so many possibilities as you could save a whole lot of time and resources. With these tools on my side, I could eventually use Virtual Instruments to make my own background music, whether it is for coding my own video game, or making a film.

This is the Pro Tools interface. Here, there are different instrumental music tracks, with virtual instruments on the screen.
This is the Pro Tools + virtual instruments interface. Here we can see the virtual instruments such as the drums, the pianos, and other instruments.

My main takeaway for using Pro Tools and using MIDI in Pro Tools is that you unlock a wide variety of virtual instruments that you can play, without even having to buy a physical instrument. In addition to that, you don’t even need to learn how to actually play a physical instrument, as it only takes a few clicks on the mouse or keyboard to make that happen. Even though there’s still a lot for me to learn, I hope that I get to become even more familiar with Pro Tools so that I can create better music and see my improvement comparing to where I first started.

For this unit in Design class, we focused entirely on making illustrations for our narrative story through Adobe Illustrator, and photography by using colored lights to express mood. Before we started these projects, we were taught how to properly draw shapes in Adobe Illustrator, by using the pen tool and live paint (yes, we learned Illustrator in Design first way before we were taught it in Digital Media). We did many practice assignments to build our foundation with our Illustrator skills, such as tracing a rubber duck image, and drawing our bedroom in one point perspective to show dimension.

This is my creature. It has a purple dog head, indigo iguana legs, a pink mantis body, a blue and orange whale fin, and blue and orange peacock wings.
My Narrative Creature: The Peoguanamale

For our first Illustration project for the narrative unit, we had to list out five different personality traits that our character had, and the find a corresponding animal that represents that personality trait. The creature body parts that I chose were the dog head, praying mantis body, iguana legs, whale fins, and the peacock wings. The dog represents friendliness, the praying mantis characterizes high self-esteem, the peacock exhibits beauty, the iguana portrays strength, and the whale depicts a sense of entitlement. Then I had to surf the web and look up plenty of images of my chosen animals and their body parts for me to trace. For my color scheme, I decided to use blue, purple, and accents of orange as they represent confidence, energy, and importance. My favorite part of this project was getting to learn how to create the different textures, such as the fur on the dog head, the geometric patterns on the iguana legs, and the feathers on the peacock wings. The result was a beautiful, unique creature that represented the qualities of my narrative character.

This is the background: the creature's bedroom. The room is mostly purple colored, with a pink floor.
Background: My creature’s bedroom.

As for the background, I used a one point-linear perspective to draw the bedroom and the closet of my protagonist, where she stores all of her favorite belongings. I decided to illustrate this as if the viewer was close to the ground and near the right side of the room so that it would match the height of the creature. Then I added details such as my character’s belongings in the closet, and a ray of light casting in from the window onto the creature. Eventually, after finishing both the creature and the background illustration, I placed my narrative creature onto the background, representing the scene in my story before the conflict has began (where everything in her closet disappears).

The final outcome of the illustrated narrative creature art after combining the creature with the background.
Final Outcome: My narrative creature happily walking around in her bedroom as this is the scene where conflict hasn’t broken out yet.
Behind the scenes of making the narrative creature art in illustrator: Color scheme dots, the canvas, and the layers panel.
This is my process of assembling my creature with the background, where I was trying to determine where the creature should be positioned.

My Narrative Creature Artist Statement

My creature is based on my story about a high school student named Crystal. Prom is almost coming up and no one has asked her out yet. To make things even worse, when it came to the day right before Prom, she was shocked to see her closet to be emptied out because her dad sold her dresses so that he could buy a new computer that he always wanted. The scene that I illustrated here was the time before her dresses and her favorite belongings weren’t taken away yet, as my creature is seen to be very happy in her bedroom.

Our project started off with brainstorming five different types of animals that represent our character: one aquatic animal, one insect, one bird, one reptile, and one mammal. The creature body parts that I chose were the dog head, praying mantis body, iguana legs, whale fins, and the peacock wings. The dog represents friendliness, the praying mantis characterizes high self-esteem, the peacock exhibits beauty, the iguana portrays strength, and the whale depicts a sense of entitlement. Then I began to find reference images online and trace them in Adobe Illustrator. For my color scheme, I decided to use blue, purple, and accents of orange as they represent confidence, energy, and importance. When drawing the bedroom as the background, I used a one point linear perspective and drew it as if the viewer of the creature was close to the ground and near the right side of the room. At last, I pasted my creature onto the bedroom illustration, where she stores all of her favorite belongings. Some challenges I came across were drawing the complex details of the creature, but I am glad that this project made me more familiar with Adobe Illustrator.

Along with visually representing our narrative character through drawing a unique creature, we also made our narrative character “come to life.” For our Narrative Mise En Scene (Portrait) project, we had to choose one of our classmates, or someone who we know that resembles the look of our narrative character, to be our model for the photoshoot. Then, we had to pick a background for the photoshoot that matches the scene of our story. In this project, we learned what makes an effective portrait photography, by having a lighting setup where there is light coming from the side and the back. We checked out light stands that could change color, so we could choose based on our theme, and ultimately create some mood in our photos.

For my model, I decided to have my classmate Anna to be my model, as she fit the character traits of my character I created in English class. Because my story was about a teenage high school girl who was shocked to find her closet to be emptied out, I had her sit in a closet, and act sad and hopeless. As for the lights, I used blue and purple colors to emphasize the feeling of shock and surprise to make my story come to life.

My character sitting in a closet in despair, resembling what I wrote in my story.
Portrait of my character sitting in the closet. After realizing all of her stuff is gone, she sits down in the closet, feeling hopeless.
This is my editing process in Adobe Photoshop. The purple colors were a bit too intense so I am adjusting the vibrance and saturation in this screenshot.
Behind the scenes of editing the portrait photo. The blue and purple lighting was a bit too intense, so I had to use the adjustment panels to decrease the vibrance and saturation.

My Narrative Portrait Artist Statement

My portrait is based on my narrative on my female character named Crystal. She is a high school teenage girl who gets worried because Prom is coming up in less than a day and no one has asked her out yet. To make matters worse, when she comes home from school, she is shocked to see her closet completely emptied out when her dresses are supposed to be in there. It turns out that her selfish dad sold all of her clothes so that he could afford a computer that he always wanted. The portrait that is being portrayed is my character sitting in her closet next to her backpack, not knowing what to do. She has a sad expression because she feels hopeless that no one would ask her out.

The creation of this image started off with reaching out to my classmates to see who could be my model for the portrait. It was fortunate that I wrote my narrative based on a teenage girl, so it was super easy to get a model for my photo. My plan was to shoot in a bedroom with a closet, but the problem was that my closet was full, which doesn’t reflect the theme of my story. Luckily, my dad told me that I could use the additional housing unit we have in our backyard, as it was empty and not rented out yet, so it perfectly fits my scene. An hour before my photoshoot operation, I set up my lights and set them to blue and purple colors as they fit the theme of sadness and shock. Since we had to take many photos, we had to experiment with many poses and we had a good laugh in the process. Then, I picked out my favorite image, opened it in Photoshop, and lowered the saturation of the image as the purple light was way too strong. Reflecting upon this project, if there was something I could change, it would be adding a couple more props to add slightly more to the photo.

Looking back at what I learned in Design for this unit in particular, I was so amazed that I already learned a lot of skills when it comes to using Adobe Illustrator to exercise my illustration and linear perspective skills for my narrative creature. Over time, I got more and more used to using the tools in Illustrator to create my own art, such as the Freestyle Open House Poster, and I am now applying these skills to my graphic design elements for my documentary book. Overall, I am so proud that I am already becoming used to using these Adobe apps to create art, and I look forward to more Illustrator projects in the future.