Conceptual

Introduction

These are the projects that were used to help us practice using these new programs and help us to start off the year at Freestyle Academy. Through these projects, we were able to use our creativity and try to make something out of the prompts we were given. It was very helpful I would say because it often helped guide me through that beginning of the year anxiety as I had felt every year of school but also pushed me to try something out of my boundaries with my creativity.

Opportunities to create in general has felt like it has been diminishing over the years of school. I remember a time in elementary, I always had the opportunity to draw and make dishes out of clay. But as I passed each grade level, it had felt that these opportunities were beginning to cease a little as time went by. By choosing Freestyle, it had felt like a huge jump away from how I had gotten used to doing school but I think it will help inspire the more creative side of me which I know from past experiences that it will be rewarding with each project that I get to do here at the academy.

SFMOMA Art Reflection Video

This project was about finding a piece of artwork that made us feel the most inspired while we were at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and apply how the art made us feel through a visual using Adobe Audition. It was a day trip and I found this piece of artwork that was made by Pat Steir to have a some aspects of the eight wonders of life. Which includes moral beauty, collective, effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, life and death, and epiphany. The painting had resonated most strongly with nature and life and death that through the assignment, I chose to emphasize those feelings through this video by adding music, text that correlated with the audio, and fading in/out effects.

Parody Song

Making a Parody song, it was a process of finding a song that I typically enjoyed singing and I landed on “All I want For Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey. When writing the parody lyrics for this I wrote the topic on food as I thought it would be realistic to maintain that upbeat feeling of the song when talking about food because it is usually a positive notation tied with the topic food. This was meant to be a humorous project that was intended for us to not sing good but to get a laugh out of the people that had watched this and I was happy I was able to achieve that.

My inspiration for creating a parody of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” came from hearing it on the radio and social media every year, just a few months before Christmas. This is one of the few songs I enjoy singing, especially when my family is in the car and it comes on the radio. I struggled to find a fun song to sing, but ultimately chose this one because I felt like it would be very enjoyable to sing.

Working on this project helped me realize that I don’t have to sing exactly like the original artist; I can in my own tone, which was initially challenging for me. Additionally, I practiced using Adobe Audition, employing razor tools to cut out excessive breathing sounds and adjusting the loudness of the background music and my voice. I had no background experience in using Adobe’s programs so it was nice to have the opportunity to exercise skills revolving around it. These skills will be valuable for future projects at Freestyle Academy and outside of school when it comes to making my own audios that I may feel inspired to make.

One of the things I’m most proud of is simply being able to sing at all. I was really nervous because I didn’t think I was a good singer, but knowing that this project wasn’t about singing perfectly helped me relax and enjoy the process while having fun.

Animation

Taking Animation class this year has been a wonderful experience with getting to learn the principles of it to create movement between different frames. My previous thoughts on Animation was that it was going to be a lot of work but it has felt fulfilling whenever I get to see the final product of the many hours I spent to create. During this time of a lot of growth, patience has felt to be a common theme in my mind. As we are drawing or creating objects, having patience to go from frame to frame can be taxing so I always keep in mind that is part of the process.

Becoming an Animation student, I value that I’m getting to create a piece like those that I had seen on television or the internet. It has fascinated me how frames of paper could feel like they are coming to life and that I’ve been getting the opportunity to do the same. One of the most influential animation shows that I grew up watching was Shaun the Sheep movies and Wallace and Gromit shows, these are important to me because these characters have this lively and warm feeling to them. By learning animation, I can create a message that I can send out into the world like these shows have done for me whether it be humorous, serious, or chasing that feeling of comfort.

Praxinoscope

This was produced using two strips of paper that was made by utilizing a light board to get more accurate frames. In order to test the movement of the frames, we used an invention that is a wheel with mirrors on the inside and we would begin to spin it until we could see the images in the frames begin to move into action. I had decided on drawing on shark that was far away and with each frame, it would gradually come closer and try to appear that it was trying to bite the person that was looking at it.

Phenakistoscope

With the phenakistoscope, it was possible to spin it by putting a pin in the middle of the circle and putting it in front of the mirror. While it was spinning, you could see the images begin to move through the little slits that consisted of 16 frames. It was much easier to see the animation with the use of photoshop by digitizing the phenakistoscope into a gif. The objects that I decided to include was this green ball that would have a pattern that would come come out in the shape of a tiny white star and went into a repeated cycle. The rocket would fly away into space and to make it more interesting, I gave the phenakistoscope more action by making it explode later on.

Flipbook 1

These two flipbooks were the assignment which the first one was about creating something that we found inspiration from like the internet or anything that may interest us that we may want to draw the frames about. I decided to make it about a person getting abducted from Earth and they would travel amongst the stars in space. The person gets to travel in the space ship and pass though asteroid belts. Eventually, the stick figure lands on a planet and that is where the first flipbook ends. It was definitely a challenge when there were frames with a lot of objects because there would be a lot more to keep track with the movement of how I wanted the direction of the “story” to go in making sure that it flowed together.

Flipbook 2

The second flipbook had to flow into the other people’s flipbooks, the frame would start with whatever shape the person before me had chosen and that shape could be turned into anything as long as the final frame had morphed into another shape that the person after me would go into the class flipbook. The way the triangle was going to turn into a squid was an idea that felt very versatile and wouldn’t constrict the movement of the rest of the objects in the frames. I had thought that by allowing the triangle to turn into a squid, there was a lot that I could do to transition into the next shape which was a semi-circle. To give the flipbook more movement, I tried to think of another animal that lives underwater and I landed on fish that were of various colors to make it pop out more.

Stop Motion Paper

This project was centered around making an animation out of paper. During the time of making this, I had watched Wall-E the movie with the robot that cleans trash and that was where I had drawn my inspiration. One goal was to make a bi-pedal character move around and I drawn inspiration from a robot to be the main subject that the animation would revolve around. The robot would travel around and be very curious of his surroundings which was my objective in trying to convey that using paper. Some challenges that I had faced when making this was making all the paper objects stay in place if they were not intended to move because the paper would be layered on top of each other for some of the objects. However, I enjoyed the parts where I didn’t have to be so careful of moving so many objects when the animation would transition onto another scene and the robot would move with a faster motion.

Stop Motion Object

When this project had come up, the assignment allowed for us to use play doh and the idea had come up in class that lego could be the subject of the animation as well. So I decided to use both of the materials and had chosen to pick with Hon Solo figurine character next to his space ship. It was interesting to animate with two different kinds of objects into one animation which had worked well. Like many of the “Star Wars” movies that I had seen my brother watch, the characters were always fighting against someone or a space creature and so that it was where I drew inspiration from. This plant that seemed ordinary would eventually come together to be recognizably as not your average plant but a creature that draws in other play doh creatures to attack Hon Solo in order to protect itself.