It was finally time, we were switching from the Conceptual unit towards the Visual Narrative, or just Narrative unit. In this unit we were given multiple task in different forms. Such as the story narrative where we were tasked to write a flash fiction with characters, plot and conflict. After writing the flash fiction, it then led to other projects, such as the short story recording where we recorded our flash fiction into Pro Tools and then also the Narrative Creature project where we had to create a creature based off the character traits of our main character in the flash fiction. Alongside the flash fiction and the many other projects related to that, we also dipped our toes in the world of music, creating some experimental music using Pro Tools. It was then followed up with more Visual Narrative creation with the Illustrator project where we had the option to create something in Adobe Illustrator and then put that design or whatever we made, onto a physical product. It wasn’t only individual projects we worked on, we also had group project such as the Exquisite Corpse where each person in the group was given a section of the main artwork to work on and after everyone finished, it was put together to create a larger image. Overall, this project was a blend of almost everything from music, to writing, to illustration.

The next thing we did in the narrative unit was the Flash fiction writing project where we had to create a flash fiction story. We first started in english where we wrote the flash fiction and created the characters and plot about our character and overall message about flash fiction. I created a character named Johannes with was reflecting someone that is very ego driven and also very over confidence. I really like making this character as well as it allowed me to work on my skills of creating a character and message.

Once we were done in English, we move onto Digital media where we created a flash fiction recording in Pro Tools. We were asked to record ourselves speaking our story and also adding some sound effects and some music as well in the background. We also created a cover for our story that was based off the idea and story of the flash fiction

Cover Art for the Flash Fiction
Flash Fiction:

There was something about Johannes, maybe it was that suit that had a peacock pin at the cuffs, or maybe that cup of coffee from that expensive cafe around the corner. Perhaps it was the gold watch that he wore on his right wrist. There was just something that screamed that Johannes was someone, someone that was successful and someone who's been noticed for that success. Little did people know, Johannes bought this suit from the secondhand store, and that cup of coffee? That was something he fished out of the trash can and kept for the last couple of weeks. The watch he wore, that was a plastic watch he painted with metallic gold paint. 
Johannes had grown up with this belief that money means success. He was heavily spoiled by his rich, almost deadbeat parents.. Most of his life revolved around the money that his family had, from allowing him to study at a boarding school and providing him with all these things. But once he wanted to move to America, he was disowned by his parents. The only thing currently that connected him to his family was the peacock pins on his cuffs that were shaped into the family crest. Why was it a peacock? Johannes believed that it meant the beauty of the family and himself. 
As he “sipped” the non-existent coffee, he walked on the busy sidewalks where people passed by him, heading to work. Nothing about him was memorable, he was just another average Joe heading to his job. Johannes believed himself to be a leader while in reality, he was just some backburner worker that would do most of the petty errands that no one wanted to do. But this inflated his already big head, thinking he was some hot stuff. 
Johannes entered into the gray scale building to be noticed by no one. No coworkers saying hello and not even a slight nod from anyone. Even when Johannes waved to some coworkers, they stared with quizzed faces. Putting his hand down with his smile starting to fade, he grabbed his ID card and scanned himself into work. As he walked into the office, he bumped into someone picking up their papers from the floor. Johannes looked at them and figured that it wasn’t his problem to help. Compared to his upbringing, this workspace was just some average cubicle office. 
Johannes fell into his chair and kicked his feet onto the desk, papers at his feet. He glanced at his watch, 10:30 it read. He grabbed his papers and folders and headed to the meeting room. His team and himself had been given a project last month, their goal was to create a design for a client. Throughout the month, Johannes had established himself to be the “leader” of the group although no one really paid attention to him. Majority of the work had been done by the team however, Johannes figured that the design was not to his taste and redesigned the entire project to a design of a peacock, akin to his family crest. 
The meeting room was cold, the client was sitting at one side of the room and the team at the other, Johannes had arrived slightly earlier than expected. The room quieted down as he entered the room, no one acknowledging him. Right after Johannes entered the room, the meeting officially started. 
The redesign of the logo was placed onto the whiteboard, his team looking puzzled. It wasn’t the same design that they were working on for weeks on end. The client stared at it for a while, finally shaking his head and expressing how he would be taking his leave and walked out. The team bewildered and looked at Johannes, as he was the only one to redesign the logo into a peacock given from how much he talked about peacocks and his family crest. 


	Johannes left the room, and stumped into his chair. To be scolded, in front of everyone, that was… something he never felt. Well, he wanted the attention directed towards him, but what he just experienced didn’t give that sense of attention (going to rework this) he needed. Johannes stared at the ceiling for who knows how long, he ended up clocking out early that day, leaving the office. 
	The next day, Johannes woke up in a haze, not sure how he got home and not sure how he got into bed. He did remember him drowning some drinks down but that was kind of it. Completely lost in thought, he didn’t feel like going through the effort of putting on a suit and grabbed a nearby button up shirt from his closet. It wasn’t much, just an old shirt that he brought from Germany that had his family crest embroidered into a sleeve. He didn’t bother to do his hair and grab a nearby toast. He left his  apartment and started to walk onto the busy sidewalks to the office
	There was something about Johannes that day, maybe it was his hair that was messed up, or maybe it was that wrinkled button up he wore. Perhaps it was that piece of toast that he was eating. But there was just something that made Johannes look normal, perhaps just an average joe on the street. 
	He entered the office building and as he entered, he had bumped into someone, their papers falling to the floor. He leaned forward and started to help them pick up their papers, and as they both stood up. That person, some who he never met, looked at his shirt and noticed the on his sleeve. 
“The peacock looks cool, mind telling me where you got it from?” they asked 
Johannes looked at the clock, noticing he’ll be late. But he didn’t care, because for the first time, someone else was starting the conversation.

After the writing and the flash fiction part of the Narrative unit, it was then onto the Illustrations part of the unit. This was by far, the most fun and also easiest part of the entire Narrative unit. Some of the projects we done under the Illustration part included the Exquisite Corpse project where we worked in team of 3-4 to create a larger image where each of us got a section to work on. It also included making album art for both the Short Story (Mentioned above) and the experimental music projects. In both album arts, we had to create some sort of artwork for our story/music that represented the idea of our writing or song, both were very fun to do because I could add even more layers of creatively on top of my other works. We also were able to create a physical product on of our designs we created during the Illustrator project, and by far, that project was my favorite because I could make literally anything and could put it on a physical product… although, I’m still waiting to take it home after expo… but it was cool knowing that I have a physical product. Finally, at the end of it all, we learned how create banner in WordPress (you should see some above under the different header).

Exquisite Corpse

One of the first Illustrator project was the Exquisite Corpse where we were put into teams and tasked to have each person work on a fraction of the larger image, only having tick markers to know where to draw and were to connect. This was really fun because you didn’t know what everyone else was creating and it was just a mystery until the reveal. So once we got to the reveal, it was very cool seeing everyone’s different art styles and seeing it all come together as one larger image. For my section, I though of creating a handshake because in a handshake, you are literally connecting with the other person, where you are holding hands and in most situation, a handshake is a form of unity between two friends or business partners.

My section is second to the left, it is connecting to a lion/tiger/cat creature, and on the right it’s connecting to another creature. The entire thing is finished with a drawing of a mouth.

Adobe Illustrator Project

The other Illustration project was the Adobe Illustrator project where we had to create a design of something we wanted and put it onto a physical product. In my case, I picked the Night Lite for my physical project for two main reason, I needed a new night lite and because it looked cool so I went ahead and picked that for my product. First we had to create the design, because without the design, there wasn’t going to be anything on the product. For the Night Lite, I chose to create the head of the Mighty Strike Freedom Gundam. What is that? Well, Gundam is like a robot/military machine, but all you need to know is that I love Gundam, like a lot. So I picked creating a design of the head of my favorite model. First I did everything in Adobe Illustrator and then I send the design to be craved into the product. Overall, this was very fun to see my design come alive into a real product.

Process of creating the head, everything was done with Adobe Illustrator
Closer up of the final design, I used the pen tool and line tool mostly to get the shape and finer detail
Final Product with lights. It looks really cool

Artist Statement for the NightLite 

This project was given to us with the only rule being, be creative and make something that you want to make. In this case, I chose to create a night light for myself with the engravement of the head of the Mighty Strike Freedom Gundam. It has a very long name but pretty much, it’s a robot and I recreated the head into the engravement. First I used blender, a rendering tool to render the head into different parts so I could see each part before drawing the head. After creating the rendering, I went into Adobe Illustrator and started drawing the outline of the head making sure that each of the parts were proportional. I used line tools to create the different straight lines and when in with the pen tool to get the finer details. Overall, I felt pretty good about this project, it was really fun to make this night light and get to draw the head of my favorite gundam model. If I had to change anything, I felt like I should have fixed the face but it wasn’t too bad.

Overall

The illustration part of the Narrative unit was pretty fun and chill. There wasn’t anything too hard about using Illustrator or creating any design. During this section, I learnt how useful Adobe Illustrator is and the amount of tools and creative freedom you could have while using Adobe Illustrator is immense. Overall, this was my favorite part of the Unit aside from maybe the music creation or the Narrative Creature project. Using Adobe Illustrator in the future is going to be even easier and now with all these tools that I know how to use, it’s going to be the creative process even faster.

Now, we’re at the music part of the Narrative Unit. Specify, we were tasked with creating our own creative song or melody in Pro Tools. Now this is very different from the other audio or music project in the pass, because in this situation, we are creating our own song, from scratch. Now I have dabble a bit into music creation, given that these music creation are very short and not very good. But this part of the Unit was most likely either my favorite or second favorite part of the Unit because of the amount of freedom we got from this project. The different instrument we could have use and the different options we could chose for this project was so much.

We had the option between creating a full song or creating several shorter but different style melodies. I went with the full song because I believed that I could do that, which I was able to. Creating the music wasn’t hard in the sense of music theory and all of that scary things that you learn while playing the piano and other music lessons, the program was the hardest part of the project. In this project, we were using a program called Pro Tools which, is very Pro, and has a lot of Tools. However, the interface was very different from what I was used to, I used mainly Musescore before this, which was more simple than Pro Tools. However, Pro Tools allowed me to have access to more instruments and ways to create music through beats and intervals. So in my song, I had watched the second season of Arcane and the music from the Tv show kind of inspired me in some sense. So in this piece of music, I used the Vaccum mainly, which is like a electronic instrument. But I used the Vaccum to create some really cool rift, and backing it up was some piano and drums to keep the beat. Overall, this was very fun and I liked the music creations. Below is the song.

Artist Statement

Portal to the New World - Experimental music production

In this project, we had to create experimental music using the program Pro Tools. I was always into music and this project was a really fun one for me because I was able to use my only creative license to make this music to my liking. One of the main inspirations of this project would probably be the soundtrack of the TV show Arcane. I just recently watched and listened to the soundtrack of this TV show and I loved how there were so many different genres of music blended together. So I decided, I would like to try to make a song using some sort of electronic sounds similar to the music from Arcane. The thing that I’m the most proud about this project is that in the little time, I was able to make a song that sounded not only mildly good but also something that I felt content with.

The instruments I used in this project were mostly the vacuum to get that electronic sound with some backing from the drums giving the steady beat. Along with that, there were some instruments from the tool Xpand where I was able to add some FX sounds and strings to really add to the song.

Honestly, there would be many things that I would like to change but the final product was not too bad and it accomplished what I wanted to make. Something that I value about music production is that it’s not a hard process, yes it might be hard to start at the beginning but it’s really fun and you can experiment so much with it.
The Pro Tool Session that I used while creating the song. You can see the different instruments I used to create the beats and melody

Overall, this section of the unit was fun in terms of being able to create your own piece of music. This project also gave us the opportunity to learn how to Pro Tools in order to use the different instrument and also being able to know how to use another audio program. This program was different from Adobe Audition because in Audition was more just audio and voice over. Pro Tool had more option to do more stuff with all of the different instruments and beats.

For the Narrative Unit for Design, it started with the Narrative story where we created our characters in english first then we started the process of the Narrative Creature. What we did was we took the different character traits of our character and found animals that fit those character traits. After figuring out what animals we wanted to use for the character traits, we jumped into Adobe Illustrator. Now, we used Illustrator a lot earlier than everyone else in Digital Media, so we learned more tools such as the live paint bucket tool and the puppet warp tool. Both I used in the project in order to make the process smooth and easy for me to do.

First, we had to create the actual animal, so I had to figure out the different character traits of my character. That part was the easier parts of the project. Everything else after this point was harder, for example, once we found the animals, we had to go find different photos for reference of the animal body parts and this was hard because in my original plan, I was going to have a snake body connect to donkey legs. Now, snakes don’t have legs and people tend to not draw snakes with legs, so take a guess how bad it looked when I drew legs on a snake body. So eventually, I scrape the idea with the snake body so I move some of the animals body parts around. At the end, I finally go the look I was going for and I was pretty proud about myself because it looked decently good, like it could be an animal, if animal binding and fusion was real/legal.

My Creature I created from my Character’s Character Traits, the name? The Owpeakeyanke-ray  

After creating the creature design, we had to create the back ground. We learnt how to do perspective drawing, either two point or one one linear drawing. In my case, I decided to use two point linear in order to create a building going two different directions. My thinking process was I wanted my creature to be walking down a street toward his office job. So I had to create buildings, a sidewalk and roads. The sidewalks and streets were easy because I only had to draw minimal details, however once I got to the buildings, they required a lot more time towards the details. Even though the buildings were the most time consuming, they were a lot of fun creating the design and making sure all of the shading of the buildings were correct.

Background that I created, the sidewalks and buildings of the city my creature lives in
Full finished Illustration with the creature and the background
Behind the scenes in Illustrator

Artist Statement

Owpeakeyanke-ray  
	My narrative story is about a man who is self centered and tends to overstep his duties. He is also a very lavish person who believed that reputation and outward appearance is everything to the point where he would wear all of these different expensive brands of clothing and accessories. Little do other people know, he isn’t very wealthy and most of these items that he wears and shows off are either second hand brought or stuff he got out of the trash can. 
        This narrative creature project started right about the middle of the process of writing the narrative, however the character had already been flesh out so I started the process by picking the different animals that would be represented by his character. First I looked at the different traits of my character, some were easy, such as his character trait of being very stubborn. This character trait led me to pick a donkey as donkeys have been a symbol of being very stubborn. The other traits were as follows: egotistical, fierce, smart, and cunning. For egotistical, I picked the peacock due to their feathers being very bright and attention seeking. For fierceness, I picked an owl due to their hunting process. For cunning, I picked a snake due to most fables representing the snake as being the cunning antagonist. Lastly, for being smart, I picked the manta ray. The creature creation in Adobe Illustrator was probably the hardest part because I had to go through trial and error for the different body position and how it would connect into each other. During this process, I would change the different body parts of the animals in order for them to fit better. After completing the creature, the last thing we had to do was to make the background. What I chose to do was to make my background to be the corner of a busy street with different buildings because the start of my story was my character walking to work. I used two point perspectives to get this angle where the corners of the building were facing forward to really give that corner store or deli. Overall, I felt pretty proud about this project, everything came together really nicely and this project was a lot of fun in creating the creature.

Narrative Portrait

After finishing the Narrative Creature, we moved onto the Narrative Portrait where we took our short story and try to create a scene from the story and photograph it. We had to find someone that represented out character and they resembled them in their physical traits. After finding my subject, I had to figure out of the background, so in this case, I wanted the background to be in a house or living room. This representing my character coming back from work and arrive at home. Once the background was set, I got a pair of lights where I could change the colors of the light in order to create the scene/mood.

The person I chose in this Narrative Portrait was my friend Landon who happened to fit my character’s physical traits, minus being like 5-10 years younger but it works. My character was working office men and the way Landon presents himself seems like he could be a office worker. I used a dark blue light with some light white lights to balance the dark and the light. I use the light to create a conflicting mind with the blue vs the white.

Final Product of my Narrative Portrait where their sitting at home and thinking about their live choices
Behind the scene in Adobe Photoshop creating the image, I used vibrance and saturation filter to make the colors less harsh

Artist Statement Narrative Portrait

	We are looking at Johannes, the main character of my flash fiction, who is known for this egotistical drive for an outwards image of being highly successful, which ultimately leads to his downfall of being humiliated and ultimately fired from his job due to his cockiness and overreaching ego. In this scene, Johannes comes home after being fired from his office job. Once at home, he sits on his couch looking endlessly into the distance thinking about his life choices and how he got into this situation and what his next steps are. This scene is near the end of the story where by the end of it, after being upset about being fired, Johannes comes to terms about it and realizes that maybe, getting fired from that old office job might bring more opportunities. 
	I created this image by setting up two lights, one on the right side of the subject and another on the left. I set the right light to a blue hue and asked the subject to face through the light and on the left light, I set it to almost white but not too white of a light. After the lighting was done, I asked my subject to look endlessly and deeply into the distance through the light to make it seem like he was deep in thought, which was what I was going for given the character’s backstory. After finishing capturing the photograph, I went through and went ahead and imported it into Adobe Photoshop for editing. First thing I noticed was that the blue light turned almost a greenish teal, so in order to fix it, I changed the vibrance and highlights so the light would be more blue compared to a green. Without intending to, when I change the vibrance, my subject face turned a little bit orange. However, it works really well with the idea of conflicting ideas in the character between being upset after being fired and thinking that maybe being fired can lead to more opportunities. Along with changing the highlights and vibrance, I turned the exposition a little bit higher to make the photo lighter. Overall, this project was really fun, especially with setting up the lights and having a subject pose. I also feel like I really improve my photography skills with setting up angles and posing my camera where my subject is really the forefront focus.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with the narrative unit in Design. There was so many fun projects with got to do including not only digital art but also physical art with the Narrative Portrait. Overall, I learnt a lot on how to use Adobe Illustrator and all of the tools with Illustrator and also I learnt a lot in using lights and using my camera to get photographs of a scene with the mood set.