Welcome to my Reflections Website! Throughout the course of this unit, each project was focused on answering the question of "Who am I?". During the Narrative 2 Unit we learned many new things in English, Design, and Digital Media. In English, we wrote a personal essay, short story, and lyrical essay. Eventually we recorded ourselves reading these pieces in Digital Media and edited the recordings into tracks. In Digital Media we also learned new skills in Adobe After Effects, Animate, and Pro Tools. We learned how to use 3D graphics effects while editing videos in After Effects and how to animate our own motions using Adobe Animate. In Pro Tools, we learned how to do ADR recordings which means you can sync up the voice recordings with videos so a person’s lips in a video can be synced with the audio. I felt my learning experience in Digital Media this semester was the best so far. I learned many advanced techniques that I was not able to pick up last year because I was so new to everything. Throughout this semester in Design we also learned many new skills in photoshop. These skills included different surrealist effects, black and white photography, and creating a diptych image. My overall learning experience in Design this semester was fun but challenging. Learning new skills in Photoshop took a while to master because of the many details that need to be followed.

In the process of designing this website I first started by drawing a design on paper. Below you can see an image of my original design of my website. My goal when designing the website was to keep the design simple but asthetically pleasing.

In English class we read Citizen by Claudia Rankine. Citizen is a book that has seven chapters with many different images and poems. The book talks about different microagressions and racism. We wrote our Lyrical essays based off of Rankine's writing in Citizen. Below is my Lyrical Essay. I hope you Enjoy!

The Shopkeeper

You walk into an expensive clothing store. The store owner’s attention quickly turns to you. Attempting to show that you mean no harm, you wave and smile. The store owner rolls his eyes and goes back to the register while keeping one eye keenly peeled on your actions.

You go back to shopping.

Finding something that you’d like, you take it off the rack and walk towards the dressing room.

Hey! Put that back on the rack this isn’t the Salvation Army.

You try to offer an explanation.

Get out before I call the cops!

Just because I’m black.

In Design we learned how to take pictures using HDR in black and white. We were assigned to create a black and white dipytch. Below is a screenshot of my work in Photoshop, my diptych, and my arist statement. I hope you enjoy!

Artist Statement:

The two side of my diptych display two different messages about the outdoors. The image on the left describes finding adventure in nature where people do not usually go. Whereas the image on the right displays the skyline of the Bay Area showing houses contrasted by nature. I chose both images because I felt it was a unique opportunity to talk about the focus on electronics in Silicon Valley. I wanted show that even though our community is largely based on technology because of where we live, we still live in a beautiful area that should be explored. The two images speak to each other because on one side you see the perspective of a person exploring the woods in their vehicle. Whereas the other image shows Silicon Valley and the mixture of wilderness.

To create the composition I used a tripod to hold the camera still while I took multiple shots with different exposures which I combined later as an HDR photo. Once I finished shooting all the images I combined them in Adobe Photoshop. Then I added a black and white filter to the image to give stronger effect. Some issues I encountered while creating this composition were holding the tripod still and finding the perfect shots. While taking the photos, it was extremely hard to hold the tripod still which made the HDR photos hard to combine. The shot I was looking for was also very hard to find as I had a very specific idea in my head of what I wanted to shoot, however it was very hard to actually find the shot in real life. Despite these challenges I was still able to create a composition to display the message I was looking for.

In Digital Media we created a perspective video to show our current stance on topics.  I chose to make mine about the current issue of police brutality. In the video, I used new tecniques we learned in Digital Media this semester. To create the video I first wrote what I was going to say and then recorded myself reading it.  I then edited the sound over the animation.  I hope you enjoy!