The first unit in our senior year was spent reflecting on who we are as individuals. I think this was inspired by all of the college essays we’re writing at this time about the skills and values that mean most to us.
I was really appreciative that this was our first unit, because it’s so convenient to have time in class to work on college applications. To be able to have your friends and teacher review your work is really helpful.
At the same time, I enjoy introspection, especially as a way to create art. I like making things that I care deeply about, and can experiment with.
Core Values
This assignment was an opportunity to learn Adobe After Effects text animation. We didn’t spend too long on it (a couple of days), but it was very effective in teaching us the basics of image and text animation.
I think my core values are pretty self-explanatory. My community is most important to me: giving back to those who have helped me, and looking to them in times of need. Experience and passion are the foundations of my community, because I know all of my friends through our shared passions and experiences (school, art clubs, online, etc). Leadership sits right on top of community because a community always has and always needs a leader, even if it’s multiple, even if it’s not obvious.
Mandala
In Digital Media, our main project was to create a mandala that represented ourselves. I think that was it, at least.
I took inspiration from Filipino tile patterns, because I saw them in my aunt’s house. I thought it was so strange how they were everywhere— the bathroom floor, the garden vases, the kitchen countertops.
I had so much fun making the fish in the middle. I wanted something to do with nature and the sea. I love fish, tilapia is one of my personal favourites. I have a love-hate relationship with ocean life, because they taste so good, but they scare me so bad. When I go swimming in the ocean or lakes, I always hate feeling fish scales on my skin, or even seeing them circle me in the water. I hate how they can go faster than me, I guess.
College Personal Essay
The assignment we worked on pretty much the entire unit in English was our CommonApp essays. The prompt given to us by Mr. Greco was “Who am I?” which is different from the questions the CommonApp gives applicants.
Production
We mainly worked on learning Maya and Zbrush in the first quarter of the year. To do this, we spent a few weeks on small projects.
My favourite object we made (modeled) using Maya was a weapon of our choosing, so I chose some kind of mechanical, steampunk gun. It didn’t take very long to make, so I also modeled a backpack to go along with it, which I tried to make look steampunk… or at least fit in with the odd gun.
After we got more accustomed to the program, our next assignment was to start our characters! We first had to make the profile shots of them from the front and side so that we could build on top of the image.
At first, I was going to make a bee like my puppet from last year, but I realised that it would probably be too simple. The problem was that I didn’t like how characters looked with clothes on, so if I wanted mine to wear anything, it would have to be skin-tight so that there is no loose fabric, which looks strange with motion capture.
I chose a person with a tiger head because I made a character of it a while back, who wears a cowboy outfit and lives in the midwest delivering rations to a military camp in the desert.
Once the character was built, we were done learning maya (for now), and moved on to ZBrush!
The only thing we got to work on was our weapons, because we had to learn how to use the program first. I drew on some patterns on the main body of my gun, and textured everything accordingly. I didn’t need to do much, though, since my weapon doesn’t need cracks or dents like a sword or mace because of its long range.
At first, I had a lot of trouble learning ZBrush because of all of its minor bugs that would cause major issues down the line. But once I figured out how to set everything up so things wouldn’t crash or destroy my model, it was more streamlined than I thought.
But I will mention the fact that due to the way the desks are set up with both tablets and PCs, I couldn’t use both the keyboard and the drawing tablet at once because I’m left handed. So I had to use the express keys on the side of the tablet, which proved to be difficult when working with so many shortcuts like in ZBrush. If you’re right handed, then good for you.