The narrative unit is the second unit of my Senior year at Freestyle, and also the most challenging unit we’ve had so far. In Film class, we were tasked with making a short film with dialogue. In English, we wrote a lyrical essay and researched and wrote a paper about a social issue. In Digital Media we designed Mandalas.

English

Our first assignment of the Narrative Unit in English was the lyrical essay, which is a style of writing that combines poetry, memoir and narrative. We first read Citizen, a lyrical essay novel by Claudia Rankine. It describes her experiences with racism, alongside images that related to the text. After finishing the book, we interviewed someone who had a different perspective than ourselves. For example, I interview a half-Hispanic art teacher about her experiences with racism and discrimination. Based on that interview, we created a lyrical essay and paired it with an image like in Citizen. 

My essay had themes of seperation and conflicting identities, which is why I chose to format the essay in two columns. My image also echoes these themes. 

Research Paper:

The next project in English was our Social and Civic Responsibility research paper. We had to choose an issue that had to do with social and civic responsibility and investigate it. I chose to write about the fast fashion industry and how it hurt the environment and violates workers rights. This is an excerpt from my paper, discussing how workers are abused in overseas clothing factories:

“Workers in many factories are not only paid little for grueling labor, but are exposed the harmful chemicals and unsafe working environments. Factories often have no ventilation to keep toxic chemicals out of the air or safety standards to prevent accidents or injuries . In 2013, Rana Plaza, an eight-story building containing a clothing factory, collapsed, killing 1134 garment workers. When cracks were discovered in the building, the lower floors containing a bank and an apartment building where immediately evacuated. Despite this, the employees from the clothing factory on the top floor where ordered back to work. The factory, which manufactured for brands like Benetton and Walmart, threatened to withhold a months pay from workers who refused to come in. Later that day, the entire building crumbled. Most of the victims were women, and also many children. The collapse is considered the deadliest structure failure in modern history. The high demand for cheap and fashionable clothing has caused companies to be more concerned with producing a product as fast and low-cost as possible, with no concern for safety or health of workers.”

Film

Our project in Film for this unit was to create a narrative film. Last year, we created a narrative but on a much smaller scale. This year, we created a screenplay, and also learned how to include dialogue and lighting to make a more professional film. My film, called Mabel the Professional, is about an old lady who buries dead bodies. 

The first step of the process of this film was the screenplay. We had to learn how to write effective dialogue and a good story, which was difficult because most of us had no experience with screenwriting. We used Final Draft to write the screenplay. 

Before we could start filming, we had to lay out every single shot in our film. It was really tedious, but it ended up helping a lot! We also learned how to properly light a scene, how to use boom mics and how to slate. 

Finally, we could start actually filming!

 

The last and hard step is editing everything together! It took a couple weeks and a lot of staying late after school, but we finished. We used Premiere Pro to edit. 

This project was very difficult, but I learned a lot about how much planning and time goes into make a real film. I’m pretty happy with the outcome, and I’m proud of what I’ve managed to produce!

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Digital Media

Our first assignment of the narrative unit was to learn how to make music in Reason, which we used to make a small part of an EDM song. Our part was combined with everyone else to make one song. It was fun to experiment with a new program, and I’ve never tried making music before so it was a completely new experience for me. 

 

Mandala

After we finished learning Reason, we spent most of our time designing Mandalas in Abode Illustrator. We learned how to create repeating sections so our Mandala would be perfectly symmetrical, and clipping masks to make the mandala look clean. My Mandala has 8 repeating sections. 

 

After creating my Mandala, I colored it in. I decided to use a theme of the earth and galaxy, with the innermost section of the mandala being the magma inside the earth, the brown in the dirt, the blue is the sky and the dark blue is the galaxy. 

This is a video I made of the process of creating the Mandala. 

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Freedom Project

The next project was the Freedom Project. We were able to pick anything type of video we wanted to produce. I decided to make a tutorial on how to color correct using a mask in Premier Pro, which was a skill I had to learn for my film. 

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