Introduction
In this unit, we learned narrative expression by combining our works from Desing, English, and Digital Media. We learned how to use Illustrator and Premier Pro to communicate our story visually and musically. I find it so amazing how people express themselves so differently and use the same platform but all get different results.
This unit helped me improve my skills and taught me many new things like how to work with Premier Pro and working in a recording studio for the first time. This project has improved my visual communication through my art and I hope to improve even more.
Illustrations:
We learned how to use the program Illustrator and use it for multiple different projects.
Exquisite Corpse
I enjoyed this project and I think it was one of my favorite Digital Media projects so far. For this small project, we had to form a group of 3 and were each given a single panel to draw whatever we wanted on as long as they followed the starting and ending markings we all decided to put on beforehand so all of our artwork would connect. We don’t show or tell the other people in our group what we are doing and in the end, it will be revealed to the whole class on what we did.
Illustrator Project
This is one of my favorite projects I have done in digital media so far. It let me do something I like (which is draw) and combine one of my favorite things with it (Pokemon). It allowed me to test my Illustrator skills and use what I learned in Design here. We have the option of picking from making stickers, clothing, mousepads, cups, glass engraving, etc. For this project, I really wanted to draw Psyduck (who is one of my favorite Pokemons) and turn it into a hoodie design.
Music Production
We have to create a parody of song of our choice by rewriting the lyric to anything we want as long as there is a theme. I did this project with my friend NadineS.
We decided to use the song Burn from Hamiliton and we wrote about burn bread because Nadine said so and who am I to go against her? We thought it would be hilarious if we wrote it about someone baking bread and the other burning the bread and lowkey breaking their trust. I think we had 3-4 tries of singing this song. The hardest part for me if knowing the timing of when to sing since I’m not that familiar of this song unlike Nadine. We had to re record one of my lines in the Iso booth and you can tell the quality difference compared to the rest of the song. We had a lot of fun making this parody and laughed a bunch.
Narrative Creature
For this project, we have to use the flash story that we wrote in English and turn the main character it into a hybrid creature of 5 different animals.
My short narrative is about a 14 years old girl named Vanessa and she just started high school and the story is written in a diary entry form of how her freshman year of high school went. This scene is where she met the popular seniors for the first time. It’s also where she started to get more invested in them and slowly spending more time with them before she started to spiral downhill from a normal freshman who isn’t that bad of a person into someone who would rather badmouth a close friend in order to gain more popularity.
The animals I choose for my hybrid animal are a naked mole rat, Argentine black and white tengu, kiwi bird, dolphin, and moth. These creatures I chose represent insecurity, agreeability, vulnerability, egocentric, and gullibility. For my color palette I want to have something that can show the vulnerable side but also the egocentric side to Vanessa. My creature is inside Vanessa’s locker at school which is where she met and interacted with the popular girls for the first time. I faced a lot of challenges when first making my creature because I had a hard time thinking of where to put my colors. I didn’t want to use an unappealing shade of yellow, but I also want to make it look good with the other colors I picked. I really like how my background turned out although I wished I added a bit more detail to the inside of the locker. I like how I used the green because I usually would have a hard time knowing how to use green that isn’t in a plant.
Narrative Portrait
Afterwards, we have to recreate a scene from our flash story into a photograph. We needed to find a real model and use nice lighting.
My flash fiction is about a girl named Vanessa and her freshman year in high school. She had a friend named Sasha and they were best friends since elementary school but when they started high school, Vanessa started to hangout with the wrong crowd. There was a strain in their relationship which led to them getting into an argument causing them to slowly distance themselves from each other. This scene is the aftermath of the argument between Vanessa and Sasha, with Vanessa sadly staring out the window, watching Sasha storms away.
To create this photograph, I had to first plan out the props, location, scene, model, clothing, colors and mood. I wanted to capture a sad regretful mood of Vanessa looking out of the window. I was aiming for an early 2000s vibe like Mean Girls, so I had my model wear low rise jeans and a black low rise shirt with a half up half down hairstyle. Some problems I had while taking this photo was that my model was sick and that the power went out for a bit so we had to plan another day to shoot. Planning another day was actually kind of hard since I was on a time crunch and when my model gets sick, it takes a while for her to recover. Thankfully, she managed to recover in time and I got to take a couple of pictures of her. It was hard to get her to start crying so I had her talk about the Notebook since to her, it was an emotionally sad movie. In Photoshop, I added a blue filter and cropped the picture a bit to leave out unnecessary background bits out of the picture. Overall, this project was fun and I really enjoyed it.