Narrative 1

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The narrative project moves past a basic understanding of equipment, and begins incorporating our newly learned tools into a story for people to enjoy. What this means is we have to start developing skills that use more of our creative minds than our technical abilities. This means utilizing our tools to strategically mix together, synthesizing characters and feelings that people interpret as real. I appreciate this project because it really puts us into the mindset that writers and filmakers are put into when creating their stories, only on a smaller level.

Our first big project in english class was the flash fiction narrative. The goal of this was to read various flash fiction stories by other artists, and then creating our own story based on the skills we gained. After writing this story, we recorded the story in an iso booth to create an audiobook version of this story. Spending time perfecting the sound and adding sound effects on top to match the story. What I valued about this project was learning the importance of symbolism of objects in stories and how to use that symbolism in a way that makes it across to the audience.

Ornaments

Ornaments

Aria’s Father had developed the optimal method of decorating their Christmas tree effectively. Aria was in charge of the green ornaments, her mother, Clara, in charge of the white, and her father, Felix, took responsibility for the red which allowed them to distribute the ornaments evenly throughout the tree. Aria’s green ornaments seemed to exclusively occupy the bottom 4 feet of the tree, sometimes one or two reaching 5 feet when her mother picked her up. But her parents couldn’t really fix the imbalance because Aria always wound her ornaments too tightly. Her parents would always stand next to each other while decorating. Aria noticed that every time her dad would accidentally bump into her mom, she would laugh and kiss him on the cheek. Observing this pattern, Aria realized that her dad is very clumsy because he accidentally bumped into her all the time. He also was not that smart sometimes. Her parents would also race against each other to finish first, having had the same number of ornaments to get through. But Aria noticed that her dad would always slow down when her mom went to check on the pumpkin pie she made every year. Which was not very smart because if he kept going while she was gone he would have gone faster than her.

A cold chill resonated throughout the complex. This was the kind of apartment where every room that isn’t a bathroom or bedroom is clumped into one place, so the emptiness of the kitchen and dining room encroached the warmth of the Cchristmas tree. Aria, however, was immersed by this warmth. She was squatting by the base of the tree, winding a final wire tightly around a branch with her tongue poking out the side of her mouth. Felix, standing a couple feet above her, had been more sluggish hanging his red ornaments. Aria knew he was feeling very tired. She knew that most days he was secretly going out late at night, probably doing some extra work. Looking up at her dad, her eyes shift to the tree, which looks a lot uglier than usual. When she took a couple steps back with her head pointing upwards, she realized that it was too much green and red. Felix told Aria that they wouldn’t see her mom again for a very long time. So nobody was there to hang up the white ornaments. 

Felix’s eyes snap to his daughter as a heavy box drops by her feet. Aria had to go all the way to their closet to get the white ornaments because her father foolishly forgot to bring it. Aria crouches down and begins to tie the white ornaments onto the tree. While continuing to hang ornaments, he asks, “Hey what are you doing hon?” “We need the white ornaments too.”She said while tying a white ornament tightly around a branch. “Aria, that’s your moms job, remember?” “Yea I know, but while she’s not here I can do it for her.” At this, Felix’s hands stop moving and he turns to his daughter. “Your mom wouldn’t want you doing this for her right?” “Well the tree can’t be just green and red. When she gets back we can-“

“Aria.” her father slightly raises his voice, “You-“ he exhales, unable to complete his words. “When it’s just the green and red it doesn’t look so good” She says while hanging up more white ornaments. “We need to add the white ones, they look like the color of snow, so it’s like there’s snow on the tree…”

“Aria please…” Felix takes deep breaths and tightly closes his eyes as Aria continues. “And it makes the tree look brighter. And if mom can’t be here to do it then we should. And mom chose to leave during Christmas anyway so this-“

“Aria!!” 

Aria is shocked by her father’s voice who had swiftly turned to her “These are for your mom and only your mom to put up! Since she can’t be here right now, we aren’t going to hang them up! Got it?” Aria freezes in place looking up at her dad. “Now Aria, you’re going to remove every white ornament you’ve hung up! And stop crying!” Aria stands still with wet eyes as her father looks between her and the tree, unable to move. “Alright if you’re not gonna do it i’ll untie them myself.” Felix dropped down by the base of the tree as his crying daughter watched him fearfully. He grabbed an ornament and shakily tried to catch Aria’s string with his nails. He yanks the ornament, ruffling the entire tree. As he pulls and pulls at the glowing white ornament, his eyes begin to tear up. As he tried to grab at the wire again, the silver wire’s point pierced his finger. “Shit!” Aria, still teary eyed, flinched at the echo of his voice, backing up from her father. Felix then sat on the ground, looking at his bleeding finger that he held in his other hand. Felix’s face falls into his arms. Then Aria heard a sniffle from her father, she stopped crying and saw her father sitting curled up next to the tall christmas tree. He began to cry. 

Felix felt a small hand land on his shoulder, he lifted his tearful face from his hands and looked up at his daughter. It was when Aria looked into her father’s eyes when she realized that maybe it wasn’t just the white ornaments that made him sad. She wrapped her arms around her father because she felt he really needed it right now, and maybe she did as well. “I’m sorry Aria.” Felix said as he held his daughter closer. Aria wished that her mother could be there to make him feel happier. But she was gonna have to take care of her father until her mom comes back, even if she’s gone for a very long time.

In the photo above, you can see the illustrator project that was used to make the album cover work for the short story. The big red ornament in the album art represents that ornaments that are in the story. And I matched the colors of the album art with the colors of christmas in order to show viewers that this is about christmas day.

The most influential story we read was flowers, the story about the girl and the dead body. I think it was very interesting to me because it flipped my idea of what a story is supposed to be. I had always been taught; simple story, deep characters. But I feel that in flowers, the main character was quite a shallow and predictable character. While the situation she was put in, running into a dead body as a child, is what makes the story interesting. While I did not implement this into my story, it did make me think more about what my story could be, leading to some ideas that I ended up scrapping.

The inspiration for my flash fiction was a scene from Signs, where a father thinks he and his family are gonna die, and ends up breaking down while trying to hold an authoritative front. This scene is one of the first scenes in a movie that actually made me cry, and I think it’s just because the circumstance had so much emotional depth to it. With the contrast of the father’s fear with the burden of pretending to be fine and being the man of the house. I wanted to retell this story within a short flash fiction to see if I can affect my viewers in the same way as M-Night did in Signs.

The way the prewriting process helped me develop my story is by making me consider things that I didnt know I had to. For example one of the questions is, “describe what the character looks like.” And for some reason, something as simple as that made me realize that I had no idea what my characters look like. I’m so used to not describing characters visually due to casting limitations, that I forgot that I can make these characters look like whatever I want. And also I am a very audio oriented person, so I pay less attention to visual elements in a story. But because we had this process of developing the world and characters beforehand, I was able to consider factors like this one.

The biggest struggle I had in my early drafts is that I didn’t have a symbol. I have never been creatively pushed to use symbolism before and I don’t pay much attention to it when watching movies or shows, so I had completely forgotten the importance of it. And when Mr. Greco pointed this out, I came to the ornament theme. And once I had the ornaments, it seemed like the entire story wrote itself. The ornaments drove the story in a way that I didn’t realize one small change could do.

I showed it to two of my friends who are known to get super emotional with movies and books, but they seemed completely indifferent to the story, despite telling me that the story idea was very strong. So I knew something was missing. Then, we came into class on monday and Mr Greco showed us a presentation comparing boring sentences with good narrative sentences. And I was like, oh, theres the problem. I’m so used to writing scripts where we don’t use emotion and only describe strictly what is happening on screen. When I’m writing a script and someone collapses due to emotional trauma, I would literally write “He sits down, he puts his head into his hands and begins to cry.” Before my friends read it and Mr Greco gave the presentation, I was completely unaware of how that sounded to other people. But now I’m like, oh duh, of course that’s it. My diction is a snooze fest!.

So what I still need to change is my language. I need to go through each sentence and spice it up for the reader to be more immersed instead of getting bored from my script-like language. I was also told I should revisit the symbolism of the ornaments to better connect it to the mother but I think I should visit that after I have fixed the diction of my fiction because that seems to be the biggest thing that is affecting its emotional impact.

The way flash fiction helped me grow as a writer is in two main places. First, it made me aware of the importance of fixing my language to be less script-like. I think this will come useful in my documentary project and even my dialogue writing in film. And second, I found the importance of symbolism in stories, now having realized how much they can push a story, in contrast with my initial view of symbols being just a complimentary artistic touch.

One of the new tools we learned how to use in the narrative unit is illustrator. It’s a software made for creating original works with math. We created several different things in this. We made these exquisite corpses which is just these different illustrations put together to make a whole picture. And also our own project which we get to design ourselves.

The photo above is the exquisite corpse project we worked on. I was given perameters to draw my project which is on the far left, I used the shape tools to create the ender dragon scene from the game Minecraft.

In the above images you can see my illustrator own choice project where we got to choose what we would like to create and then print it onto a real life object. I chose to make this abstract mountain range so that when it was printed into a mouse pad it wouldn’t be too intrusive on my desk.

In this piece I produced an abstract mountain view on a mousepad. I used the illustrator pen tool and gradients to make a scene with mountains and trees on top of it. My focus on this piece was to be something that blends into the background, something that will have a nice look but not be distracting on your tabletop. I used different gradients to reflect how light interacts with the world, depicted in a much more simplistic manner.

This project was different from the other projects i’ve done in the past because everything I work with comes from pieces in real life. For example i’ll put together videos, ill use photos, or ill use samples. But for this I had to completely make my own art which made it more difficult than usual.

One way I grew artistically in this project is I learned how to work colors together. I had to mess with the swatches a lot in order to get the colors to blend nicely. Where color is not a subject that I have ever focused on much in the past.

The truth was that I felt very week in this project because I’ve never really done any drawing or painting in my life and I felt like those were very prevalent skills that people around me have that I don’t. So I hope that in the future I can improve my drawing skills so projects like these will turn out better.

I find that photoshop and illustrator require different skills to operate and create good products with. Imagine if photoshop was like taking a printed photo and modifying it. While illustrator is like a blank canvas and a bunch of coloring tools. If I’m honest I much prefer photoshop only because it aligns with the projects that I like doing. I’ve never really been that good at drawing original art or just drawing in general, so I felt a little out of place with the illustrator work. But I do enjoy working with pictures which is why I prefer photoshop.

Another new software we learned for the music project was pro tools. Pro tools is the industry standard daw for making music. While I have used other music software in the past, I had never used pro tools before so it was valuable to learn how to use this widely used software. And the way we learned how to use it was through the experimental song project.

When making my pro tools song, I had a certain sound in mind. I knew I wanted to create a fun synth-wave sounding rock song like in training montages. So in order to do that I had to get a hang of all the different tools in pro tools that allow me to create that accurate sound.

I was inspired to create this music from watching a bunch of training montages for a project in film. We were making a film about the gym, so I watched a load of training montages from different movies, and noticed they all had a similar style of music. That pumping bass with the rolling tom drums, it’s such a fun and high energy genre. And because it was interesting to me and it seemed pretty simple I decided to make a synthwave, rocky kind of song.

I am most proud of the first 30 seconds of the song. It took a lot of digging to find the rolling tom drum sound but I eventually found it in vacuum, and it ended up sounding really nice. And I think the first verse works really well. In the second half I kind of went more experimental with this chord change up a half step which was inspired by this soundtrack by Hans Zimmer which does a similar move. It works fine, I think it sounds a little more messy than the first half. 

When I first opened pro tools for the conceptual project, I was extremely confused. It was so different from the software I’m used to. So what I value most about this project is it taught me how to use pro tools for the first time. This is an industry standard software and it’s the main one we use in the freestyle studio so having this basic level of understanding is what had the most value to me. That’s why I ended up calling it “Proteus Toolology” which is just a lengthened version of “Pro Tools.”

Narrative for film requires an understanding of the rules of filmmaking. Now that we are telling stories and trying to get the audience immersed in a world, we have to make sure we get it right. So all of the following projects are made in order to get us ready for the big narrative project which I’ll talk about in a second.

Griffith’s Pattern

When we were learning the rules of griffith’s pattern, the language that tells you the location of a story, we learned that the outside place that you film can be different from what you tell the audience is the inside. So we thought it would be really funny if we just filmed the outside of a car in a parking lot, and then went into the classroom to pretend it’s the inside of a car. It was kind of silly but it taught us the technique.

Suspense

VIDEO

For the suspense scene, we learned about hitchcock’s techniques in film in order to create suspense in film. The kind of scenes that put you on the edge of your seat hoping that the character doesn’t get caught. Specifically we tried to lean into the dramatic irony of the scene by the character not seeing who’s prowling.

Chase Scene

VIDEO

The Chase scene was mainly a project about screen direction and the 180 degree rule. By watching various chase scenes and videos demonstrating the rule, we were put to the test by creating our own chase scene that had to follow the rules. It was a hard project that we really had to focus on when working on it. But we ended up learning the rules which made it worth it

The Narrative Film

VIDEO

Narrative film is the hardest project in senior and junior year. It requires the most planning, the most understanding of character and story, and requires good technique when recording. In our narrative project, I was partnered with Stephen Messner to create our buddy movie that takes place in the gym. It took a lot of reworking to make the project come together in the end. But the story ended up being successful and is enjoyable when we show it to audiences.