Conceptual

Introduction

For this Conceptual Project, Juniors needed to develop their abstract thinking abilities and to answer the question below through effective communication:

“How can I use unconventional forms to express myself?”

This page will show my journey of risk-taking through art, music, poetry, web production, and animation with my own personal aesthetic. By utilizing modern professional equipment and applications like DSLR Cameras, Tascam Audio Recorders, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Animate, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, WordPress, and Google Apps, I have been able to push myself creatively to achieve essential and technical communication skills.

As a Freestyle student, I really value the way that Digital Media and English are designed to revolve around each other. They continue to push us to think outside the box, and alter our perspective. The style of Freestyle English differs quite a lot from traditional English, in that it’s more about uniquely expressing ourselves and our ideas. I really respect and appreciate all the hard work that Freestyle students put into their projects, and I think it really conveys that there’s more to being a student than just being textbook smart.

This project was important for me personally because I had never before used Premier Pro or any Adobe tools for that matter, and I felt this project was a great introduction.

For this project, I really value the experience that I gained with Photoshop and Pro Tools, as well as my knowledge of writing poetry. I personally really enjoyed this project even though I had only written poetry a couple times before.

Elements and Principles of Art

For this project, we learned about the Elements and Principles of Art, and we created a short slideshow to display our knowledge. We watched short videos and found some example photos, so we could apply these concepts to our own work. Click below to see the presentation.

Elements and Principles of Art Title Page

Animation

In animation, we have done many different projects using different methods such as stop motion or zoetrope animations. Animation is very tedious and time consuming, and sometimes the end product doesn’t always look like how I imagined. However, I find that every single time I finish a project, I’m impressed with myself. I’ve seen myself grow more patient, and dedicate more time into making an animation look nice. I really value the chance that this class gives me to express myself and my characters creatively through art in a short film.

Zoetrope

A zoetrope animation utilizes a strip of paper with adjacent animation cells. When placed into a zoetrope and spun really fast, you can see the animation by looking through the small slits. For this class, we handmade our own zoetropes and created two different strips of animation.

Photo of both my animation strips

Flipbook

A flipbook is a fairly popular method of animation, and it involves a small book where each page as a frame. When flipped really fast, it reveals the animation. I was really excited to do the flipbook animation because I had seen videos on Youtube, but I never actually tried to make one myself. This animation was extremely time consuming, but I think it turned out well in the end.

Stop Motion Paper Cutout

The first stop motion we did for our class was a paper cutout animation. Stop Motion is a film technique where objects are physically moved and photographed to create a video. I decided to do a short animation of one of my favorite video game characters, Kirby.

Screenshot of my stop motion video in After Effects

Stop Motion Object Animation

The second stop motion project we did focused on 3d objects instead of flat pieces of paper. Personally, I like drawing animations rather than stop motion, so for this project, I did both. The app that we used called Stop Motion Studio has a feature called onion skin, which allows you to see the previous frame on top of the current one, and I heavily relied on it for this project. This was definitely one of the most time consuming projects for me, but I am very proud of how it turned out.

Screenshot of my stop motion video in After Effects
Short Timelapse