Thanks for visiting my last website at Freestyle this year. For our experimental unit, I decided to go with a horizontally-scrolling website. They aren't used often because it's more natural to have a vertical website, but I've always wanted to play with horizontal layouts. I think it came out pretty well; I hope you think so, too. :)
To navigate, just scroll left and right !
See you all next year~
Lily
In English, our focus was on modern art and poetry. We learned about what makes 'good' and 'bad' art/poetry, with criteria like meaning, depth, originality, etc. For our final product, we were required to make a Poetry Packet consisting of 125 lines, each poem having to fit certain topics; for example, a poem about The God of Small Things, the book we're reading; a short 3-5 line poem; a poem with a consistent meter; etc. Click a thumbnail to read my poems, and use your left/right arrow keys to go back/forward.
In Design, we created experimental pieces; the only requirements were to have a strong concept, and to execute it by experimenting with the technology we've already used in class (like Illustrator and Photoshop). During this unit I learned how to use Illustrator better, because I had to experiment more with using layers in my illustration. Artistically, making this piece stretched me compositionally because I had to position a lot of different shapes (the bicycle parts and girls).
Girls on Bicycles
My experimental piece for Design is about my obsession with bicycles. It took me years to get up the courage to ride without training wheels, but these days I love cycling; it's the best feeling in the world - the wind in your face, zooming past bugs, your legs burning up. But most of the cyclists I see are men, whether they're commuting to work, exercising, or just riding around town doing tricks. I wanted to create a piece that tied girls and bikes together, so I chose to compose something in Illustrator, and then project it onto a canvas (in this case, a 20" by 20" piece of brown paper, to represent how natural it feels to ride bikes) and paint/draw it using gouache and white colored pencil. The colored, painted lines are simplified representations of different bicycle parts: the frame, wheels, dropbars, spokes, stem, cranks. I chose to paint them different bright colors to show the vibrancy of the cycling culture, and to show that bicycles aren't dusty, old-fashioned antiques from the past. On top of the bike parts, I used white colored pencil to draw a girl and a bike in different poses. The white represents the purity and "cleansing" riding bikes gives me - I feel refreshed and my senses are more awake during and after I ride. Lastly, I lightly painted a woman's figure on the right-hand side of the canvas, incorporating a wheel and dropbar.
Girls on Bicycles
In Web/Audio, we made a few things: a poetry animation, a song, and of course, this website. We created the animation in Flash, animating a short poem we wrote.
We created songs by either recording live music in the studio or using Reason to digitally compose songs; I used Reason to compose a piece. Our website is experimental because we had to make it a single page. I chose to make a horizontal layout, and incorporate the Lightbox Javascript code to show my images.
The Web/Audio experimental Audio Engineering assignments had us create songs using Reason, a computer application that serves as pretty much any instrument or mixer/synthesizer/etc. that you could ever want. We used Pro Tools when recording live musicians in the studio. It was really interesting to learn how to mic and record live performers, but my favourite part was making music in Reaosn, which basically lets you create anything you want using any instrument you can think of.
My animation is of one of the haikus I wrote. Originally I wanted to make it in Japanese but I realized most people wouldn't be able to understand.
Japanese: Translation:
俺たちの our
純粋な愛 pure love
永遠ですか is it forever ?
English:
our pure white romance
left on yesterday's cold bench
an old memory
I made my song in Reason, using an M-Audio keyboard to play the music and using Reason's NN-19 Sampler to create the voices in the song. I really enjoyed using Reason, because there is such a wide variety of instruments/sounds to use. If I had the time, I'd love to spend more time with Reason. I chose to play a cover of Yiruma's "River Flows in You," which is originally a piano piece. I played the first section of it and have it on loop. In Reason, I made two lanes, one for the left hand part and one for the right hand part, because on the M-Audio keyboards there aren't enough octaves to play a complete song using both hands at the same time. I quantized the song so that each note is precise. I chose to use voices instead of a regular piano's tune because I thought this sounded cool and also shows part of the crazy things Reason can do. (Click the image to view my music file in Reason!)