Introduction
During the conceptual unit, through abstract thinking we were able to learn how to express ourselves in our own way through poetry, music, art, and web production. We learned various different skills through equipment like DSLR Cameras, Tascam Audio Recorders, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Animate, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Audition, Avid Pro Tools, WordPress, and Google Apps.
During my first quarter at Freestyle, I have learned to use new skills to express myself in different ways. In English, I learned how to use both my words and visuals to convey emotions in concise ways. In Digital Media, I learned various different tools that allowed me to try all sorts of applications.
Art Reflection
During our trip to SFMOMA we were asked to find one piece that inspired awe in us. While walking around there were many pieces, but only one of them truly made me sit back and think about it. That was The Visitors by Ragnar Kjartansson. It was both a musical and a visual piece about a group of friends playing music in a home together and it brought me this feeling of togetherness that can’t really be explained.
In English, we were asked to write about this piece. Why did it inspire awe? What personal connection do you have with it? It made you look at more than just finding something impressive or pretty, but find a reason as to why it spoke to you. We took what we wrote down and in Digital Media we turned it into a quick video. During this, I learned a lot through the editing process and how to make a short video. Overall this project taught me plenty of new skills, while still being a project that was interesting to do.
Parody Introduction
The process behind making this parody was one that was both fun and allowed us to work together with various different classmates. While working on this parody I learned that at Freestyle you can’t be scared of being loud or taking up space. At first recording was hard because, yes, other people could hear you recording. But you have to get over that and by getting over that we were able to create our masterpiece. This was the first time I’ve used Audition, but I found it not too hard to use for most basic things like cutting or adding reverb. I learned a lot about Audition and was able to learn how to cut audio, change the volume, and make different changes to the audio. If I could change anything about this project it would be all of us recording the chorus together. It would have been better to each record individually and then pan our audio during the chorus for a more full sound. I’m really proud of my group and the lyrics that we, mostly Athena, came up with.
The song that my group and I created a parody on was “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel. Our song’s title changed to “We Didn’t Have Any Ideas” and our inspiration behind that came from the fact that we couldn’t think of anything to write our parody about despite talking about it for two hours. We took all of those ideas that we talked about and put them into one song. “We Didn’t Start the Fire” worked well for this because the song does a ton of listing items, which is what we did as well. The song goes anywhere from My Little Pony to Trump and Biden.
Parody Lyrics
Twilight sparkle, pringles can, netherlands muffin man
Bad Ninjago, world war 2, nickavacado
Sukuna x cinderella, avengers, arkansas
Chipoootle, springfield dog eaters, Potato saladGeese, Monkeypox ewww, Looney tunes, Club penguin
TSA agents stealing bookmarks, love letters with kim jong un
Oceangate titanic, Rainbowdash the Emo horse
Taylor swift the childless cat lady, totoro, pretzelsWe didn’t have ideas
We were spouting nonsense, for like 40 minutes
We didn’t have ideas
No, our brains are empty, so, we have no entryHobama, football yay, Shining armor, french poop river
Leonardo, Climate change, Flat earthers, Barbenheimer, raygun bleh, “Transgender surgeries on illegal aliens in prison,” no it’s me, sue sylvester, moo deng is so cuteKnuckle symphony, execute the babies, Nightmare moon, spoooooooooooons, 1000 bottles of baby oil, SNL, 784 DiB ledoo’s, Strawberry, seizures, family guy, amphibious component, booo
We didn’t have ideas
We were spouting nonsense, for like 50 minutes
We didn’t have ideas
No, our brains are empty, so, we have no entryCIX, eggs galore, riddler, kirby’s watching you
ice monster makes me cry, bread, grapes, wall, circle
Birds love, paper hair, Pink pony club
The government kills everyone who tries to find a cure for cancerrainbow loom, Penguins surfing, European mummy eaters,
chris columbus shagged a llama, whale shark eyeball teeth
bean baby water brain, polynomials make me cry
shrekWe didn’t have ideas
We were spouting nonsense, for like 60 minutes
We didn’t have ideas
No, our brains are empty, so, we have no entry
Hadestown, crime rates, confusing boring rallies
Monsters, preachers, natalie arbatman
Presbyterian window gobo, percy jackson musicalVibes bad, four score, website broken, tis’ been a fortnight since we last spoke, the mazerunner
RFK – ran over a baby bear, 2 gallons each.We didn’t have ideas
We were spouting nonsense, for like 80 minutes
We didn’t have ideas
No, our brains are empty, so, we have no entryNicholas cage, watery paint, count dracula, Bluey
spice addicts, disco ball, paper cranes, buffalo
anime scented candles, Korean convenience stores
Do you like triden or bump, harry potter and regina george
descendants, minecraft movie, jennifer coolidge
adderall, dodo bird, vogue, fish, ouija boardeating cotton balls to get into a mental asylum
jorts, jag, jate, jowl, I can’t take it anymore
We didn’t have ideas
We were spouting nonsense, for like 90 minutes
We didn’t have ideas
But we’re still not done
So we just go on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on
We didn’t have ideas
We were spouting nonsense, for like 90 minutes
We didn’t have ideas
No, our brains are empty, so we have no ending
We didn’t have ideas
We were spouting nonsense, for like 90 minutes
We didn’t have ideas
No, our brains are empty, so we have no ending
We didn’t have ideas
We were spouting nonsense, for like 90 minutes
We didn’t have ideas
No, our brains are empty, so we have no ending
We didn’t have ideas
We were spouting nonsense, for like 90
Conceptual: Design
In Design we have been learning Photoshop and using photography to convey stories. We started by developing our artistic view with elements of art and the principles of design. This helped us understand how to create visually interesting art pieces. We began to learn about color theory and color schemes, which helps to understand how colors can effect a piece. We’ve also learned photography, what aperture to use, what shutter speed, etc.
At first, I was uncertain about choosing Design as my choice of elective, but during this unit I’ve learned so much about Design. I’m more used to traditional art, not digital, but I’be learned how much fun working digitally can be and how much freedom it can give you. I value the freedom that we’re given with our assignments
Alpha Name Photography
For this project, we were asked to make a collage of photographs to form our name. The only exception with this was that we couldn’t use premade letters, we had to use our eyes to find these letters in the world around us. This project made us think about how to view the world around us and to see things a little differently. We learned how to see, not just look.
Conceptual Photo
For the conceptual photo project we were asked to take a prompt given to us about two very contrasting things and bring them together in a single photo. We had freedom over what two objects we used, the background, and the lighting we took the photo in. My prompt was, How can we express loneliness through history. At first I really was unsure about how to go about this, but through the help of my classmates we came together to find a meaning and a metaphor to express.
The objects that I chose to represent my topic were a mask, a syringe, and my phone. The phone was to represent loneliness through showing messages sent to someone with no reply. I did this because when I send messages to people and it shows that they’ve read it but there’s no reply it makes me feel lonely. Like the person who’s reading it doesn’t care enough about me to respond. The mask and syringe represented learning history. History can really be seen as anything that happened in the past and to me one of the most significant things that has happened in my life is quarantine and the pandemic.. This also ties into loneliness because during quarantine was one of the loneliest times of my life. I had just moved and the friends that I used to have were no longer talking to me. There was nowhere to go but my room. Together they show the loneliness and isolation that quarantine brought for so many people. The mask is covering the phone and the messages showing how, especially online, you can think you know someone but it might not be who they really are. I chose to use handwritten notes and sketches from my notebook for the background. This is because when I got in my head with no one to talk to I turned to writing down how I felt. The lighting of the photo is rather dark, as if someone’s in a dark room with a lamp on. It could be seen as the feeling of isolation in a room, but also gives the feeling of being in a room late at night, waiting for someone to reply who you know won’t.
For the photo I had to use Photoshop to change the saturation and brightness of the photo. I learned that it’s better to shoot bright and turn down the brightness then to shoot dark and turn it bright. This is because of noise that is made when shooting in the dark. Noise is hard to get rid of while editing and it causes a bit of pixelation. I edited the saturation to make the screen and text more prominent. The change in saturation caused this slight glowing quality in the text which I think pulls the viewers’ eyes to it. I also changed the brightness because the original photo was way too dark and the mask wasn’t that visible, which took away from the meaning the photo is supposed to convey.
