Introduction
During the visual narrative project, we created various different projects in our three classes at Freestyle. Throughout these projects, we learned how to convey stories through different forms of media using Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and Avid Pro Tools. This unit had an emphasis on the idea of “show, not tell” through our words and illustrations.
I was able to learn how to express emotions without needing to use words and learned the skills to better convey stories. In English, we learned how to tell a story using symbolism to get across a deeper meaning. In Digital Media, we learned how to use Adobe Illustrator and new skills. In Design we learned how to turn the stories that we write into digital media like photography and illustrations.
Story
Our assignment in English was to create a story using symbolism to convey a deeper meaning in our story. My inspiration behind my story came from the idea of family trauma and the effect that that has on someone. What someone can view as important in the moment may be irrelevant in the long term and it leaves people to question what’s really important. My story was about choosing between mending the past or chasing your future. This was conveyed through my character, Yue Song, who made the decision to chase her future over trying to make amends with her family.
The audio version of my story was recorded by me in Freestyle’s iso booths. After recording I cut the audio together in Pro Tools to make it flow better and to edit out any rough parts. I added music to the end and the beginning to make for a smooth introduction to the story. Throughout the story there are audio effects to add to the storytelling. Things like the sound of cars in a city or a person exhaling all create the environment and make it more real.
Making an audio version of our story not only helped reinforce my skills in Protools but it also helped with audio storytelling. Part of that is understanding where is the right place to add sound effects to add to the story but not distract from what’s happening. Recording what I wrote was also important to better understand the flow of a story because reading it and speaking it can sound very different. Overall I’m really proud of this project and it was fun to work through this project between the classes.
Equivalent Exchange
Packing is a rather dreaded activity. One put to the side until it absolutely needs to be done.
Boring as it is, Yue needs to get it done. She’s sitting on the floor, slowly packing the clothes for her trip all the way back to LA from New York, back “home”. It feels strange. To return to a place that used to be home, but is wholly unfamiliar now, replaced by another city, another life that can now call itself home. Anxious hands twist themselves through the long, brown strands of Yue’s hair, just thinking about the packing that needs to get done, the preparation to leave.
Yue pushes the glasses up her nose slightly, securing them as she continues to pack. Another shirt inside the suitcase, folded in half and then rolled to save space.
Monotonous as it is, it’s necessary, if at least for this last time. The call that she got from her mom a week ago lingers, even now. The faint and distant voice saying that she doesn’t have much time left. That Yue needs to return home now.
Of course Yue needs to return home, but there’s been a sinking feeling since that call. As much as she wants to go home, can she? How can she be expected to come to her mom acting like nothing happened? The place she called home became just a building that she lived in. Strained conversations with her mom. Even when she left it didn’t improve.
A pair of pants now halved and folded up into rectangles, placed into the suitcase.
There’s a scattered mess on the floor, various different articles of clothing are strewn across the room in a packing haze. As Yue picks up a shirt, a necklace falls to the floor with a soft thud. The necklace itself is a gold chain with a teardrop of jade dangling off of it, but the necklace is tangled. The gold chain weaving in and out of itself, stuck in a prison made by itself.
It’s familiar. More than just familiar. That necklace is from Yue’s mom, a gift before she left for college, an apology. Yue’s never worn it before though, but somehow she’s drawn to the necklace. An inexplicable urge to put it on.
Now cradled in Yue’s hands, the chain cold in her hands, the jade a comforting weight. She runs her fingers over the knots, tracing them slightly.
A buzz Yue’s phone jolts her out of her trance, reaching over a pile of clothes to grab her phone, shifting the necklace to her left hand, she picks up her phone in her right. On the phone is a message from her business partner and friend, Alice.
You won’t believe what just happened. I just got a call from someone from Insight Partners.. They want to meet up and talk tomorrow. I mean this is everything, we need to go. I know you need to leave today but can it wait another day? Let me know what you want to do.
Oh. The phone drops from Yue’s hands as leans her head forward to meet the floor. This is really everything that Yue and Alice have been working towards, she should text Alice back with her answer right now and say of course yes, but-
Yue lifts her head off of the floor and clutches the necklace between her hands again, fiddling with the knots in it. What about her mom? What about all the plans that Yue had? Everything that Yue had chosen to do since moving to New York, since entering college, it was all for this one moment.
Yue reached back to where she left her phone on the floor, going to cancel her flight before a call flashes across her screen. The name that flashes across the screen is her dad.
Slightly confused, she picks up, “Hey what’s up?”
“You’re going to make it right?”
Silence.
“I don’t know yet. Something big came up and I can’t miss it, this is everything I’ve been waiting for since I left for college. You understand, right?”
Silence. The silence continues and the room around Yue seems to grow so much smaller, suffocating. The pale blue walls closing in on her as the line almost seems dead.
“If that’s your choice.”
Her dad’s voice is void of any emotion, any tell of what he could be thinking right now.
“I’ll be there by the end of the week, three days at most.”
Not waiting for an answer, Yue hangs up the phone and before shutting it off, moves her flight to Sunday. A tight knot of anxiety is all that Yue feels and there’s a deep feeling in her gut. She squeezes her eyes shut, blacking out the world around her. The clothes in a mess around her, the phone buzzing with notifications from Alice, the necklace still clutched tightly in her hands. The feeling of it in her hands grounds her slightly as she takes a breath.
Opening her eyes again the light of the world seems sharp around her. One thing at a time.
Yue begins to work out the knots of the necklace, one strand at a time. Getting out the knots in the necklace before it falls to its full length. She rests it on the floor before picking up the phone and calling Alice.
“Hey, I moved my flight. What did they want to talk about?”–
Dressed in a business suit with the wind lightly blowing, Yue gets out of the taxi that she was in, making sure to fix her clothes slightly before straightening up. Skyscrapers surrounded her, making her feel smaller than normal.
The person who had been wanting to talk to them was waiting outside the door of the building and he reaches out to shake her hand.
“Nice to meet you, Yue right? I like your necklace.”
The gold chain and the jade pendant glints in the sun, free from any knots, as Yue responds with a tight voice, “It was a gift I got for myself, thank you.”
I think that this activity grew my ability to combine both the visual part of art with the audio part. With the audio production I was able to learn how to use audio effectively to add to storytelling, which can help enrich the overall project. Some sturggles that I encountered was finding the exact right sound effect that I wanted to add because in your mind there is a specific sound that you’re looking for, but to find one in the giant library of audios can be hard. Another struggle I had was more related to the recording of the audio, but it was making the audio sound engaging. If I could change something I would spend more time looking for specific audios or even making them, because there’s parts of the story that I wanted to add audio to that I didn’t because there wasn’t an exact sound effect for it. I’m most proud of the leveling that I did for the sound effects. By adjusting the noice of each of the sound effects based off of what the situation was it allowed for the audio to be overall just more immersive. I think audio editing can be used for many different things, like making voice overs for videos. It can also be used for making narrations for books (like the documentary project) that we make in design. Audio production is pretty tedious and it takes a lot of listening over and over again to make small adjustments. It also made me appreciate people who make sound effects so that I don’t have to do that part myself.
Illustrations
I also learned how to do illustrations in Illustrator which we used for various different projects across the classes. All of these are made using the skills that we learned, including the pen tool, live paint tool, and more. I’ve been using Illustrator in Design and Digital Media as a way to help create graphics to tell stories. As I first learned Illustrator in Design it helped me have a strong foundation before learning more technical skills in Digital Media. Overall, illustrations are a very good skill to have and the ability to create graphics is a skill that will be used time and time again.
Below is an example of one of the illustrations that we worked on in Digital Media. For this assignment we were given a group and were to create an illustration that connected to our partners. The only catch was that we couldn’t see what our partners were working on. This project overall was really fun and the end image might not have the same theme but it shows all of the different styles of the people who worked on it.
This is the illustration that I made for my short story album cover. For this assignment we were to make a piece that reflected the tone of our story and what we wanted people to have as the first impression of our story. I chose to make mine monochromatic to add more emphasis to the white. Overall this project was fun and I’m very satisfied with the end result of my album cover.
Our last project in Digital Media was our Illustrator Project, where we had the choice of what we wanted to create in Illustrator. For my choice I wanted to do stickers because I think stickers are a fun way of customizing the things that people own to mark it with their personal identity.
In this project I produced stickers using illustrator. This was mostly inspired by the fish that I have at home and my love of sea creatures. What I created was crying fish because I wanted to add a detail that made the fish stand apart from just being a regular fish.
This project used some of the skills that I’ve learned in my design class, due to the usage of illustrator and the pen tool. This elaborated on those skills and turned a digital piece of media into a physical product. I think this supplemented the work that I’ve been doing for the past few months on illustrator. With this project I was able to learn how to make my work in illustrator more stylized and personalized.
I am very proud of the final product, but specifically the panda angelfish because of the way I was able to simplify and translate the fish into a drawn form. If I was to improve anything I would want to put more effort into the coloring, but I wasn’t sure how elaborate to make the shading on the fish. I would also try doing the fish without outlines next time because I like how clean it could look. I think I took a safer approach to how I chose to make the fish because I already knew how to do it, but next time I would want to experiment more. I think that this made me more appreciative of digital art in general because it’s harder than just drawing digitally, especially if you’re using the pen tool. It can be very tedious but the final product makes it worth it.
Personally I prefer using Illustrator because of the ability to use it to create designs that are be able to used for various different things. Photoshop on the other hand I only have experience using to edit photos. I also am a lot more comfortable using Illustrator, but I think that both of them used for different things and have different applications. Having the skills from both of them allows for me to be able to create virtually whatever I want to create.
Music
For the Experimental Music Project we were tasked with making music in Pro Tools using digital instruments. We had the choice of either making 4 interstitials or 1 song and I chose to make 4 interstitials to have a chance to create more of a variety of music rather than having to stick to one theme. My process behind creating my songs was picking one instrument that I wanted to star as the main instrument in that interstitial before picking other instruments that I thought complemented it. I tried my best to make of each of the interstitials feel a little different, but still cohesive.
My inspiration for the music came from video game soundtracks. I find that video game soundtracks have the most interesting music, it leans into being strange instead of sounding normal and it’s made to immerse a person into a specific scene. I made these four ideas loosely inspired by Omori, one of my favorite games and soundtracks.
I’m most proud of just being able to create music. Despite the fact that you don’t really need to play instruments to do this, you still kind of do. Most of the instruments need to be played by playing piano. Making music has always seemed like a fun idea, but without the skills to do it that seemed impossible. Making this has genuinely been an enjoyable process and even if I’m not the best at it, it was fun. Throughout the process I learned more about what I liked in music and what was easy and hard for me to do. I learned that I didn’t prefer to use the drum kids, sticking to using instruments like Xpand, that created a more digital feel. Overall, I value that I learned how to better use Pro Tools, especially to create music and not just recordings of audio.
My main takeaways from using MIDI and producing music in Pro Tools was the amount of effort that creating music takes. I don’t have much experience in creating music myself and the hardest part was coming up with an idea or a place to start. Especially when adding multiple instruments it became hard to make everything sound cohesive and like it actually works together. If I had a chance I would love to produce more music, preferably one I have more skills playing an instrument so I have a better understanding of timing and notes that work together.
Design
In Design we took the story that we created in English and made it into two different projects. First, we created a creature based off the character traits of our main character in Illustrator. We learned how to do one point, two point, and three point perspective which helped us to create the environment to put our creature in. Then, we took a photo using lighting to represent our main character in our story, which we edited in Photoshop. Both of these taught new skills for us. While in the first project we created a digital illustration, in the second project we had to use props, lighting, and a person to create a mood that represented our story. It helped teach us two different kinds of storytelling.
Liseacko
In my short story, it follows a character named Yue who is going through the conflict of deciding whether or not to pursue a once in a lifetime opportunity or to return home to visit her mom, who’s sick. Through the story we see Yue struggle with the feeling of filial piety and responsibility. Yue ends up deciding to not go home and has to deal with her choice of leaving her mother behind. The scene depicted is a shot of the city, the final location of the story where Yue can be seen pursuing her dream, leaving her past behind.
Using Adobe Illustrator, I created a creator based off of Yue’s character. The body is a silk moth, used to represent arrogance and judgmentalness. The wings are from a seagull, representing stubbornness. The head is a lion, representing confidence. The legs are from a gecko, representing adaptability. And finally, the tail is a whale’s, representing responsibility. To create my creature I took all of these separate pieces of these animals and I put them together to create this animal. The creature is in a city, seen flying slightly above the buildings. To create the city I used two-point perspective to create a city with dimension and an interesting angle. Originally I had a hard time figuring out exactly how to make this angle interesting, and while I like how it turned out I think that I could have done the angle slightly higher with the creature looking down to make it more interesting. I think what I could have done better with making the creature stand out more, either by changing the color scheme of the background to make it more dull or the color scheme of the creature more vivid. I also wish I could have added more detail to the city to really make it alive.
Yue
Pictured in the image is Yue, the 19 year old who stars in my short story. The premise of the story is the choice between someone’s unresolved past or the promise of the future. In the story Yue has to decide between fixing her relationship with her mother before she dies or chase the offer that could change her future. It’s a story about what matters the most to people in the moment it matters the most and in the story Yue ends up choosing her future over her past. The scene specifically being pictured is when Yue is receiving a call from her mom letting her know that she doesn’t have much time left. In her right hand is a jade necklace that her mom gave her while in her left hand is the incoming call that Yue can’t decide if she wants to pick up or not.
To take this photo I set up two lights, one orange and the other blue, using contrasting colors to show the conflict between the two choices that my character had. In the photo the lights showed up very purple and blue, but that was fixed by lowering the vibrance and bringing the colors down. The other issue that I had while shooting was getting the wires or lights showing in the background of my photos which is one of the reasons why I chose a top down shot for my final photo. I chose this photo because, unlike many of my shots, it brought more focus to the props, the phone and the necklace. That causes some emphasis on the items which I think are important for conveying the message of my photo. In Photoshop the main edits that I did was to tone down the lights a lot, using vibrance like I mentioned earlier. The other edit I made was changing the hue and saturation to get my colors more away from purple and blue.
Through Design I was really able to learn how to use Illustrator in depth. Another valuable thing that I learned through these projects was how to convey stories through different media forms. I really enjoyed doing both of these projects because of how much freedom we had with them. I especially enjoyed doing the photography project because we learned how to use the lighting, which can completely change the tone of a photo. Overall I really enjoyed the things I learned in Design during this unit.