Introduction

For the Explorations Project, students are tasked to explore their own passion and improve upon a particular skill of their choosing. I decided to explore my interest in 3D art as Animation students move from 2D Animation into 3D, I also thought it would be enjoyable to chose something that I love so dearly.

The 21st Century Skill that I expanded upon was Technological Literacy, which is about what technology is, how it works, what purposes it can serve, and how it can be used efficiently and effectively to achieve specific goals. While I knew Blender beforehand, this project made me use my understand of the program to achieve a goal, which was to model a 3D environment. An argument could be made that you use Technological Literacy whenever you model in 3D software.

Animation – Process

Concept Art of Project

For my Explorations Project, I decided to model the front of the “Fazbear’s Fright” building from “Five Nights at Freddy’s 3”. I enjoy playing the games and I wanted to show my appreciation to them, I’m not sure where I obtained the inspiration to model this specifically, it came to mind and I thought it would be fun to model.

I started off with concept art, there weren’t any official depictions of what the front looked like, so I looked at images online and created the concept art shown above:

One of the images used for my concept, huge inspiration in terms of color and design.

Then, I moved onto modeling, texturing, and setting up the lighting of the project. Most of the project was created using Blender, with the occasion of texture work like the logo, which I used Illustrator to create.

Work in progress screenshots/early render shots

This process took a considerable amount of time, but was necessary for the project. With the combination of modeling, manually texturing, and setting up lighting, it took around 10 hours of total work. I faced a ton of issues when it came to texturing, splitting the model into a few vertices and wrapping the textures onto them took a bit of tinkering. The work I put into this project was worth it, I was originally going to add more things into the environment but had to cut it out due to time. While I had some issues with planning beforehand, having a strong idea of what I wanted led to me getting the project done on time.

Finished Product

This was single handedly my favorite project in Freestyle, it was short, sweet, and was an absolute blast to make. I may be a bit biased for this opinion (but aren’t opinions already biased and subjective?) because I already make 3D art, but this was actually preparation for Senior year Animation, so I practiced modeling and texturing in this project. Because of this project, I’m confident in what I can create in Animation next year.

Presentation of my Explorations Project:

Digital Media – Music Recording

Mason, Orlando, cam (Group) – September

For our Music Recording Project, we were tasked to work as a group to create and produce a song of our choice. The group members that worked on this project are Mason Serna, Cam Munoz, and Orlando Morales. We chose September by Earth, Wind & Fire as the song to produce the track. For the recording portion, Mason would sing the first couple verses, then the three of us would sing the middle beat drop. Afterwards, Cam would sing the third verse, which would transition to the final beat drop. We took three different takes, which would be later combined in editing.

The three of us all sang, however we split the jobs to make the work load more comprehensible. Orlando took the role of editing together the clips and making the final version of the song, Mason took the role of creating the album art and pre-production, and Cam took the role of being the third singer in the group.

Overall, the group had fun working together as a group and generally had a great time creating the song. While the final product isn’t perfect, the project came from a place of genuine care and passion. The project wouldn’t be as it is without the three hard workers who produced the song.

For me, I found this project highly enjoyable, it was a great way to say goodbye to my friends at PM and it was a fun experience singing. It was also a way to show off my singing skills, even if my singing in that was questionable at most. Even if I’m not that much into making music, the project was a blast to make and felt genuine.

Photos from the recording session

Screen shot from Protools Session

English – Poem

For English, our final year was the Poetry Unit. We were tasked to create a Poem of our choosing, we had the choice to either the poems we made in class with Christine Moore, the guest poem speaker, or we make one from scratch. I decided to test my writing and make one from scratch. I decided to talk about the stars because I thought it would be an interesting topic to explore, I also grew up stargazing.

Going back to our guest poem speaker, Christine Moore, she taught us the inner workings of how poems and how to make one. For example, she gave us an article to pick apart and create poems from, some students actually used that session as their final poem. I used the techniques she used like repetition in my poem to tell my story, you can see it below:

Final Product

Stars:
I gaze upon the stars, 

The bright lights, like looking upon the city
Or the aftermath of a fireworks show.

I gaze upon the stars,
A scatterplot mirroring all my memories, The universe stops to lend me a moment to look back,

For I don’t see it as just the stars,
I see it as my mind being shown to me
The old childhood home that I used to run around in,
The warm glow from the sun on my chest,
All are shown in an array of bright, beautiful stars