Introduction
This unit we were asked the question: who am I? and answered it through multiple projects. In English we wrote essays to express who we are to both colleges and our peers. In Digital Media we created intricate mandalas in an meditative process and we used after effects to create representations of ourselves in the form of intro videos. Design used illustrator to create PSA’s about things we felt strongly about.
Mandalas
Using illustrator to create these beautifully reflective patterns was a very fun during this project. While figuring out how to work the reflections was difficult at first, once I got an understanding it was a lot more enjoyable. Later they were laser cut into different materials by our teacher.
Black and white Mandala
Laser engraving of the Mandala
Color Mandala
Video on Mandala
This I believe
This year we wrote an essay in english about a belief we hold and wrote in-depth on where it came from and what it means to us. I really enjoyed writing this essay and had a fun time making the video to go along with it.
I believe that life is indefinable. Think of a definition of life, what makes something living? There’s the standard scientific definition, that it responds to its environment, it grows and changes, has the ability to reproduce, has metabolism and can breath and etc. The problem is that some animals don’t make this definition but if you saw them you would undoubtedly say they were living creatures, and the reverse is true some things, such as fire, meet most of these requirements but we don’t consider them alive. I’ve come to this belief through many experiences. For example when I was much younger I watched a cartoon called “avatar: the last air bender” which had a spirit world and touched on yin and yang and other such topics. Through this show I realized that the entire world is connected even if not visibly. A particular scene referenced fire having a heart beat and it made me wonder if fire was alive. A more recent example that only furthered this belief was a game I played called “everything”. In this game you inhabited or possessed animals and could move them around the environment, later though i discovered you could possess trees and move them is a way by planting new ones in the direction you wanted. This continued to get larger from land masses to clouds to continents to planets, eventually entire dimensions. This made me think, if i can inhibit and move the clouds why are they not alive? And the same with entire planets. I had a small existential crisis here about whether I was just a cell for the organism that is earth, but afterwards my thinking had changed. A less existential example is the time me and my friends had a very long and pointless debate over salad. I told them that I had had a salad for dinner, when they asked what kind I admitted that it had merely been a bowl of parsley, the room split. Half of us argued that salad was a specific thing and the other half arguing that there was no definition of salad and that anything could be a salad. Insults were thrown, accusations made and at the middle of it all a measly salad. But it wasn’t just about the salad, it was about definitions as a whole, whether they mattered, who got to make them and how far they could be stretched. At the end it was a tie, neither side had one and a peace treaty was signed (it still hangs in our english classroom to this day). The point of this story though was to show how definitions really don’t matter to me in the sense of hard set rules, and this has fueled my belief as well. All these points came together around last January, I found that each part of these shaped my view. Avatar showed me that the whole world is connected, everything taught me that we don’t know a lot about the universe and the salad debate helped me know that it was ok for things not to have a definition. I came to the understanding that everything in our universe is connected in some way even the parts we can’t see and all those pieces move together making it hard to define what may or may not be alive. I believe that life is as indefinable as the universe itself
This I believe Video
Photoshop Paintings
We also learned how to create paintings in Photoshop, which was one of the most interesting units in digital media. I really enjoyed the freedom and the new techniques.
Photoshop Painting
Photo conversions
360 photo
PSA Poster
In design we created posters that show a message we believe in, this project was a really good start to our second year of design.
Poster