Introduction
The conceptual unit is primarily about expressing ourselves in abstract ways through poetry, art, films, and other creative projects. We develop technical skills and learn to use different creative applications that pave the way for future projects. Learning to use DSLR cameras and record songs, all to create projects that ultimately express who we are in unconventional ways.
Film
In this unit, we learned the basics of film production and expressed our learning through mini projects. We worked with green screens and premiere pro to understand editing fundamentals and expressing feelings through visuals.
Experimental Film
Experimental films are a film style that is less focused on story and more about feelings. Most experimentals are very abstract, not really featuring characters or a cohesive plot line, more based on visuals and metaphors to demonstrate a wider meaning.
Concept statement: “Exploring the feeling of yearning through expressing yourself”
My experimental is about the concept of wanting to be someone new and embracing your truest self, but in order to do that you have to come to terms with burying the old “dead” version of you.
Poetry
We learned a lot about poetry this unit, even having an actual poet come to our class and teach us a bit about poetry and all the thought that goes into it. One of the poems we learned to write (and my favorite) was the Cento poem, which is a poem made by taking lines and words from multiple different poems to create something entirely new.
We then created a poem of our own, alongside a video with images we took to represent our poetry.
Artist statement: “Painted Red” is a poem about depression and this feeling of numbness and pain in everyday moments. The speaker is someone who is feeling severe depression, and even in the mundane parts of their life like waking up or taking a shower feels painful. I used a lot of harsh imagery to show what it’s like to have depressive thoughts. I wanted to show what it’s like to live life with constant feelings of emptiness and sometimes just wishing you could fall asleep and not have to feel the pain anymore. Towards the end of the poem, I use much harsher imagery describing the person cutting themselves open. This is a metaphor representing the yearning of wanting to know that there really is a heart inside of you, something that provides love and happiness, but ultimately feeling completely empty. Depression gives such a strong feeling of worthlessness and numbness, which is something I wanted to portray instead of typical sad feelings. Sometimes depression isn’t about crying or feeling sad, but wishing you could feel at all. Not necessarily wanting to die, but wanting to feel alive. The poem gets more graphic towards the end, showing how quickly thoughts can spiral. Ultimately, the dark descriptions in this poem shows a messier, but more honest light on what it’s like to have a mental illness. It’s not just one shade of blue.
Parody Production
We chose the Treblemakers finale (Bright lights/got the magic in me) because we all love the movie Pitch Perfect. We chose to make our song about wizards because, honestly, don’t we all wish we could harbor some wizardry?
We felt that it would be fun to use older words and speak in accents after going to the renaissance faire, which was our further inspiration. At first, we wanted to make a minecraft parody but felt that it had been done many times before and wouldn’t feel as unique. After going to the renaissance faire we all felt really magical and wanted to share that whimsy (acapella style).
The best part of making this parody was definitely spending more than an hour in the booth recording all the harmonies together and adding a fair amount of horse sound effects. Looking back, we wish we had more time to add all of the harmonies and maybe fix the rap part. We feel most proud of our harmonies and the fact that we kept the whole thing acapella. In life, I think we should all embrace more wizardry and magic because life’s too short to not feel like you’re a true wizard.
DSLR Practice Photos
In the very beginning of the year we practiced taking photos on our DSLR cameras. We used long exposure to paint with light, and flashes to take portraits of each other.
