Explorations
Introduction
The explorations project is all about pursuing your passion. There are very few limitations and all the projects are about exploring you passion. Each project is unique, but all are something that the student chooses to do.
Lyrical Essay
The Lyrical Essay project is to convey research though creative means. This means you can manipulate the font size, format, spacing, and color. After picking a topic, you need to do research on in, creating a group of sources to use in an annotated bibliography. An annotated bibliography is a comment written in the footer that is based in the head text. These can be anything from helping the reader understand what they are reading better, to making a silly comment that might make the reader laugh.
We studied texts, such as Maggie Nelson, Ryan Van Meter, Claudia Rankine, Ross Gay, Heidi Czerwiec; and creative nonfiction by Ander Monson and David Foster Wallace. These addressed themes with ranges from serious topics like slavery and lynching, to the absurdity of a lobster festival. Here is a compilation of all the work we did analyzing the lyrical essays of others.
We studied texts, such as Maggie Nelson, Ryan Van Meter, Claudia Rankine, Ross Gay, Heidi Czerwiec; and creative nonfiction by Ander Monson and David Foster Wallace. These addressed themes with ranges from serious topics like slavery and lynching, to the absurdity of a lobster festival. Here is a compilation of all the work we did analyzing the lyrical essays of others.
Yes that is an actual photo from one of the texts.
My essay was about both the sadness behind almost losing a species and almost losing a friend. It is written from the perspective of an outsider watching this plant suffer. It creates a human connection between the Franciscan manzanita the narrator and the similarities between them.
Reflection
The lyrical essay was a very personal project for me, as I wrote about my own experiences. While preforming in front of the class, I ended up crying like many others. It was hard to write about at first, but once I had a solid foundation, it was one of the easiest things for me to write. This project taught me the value of being able to choose what you want your assignment to be on. When writing and learning about something you are passionate about, it is so much more enjoyable and you put more effort into it.
Elective Project
The explorations unit is all about pursuing and developing a passion YOU are interested in. It can be about finding, expanding, or developing a new skill.
Process
The first thing we had to do was think of an idea. I knew that I wanted to learn more about Adobe Animate before we were going into the project, so I didn’t have any trouble thinking of an idea.
Then, I got working, mostly by watching tutorials. I learned three things that I thought were important about Adobe Animate: symbols, tweening, and boneing. The next step was to figure out a way to show my learning, so I decided that I would teach about them in my presentation and make a gif using each of the three aspects.
Cymals
The first thing I learned was symbols. These are essentially timelines that you can put into a main timeline. You can actually but a symbol in a symbol and put a symbol in that symbol, and so on (but probably don’t do that because Animate already crashes enough). There are actually three different types of symbols
Tweens
Tweens are paths that you can have a symbol follow in the animation, so that you don’t have to place it individually each time.
The Difference Between Real Worms and Gummy Worms
Similar to rigging a 3D model, you can rig a 2D model by putting bones in it. After adding the bones, you can move the joints around and Animate will automatically warp the shapes to match the change in the bone. There are three types of bones, flexi, soft, and hard. These each cause different warping effects and allow you to determine the curvature of the bone. For my GIF, I made three worms, each with a different type of bone, then had it inch across the screen using the tween tool.
Final Production
For our final, we had to present our finding from our project, including making a presentation with a our own slides including making our own GDEs (graphic design elements)
Reflection
The explorations project helped me realize my potential when given freedom. While it wasn’t the most amazing or awe-striking project, it allowed me to learn about something I wanted to. I made a slide theme and background all by myself and presented in front of my whole grade. The most interesting thing about this project was here everyone else’s projects as well, for it taught me a lot about my classmates.