Reflections

As we are applying to college and getting ready to pursue our futures, we have had to recall hundreds of details and specifics about our lives. This process, at least for me, has been daunting. Trying to minimize my life into a single PDF has been challenging. While looking back on my past, I have been faced with the uncertainties of the future. The overarching goal of the reflections unit is to ‘reflect’, or to look back on the choices we have made and the experiences we have had that make us who we are. In film, we made a personal video essay that had to be exactly 2 minutes long, about an experience we have had or a connection we have made that reveals something personal about ourselves. We were not allowed to talk about our awards, our extracurriculars, or our achievements, which required us to dig deep in order to discover what floated right on the very top of all of us. The topic I chose was my fear of spiders. In english, we had to reflect on our lives via several “essence objects” and write a college-style essay that showcased our qualities. In digital media, we made several mandalas with the essence objects we brainstormed in english in Adobe Illustrator. I chose to pursue a broad theme that illustrated the little things that bring me joy in life, like nature, food, literature, and film.

My essence objects and core values impacted the connections I made between my work in Digital Media and English and my personal life. I incorporated a lot of my integral values into my work through taking technical risks and pushing myself to create detailed and meaningful work.

Mandalas

If the images do not display below,
On a Mac, press Command + (plus) then press press Command – (minus)
On a PC, press the Cntrl + (plus) then press the Cntrl – (minus)

The mandala project encouraged us to brainstorm essence objects and connect them all through a theme which we communicated via a Mandala on Adobe Illustrator. Using the symmetry tool, we created drawings that replicated themselves around 12 sections that were infinitely replicable.

Artists statement for Colored Mandala: For the Colored Mandala, I included my favorite fruits, colors, hobbies, and flowers, and although no theme is overtly communicated through the piece, my goal is to make anyone who looks at it feel the happiness I feel when I see or experience these things. I encountered some challenges regarding the layers, and how to properly color them in, but I overcame them by working around the shapes that weren’t “complete”, or would not be filled in Illustrator, by creating secondary shapes that were complete and moving them directly on top of those shapes. This expedited the process and made the final piece look complete and filled. I think I would change the color scheme, and incorporate the same few colors throughout it, and I would also make some elements larger. I am most proud of the detailing in the reel of film towards the center, and the images I included in the frames. I included small, almost invisible drawings of trees, Mount Rainier, which is a mountain I would watch when it was visible through the clouds when I would visit my grandmother in Washington. I will utilize the symmetrical aspects of this project for other projects, as this project taught me a lot about how to arrange shapes so they looks evenly distributed and not weighted unnaturally or uncomfortably. I learned from this project to look closely at art, and appreciate all details no matter how small.

Artists statement for BW Mandala: My inspiration for the Black and White Personal Mandala project came from the things that represent me and things that make me happy. I include several variations of the flowers that belong to my birth month, April, including daisies and sweet peas. I also included some of my hobbies, illustrating a reel of film, pillars that represent my love for history, as well as various foods and parts of nature that I love. I grew with this project by learning the best way to use the wacom tablet, unlearning my habit of rotating my hand too much and learning the best angle, pressure, and settings to use that helped me create it. The tablet was a source of challenge at first, but as I worked with it I continued to become more comfortable with it. This project also confirmed my love for art of all kinds, as even though I had never used a tablet like this, I still grew to appreciate what it was able to do. I would change my mandala by using a wider variety of brushes, including more pattern brushes. I am most proud of the detail, cohesiveness, and creativity. This project was daunting, but I felt proud of how it came together at the end. I will use the ideas I learned in this project in future projects by expanding my use of clipping masks in Adobe Illustrator, as well as various transformations within the artboard to create amazing patterns. This project taught me that art can represent different things when seen from up close, and from far away.

This is the laser engraved version of my Mandala.

College Personal Essay

My College Essay required me to look inwards on my life, my ideals for the future, and dissect the elements that I am composed of. I am proud about the stories I was able to represent for my ‘Who Am I’ essay. My Essence Objects were incredibly helpful while attempting to piece together my essay, and through the reflection that was required of me I was able to recall and assign meaning to specific events in my life.

Motion Graphics

We spent part of the Reflections unit strengthening our After Effects skills by testing out animation, rotoscoping, and other Motion graphics tools. We explored audio syncing, animation presets as well as keyframing skills we could do from “scratch”, and rotoscoping.

The first assignment we did covered syncing audio to images and visual representations of wavelengths via the various styles that After effects offered.

We then moved on to simple animation tasks, such as creating a smooth “shooting star” effect that could be replicated in firework-like circular shapes.

Once we covered the basics of the After Effects interface, we were tasked with combining our rotoscoping, audio syncing, and animation skills for one video.

I am very glad to have acquired these skills throughout this unit, and I think that my newfound range of technical ability will allow me to expand my creativity beyond assignments through music and visuals.

Film

Our first assignment of the year was to create a 2 minute reflection film. In this assignment, we looked back on an important experience or message we have learned throughout our lives and communicated it through visual and verbal metaphor. Being the focus of my own project was an unfamiliar and slightly uncomfortable experience, however I gained a lot from it. My goal was to show how our fear of spiders represents a fear of an unknown future, and how in order to properly overcome our fear of life and difference, we need to overcome our fear of “spiders”. My story was about the spider that built a web inside of my side mirror, and, at the time, it was still living there, so I recorded the very spider I spoke about in my essay. Although this provided me with plenty of obstacles, and completely infringed on my ability to film footage beyond the spiders lifespan, I grew substantially from it, and no longer felt debilitatingly afraid of spiders. Filming something I was once scared of so up close forced me to confront my fears head on and, although it was a rocky process, the reward was worth the work.

This was our overarching project of the unit, but we also had smaller assignments that worked to strengthen our skills learned in our Junior year. Our 1 minute films, where we had to storyboard in under 10 minutes, trade stories, then record another persons story through only their storyboard, and then hand the footage over to the final group, and edit footage of our own.

Ultimately, our final video was not something we filmed or came up with, which made it a challenge to cohesively edit, since we did not know the intentions of the group behind it. This assignment tested our ability to collaborate, interpret footage, apply narrative structure to miscellaneous storyboards, and, most importantly, work under pressure. We had exactly 1 minute to work with in the editing room, and hardly 2 periods to film and edit. The final products are, obviously, not our best work, but they are not meant to be. This project was challenging but very enjoyable.

Another similar exercise we did was for our 1 period films. We had 1 period to come up with, film, and fully edit a story, which forced us to section our time to the minute. This was meant to mimic an accelerated version of the 3 stages of production and prepare us for the upcoming obstacle of Narrative 2 that would consume the majority of our year. I worked with my friends CJ, Alex, and Eva. Out of the 2 exercises this one was my favorite. We were still able to take creative and comedic liberties with the film, even if it was rushed., and I had a lot of fun. Seeing the different stages of production happen simultaneously gave me a solidified understanding of how time should be divided between pre, in, and post production stages.

A brief assignment we completed was the GreenScreen film project, where we had to create one realistic scene using green screen. This proved to be a lighting challenge more than anything else, because the shades of green proved to be unexpectedly difficult to remove from my subjects hair and reflection. I learned a lot through watching my classmates create theirs and, although GreenScreen may not be my calling, I am grateful to have the skills to practice and fine tune them.