Introduction
I really enjoyed the visual narrative project. One thing that I value is being able to create the things my brain envisions, and the visual narrative project was great for that. Within the various projects that I have done over the course of this semester, I have gotten a lot better at using the software I was just getting introduced to a while ago.
Illustrations
One thing that we did for our visual narrative project in Digital Media was creating an exquisite corpse art with a small group of classmates.
For this project, we were just getting used to drawing things in Adobe Illustrator. I worked with four classmates and we each created four different drawings in Adobe Illustrator and put them together to make an “exquisite corpse”. My drawing is the second one depicting an island in an hour glass.
Another project that we did near the end of our unit was the Illustration Project. This was where we could really use our Adobe Illustrator skills to their fullest extent. For this project, we were tasked to create designs for either stickers, shirts, patches, candle shades, etc. I chose to create a shirt design.
This is the finished design in Adobe Illustrator. Every different shape or form on my character had to be modeled individually on separate layers. On the right hand side of the image you can see all the layers that I modeled using the pen tool.
After printing out the design for my shirt, I heat pressed the design on a plain white shirt. The next photo is my design officially on a T-shirt. I am pretty happy with how it turned out.
Artist Statement
My shirt design is inspired by the anime Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. I knew I wanted to make something anime themed, but also wanted to keep the design lowkey. Many of the anime merchandise that I see online is too over the top in my opinion. That’s why I decided to make a simplified version of a character from Jojo to fit my own style
Music Production
Beginning our music production journey was the Song Parody Project. Previously, we had dabbled with Pro Tools in order to learn the basics of audio production. Now, it was time to put our basic knowledge to the test. For the Song Parody Project, I teamed up with my friend and classmate. We spent part of an evening together brainstorming and coming up with parody lyrics. Our inspiration for our lyrics was Minecraft. Many of the videos that we watched when we were young had been Minecraft song parodies. So, we wanted to create one of our own. After creating the lyrics, I invited him over to my house. He brought over his microphone and I downloaded an official audio recording software on my laptop. From there, we went to my parents closet and sung over the song “Weak” by AJR’s instrumental.
Animation
One of the first things we did this unit was create an original character.
This was the first character I’ve ever designed using photoshop. I am fairly happy with this, however it does look kind of rough since this is my first attempt at creating a digital character.
After creating my character, Mr. Cho wanted us to create small puppets of them in real life. The process was took a lot longer than expected, but I am happy with the final result. After creating the initial walk, I greenscreened it and composited it with a walking animation of my digital drawing in Adobe After Effects. My digital walking design was also done on photoshop and then imported into After Effects.
I thought this turned out pretty well. I also added some royalty free music so that the animation wasn’t totally silent.
The next thing up for animation was our Lip Sync Project. I had a lot of fun making this, because we could do a lip sync for whatever we wanted. I chose to do a clip from the popular youtuber and streamer Moist Critical.
I spent a lot of time on this, and one thing that I found particularly challenging about this project was lip syncing the middle where his mouth was moving pretty quick.
The last and longest project of our Animation’s Visual Narrative unit was our team animation. Since our AM Animation class is super small, our whole class teamed up to create an animation together. We spent many weeks storyboarding and creating our own animation sequences. Here is the final result:
Overall, I am pretty happy with this Freestyle unit and how my things turned out. Some of my animations are rough, but I really hope to improve in the future.