Introduction
Story
The Short Story assignment in English class was an assignment where students had to create a character and write a flash fiction about this character. We all filled out a questionnaire describing things about the character starting with physical appearances and moving to more specific questions like how they grew up and how they interact in certain situations. The inspiration for my character, Charlie, was based on the book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. I loved the idea of a main character who lives alone and had to interact with someone, and that is what the story is based off of. The way that I produced the audio for this story was by recording on my audio recorder and importing it into Pro Tools. From there, I cut out the pieces where I stuttered and imported a few different music loops and sound effects. I normalized all the clips and added transitions so the listener would have a better experience.
Gone by Owen Peterson
Charlie Booker swung the moose carcass onto his sleigh, a look of triumph on his face. He strained his huge muscles in order to get it on, this was his biggest kill ever. The preparation for this winter season was not the best, so it made him very happy to finally have gotten some food for himself. He was a huge man, born and raised in Alaska, and lived by himself for most of his life. He’s never liked people before, his parents left him when he was 10 and he had to make it on his own. That trauma destroyed any sense of trust he has had with anyone and is why he has been completely isolated from society, living in his own little cabin in the middle of nowhere in Alaska.
The sun was setting when Charlie made it back to his cabin and brought back his precious moose. He’d already stocked up on firewood for the smoker to preserve the food, so getting that ready was a quick process. He sat down with dinner, a prize for his accomplishment that day. The temperature was quickly dropping as the winter was almost upon him and the sun had set. He looked out over the lake next to his house, admiring the beauty and serenity of everything and the blanket of snow covering all the trees towering over him. This was his life, and to any normal person, it would seem impossible to be completely self-supported out in the unforgiving wilderness of Alaska. Any normal person would need support and guidance from a seasoned professional…
“Hey! Sir!” A voice came from behind Charlie and startled him. Who could possibly be out here so far from civilization?
Charlie spun quickly around to see a wreck of a man dragging his feet slowly toward him. “Please help me, Sir…” the man said. Charlie brought the man into his cabin, for he would have no chance out in the wild alone. He gave him food and warm clothes and learned more about the mysterious man. John was his name.
John was an interesting character, a man without a mission some might say. He was disorganized and completely lost, with only a backpack with some cereal bar wrappers and an empty bottle of water. He was a scrawny man, wandering for days after he was dropped off from a highway he was trying to hitchhike through.
After talking for a few days and getting John back to health, Charlie had been thinking. There was no way he had enough food for even himself, let alone 2 people. He was too scared to let John go find his way out, it was a death wish. That left one other option, and that was to get more food. The weather was worsening by the day but John was still not in great shape so Charlie took his bow and quiver on the hunt for another moose that day. He looked and waited for hours, but with the snow any moose tracks would be covered up with fresh powder in a matter of minutes. The day went on and he ventured further into the woods, away from his cabin. He knew where he was going, he had the lake to keep him from getting lost. The sun kept moving, getting lower and lower, and still no sign of any moose. Charlie knew it was time to head back home and he was so mad at himself. Why had he put his life on the line for someone he didn’t even know? He could’ve denied any service for John and been perfectly fine with his first moose for the winter, but no, he had to help him. Charlie never liked people and he had a bad feeling about John.
The sun was set once Charlie arrived back at his cabin and it was extremely cold. He walked inside and there was silence. Maybe John had gone outside to use the bathroom? He goes into his room and looks for his warmer clothes. Gone. Fear starts to surge through Charlie. He goes to the icebox to get some dinner ready only to find about half of the meat missing. Fury is building up inside of him. He gets some firewood and puts it in a pile inside to heat up the place and goes to the drawer where the flint is to start the fire. Gone. This was no bathroom visit. John was gone. His backpack was gone and everything needed to survive was also gone. Realization is setting into Charlie’s mind and he was furious. That man knew NOTHING about what he had just done. John knew they couldn’t both survive, and it was in his blood to keep journeying, just like how he did when he stumbled into Charlie. Tears are forming in Charlie’s eyes and started to flow down his face. He knew there was something up with John. He knew deep down why he avoided people. John had left him for dead, just like his parents did, but there was no way of recovering what John had taken. It was over.
All the memories of Charlie, everything about his mysterious character, all the things in his house, forgotten.
It was over.
Any connections he had with the environment, gone.
It was over.
His whole life led up to the goal of simply surviving and managing that was too much. Human connection, the main thing that scared him, killed him.
It was over.
Above is a screenshot of the Pro Tools interface and you can see the sound effects as the top 4 rows, the story recordings as the next 2 rows, and the music as the bottom 2 rows. Below, we can see an image of the album art Illustrator interface. It gives a better idea of how the image was developed in layers with the house masking a winter landscape.
Illustrations
The custom illustration that I made is a T-shirt design called solitude. It was made using Illustrator and I was inspired by make a clothing design because I think that a T-shirt is one of the best ways of showing off your art. Everyone can see it when you wear it and you can wear it wherever you go to show people what you made.
Artist Statement
Solitude is a clothing line that I, Owen Peterson, made because of my drive to chase adventure. I was inspired by nature because we are so small in this world and it is important to live your life and have experiences for yourself. Living for yourself and making memories plays a role in being human and maintaining happiness, and I wanted this clothing to portray that. I grew throughout this project by learning more about how to let my imagination and abstract ideas turn into an actual project and end up in a final result that I am happy with. One struggle that I encountered in this project was making an eye-appealing color gradient for the background of the logo. Initially, I had green in the bottom of the gradient and I kept choosing other colors to try and work with the green but eventually, I got rid of the green and was much happier with how the rest of the colors blended together without it.
If I were to change anything about this project I would possibly make another color gradient just to experiment with other styles for different moods. I wouldn’t actually change the initial design but that is a possibility of how it could be improved upon, everyone has a different style, and changing the colors could cater to different people’s wants. I am most proud of how simple yet appealing the design is, I really think it makes a great design, especially for a t-shirt because most people will only glance at it so it is important to keep it simple so it is easy to understand. I will use the things I learned from this project in the future in my creative process because I found out with this project that it is much easier to get started on a project when you just put down whatever is on your mind and work on it from there, otherwise it is hard to find a starting point. This project will influence how I see other people’s art because it gives me new respect for how hard it is to make something look pleasing to the eye and have it be simplistic at the same time.
Music
The Parody project was a project that incorporated skills that we learned in Pro Tools like extracting vocals from a song and recording our own vocals. For my project, I did a parody of Tik Tok by Kesha about the life of a high schooler during zoom school. I downloaded the audio file of the actual song and put it into pro tools, using a few strategies we learned in class to make the instrumental stand out from Kesha’s vocals. Then, I recorded my own verse and put it over the new instrumental, normalizing everything to make it bearable.
Lyrics
Wake up in the morning feeling light and breezy.
Go downstairs to finish work, it’s just all too easy
Before i leave, check the gram, classes just too sleazy
Cause when i leave for the zoom, i ain’t coming back
I’m talking canvas making no sense, sense
Breakout rooms are tense, tense
Grades blowing up our phones, phones
Teachers are heading down to their class- rooms
Showing up to the zooms, zooms
Just to get stuck on a screen share…
Please stop, make it stop
Teacher, raise my grades up
Tonight, imma fight
Just to get those grades up
Tick tock on the clock
but the homework doesn’t stop, no
Oh, whoa, whoa-oh
Oh, whoa, whoa-oh
Don’t stop, make it pop
Siri, play some study bops
Tonight imma write
Till I see the sunlight
Tik tok on the clock, but the homework don’t stop, no
Oh, whoa, whoa-oh
Oh, whoa, whoa-oh
This image shows the process and tools we used in order to make my lyrics stand out from Kesha.
Elective
In design class, we were challenged to make a project in Adobe Illustrator, which was a creature that was composed of 5 different animals, all based on the short narrative that we wrote in English class. I really valued having the creature reflect a scene in the story, and have the background also be relevant to the story.
In the image above you can see the Illustrator interface for this project. Initially, I made the creature on the left side on the blank artboard but when I had finished both the creature and the background, I took the creature and place him on the background. I tried a few different placements for the creature and found that the one that worked best is when the creature is offset to the left.