Introduction

For the Conceptual Project, our goal is to develop our abstract thinking and communication skills to answer the question,

“How can I use unconventional forms to express myself?”

This unit allowed me to take creative risks in poetry, music, art, animations, experimental film and web production, allowing me to express my opinions and develop a distinct personal aesthetic. With access to a variety of modern professional equipment and applications such as DSLR Cameras, Tascam Audio Recorders, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Animate, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Audition, Avid Pro Tools, WordPress, and Google Apps, I was allowed to build many skills and create some of the works shown below.

Being a Freestyle student, I really enjoy the freedom I’m allowed to create a project. Having access to many tools and opportunities, allows me to grow and develop my skills. Not only that, but the respect and care that the teachers have for us allows for a healthy learning environment where I’m comfortable to be myself and grow.

Haiku

For this assignment, we were given randomized emotions and actions and had to write a haiku reflecting our given statements. We were also prompted to take a picture that helped boost our haikus, then putting all the pieces together in Premiere Pro and Pro Tools.

Haiku video
Premiere Pro Interface for Photo Haiku Video

During this project, I really valued learning about haikus, the history and meanings behind them. I had never liked poems that much until this unit, trying to express my given emotion with such little space to work with seemed like a big challenge. However, it was all enjoyable and I felt as if there were so many options and end results I could’ve produced with this project.

Poetry

Click image to view poem

During our poetry unit in English, we studied and analyzed different types of poetry. We had strengthened writing techniques during class in order to help us write and understand poems. Our project allowed us to make a free verse poem, having us put our skills to the test. We were then prompted to extend our project in Digital Media, using Pro Tools, Tascam Audio Recorders and Photoshop to represent our poem.

Intention Statement: Hidden Universe is an ekphrastic, free verse poem about the love and wonder between two friends who can only spend time together during the summer, with an underlying message about their love. I responded to Ashiyaart’s watercolor piece showing two girls in an arcade-like setting. When I first saw this image, I thought about the amazing memories and feelings that can be created in friendships, but also the bittersweet ending feeling of summer. The speaker is describing her own experiences within her friendship and her hidden love for her friend. In order to describe the speaker’s friendship as something special, I used the repeated phrase of the captured universe. I chose the word universe to capture the image of their friendship to show the huge unknowingness In friendships. You don’t know what’ll happen the next day and we don’t know what we’d find in the universe, that’s what makes it full of wonder. In the beginning of each stanza I used captured universes to try to convey each little section of what makes their friendship so special. The second stanza was supposed to convey deeper the wonder that be in friendships, I wanted the speaker to feel as if she’s being left on edge by her friend, entranced too much by her features as she fails to realize her friends actions. The second stanza is supposed to touch on platonic love, the warmness of each other’s presence compared to the cooling winds of fall, the happiness that each brings to the other. The speaker also starts getting confused by this love, not knowing if her friend only loves her as a friend but if she could reciprocate the love the speaker shares. The first and last stanzas were meant to be similar in the tones, they both focus on the amazing parts of their relationship, while also trying to convey the sadness of their separation. I had a lot of struggle with the last stanza, I felt as if it wasn’t expressing the emotion of their separation enough and I received feedback that helped me change the last stanza a lot. I was told to focus more on the feeling of their separation, like a bittersweet feeling. I tried adding more lines that gave the last stanza a much darker tone and to try to highlight the speaker’s secret as well. I tried to make the dread of the friend’s separation more present and showing the negative feeling with the closing of summer, which is why I continually tried to highlight the coldness or the loss of warmth too. The poem I picked for inspiration was “A Poison Tree” by William Blake. I was inspired by Blake’s ability to have such a big shift in the mood and tone in his poem at the last stanza and really wanted to try and incorporate into my own, the shift of the warmness the friends shared to the cold separation, with hope near the end.

Pro Tools Interface for Mixing Poem Audio
Photoshop Interface for Poem Photo

During this project, I actually came to enjoy poetry and the freedoms I had. Being given as much room as I wanted, allowing to make for more choices and to invoke more feelings. Even at the end, seeing my poem visually and audibly amazed me and I’m really glad I was given the tools that made this happen.

Elements & Principles of Art

In Digital Media, we were given an assignment to study and learn the Elements & Principles of Art and Design. This is the presentation I made for my project.

Elements and Principles of Art Title Page

Animation

Learning animation so far this last year has been amazing. I’ve always loved animation and starting to get a grip on new forms and creations, I feel more proud of myself with each project. We learned to use backdrops, add audios and sound effects for our stop-motion animations.

Zoetrope animation

For our first project, we created a Zoetrope animation. This animation uses a spinning base and slits in order to see the animation on the paper strip inside. I didn’t expect the Zoetrope to be such a fast animation, and I regret for making my animation with something that involved such small detail, however I learned from this experience and tried to avoid such small detail moving forward.

Moving Phenakistoscope Wheel
Still Phenakistoscope Wheel

For our next project, we were given a circular piece of paper and had to fill it with 16 frames of animation. Our teacher had wanted us to fill the entire plate, having several things going on at once. The Phenakistoscope Wheel achieves its animation by visual illusions of the paper just being rotated. We used Photoshop to remove the unwanted background and to create a frame by frame timeline animation to rotate between each illustration.

Flipbook Animation

We also did flippbook animations, using 100 frames to make a 10 second video. I used characters form a game called Among Us, showing two crewmates walking together. To make this video, we used StopMotion Studio to take pictures of each frame and put it all together to get the animation.

StopMotion Studio Interface

Using StopMotion Studio again, we created an object animation. I used a variety of objects to try and recreate a magic show, with the “magic” appearance of the stuffed animal at the end.

Object StopMotion
Paper cut out Animation

For the last project I’m showing, we used paper cut outs and moving each paper individually to make the movement. We also used StopMotion Studio for this project, and I had a lot of fun, with this being my first 4 legged animation.