Introduction
For the narrative unit, I learned how to structure my stories and effectively communicate my emotions and include artistic elements in my writing. In English I was able to create a story that the readers would find easy to visualize and connect to. In Digital media I was challenge to use my storytelling skills and translate my story to graphic design and audio editing.
Illustrations
Reunited
For my light cover project I decided to create a representation of a universal topic, love. I named it “Reunited”. For this project, I used as inspiration, two of my all-time favorite fictional characters, Ruby and Sapphire, and the title from one of their centric episodes from Cartoon Network’s “Steven Universe”. Very often I’ve found myself admiring Rebecca Sugar’s work on the show and the topics she covers for an all-age audience. Love of all shapes and forms is only one of those many topics. In my light cover design, I hoped to capture the idea of how (quoting the main character of the show) “they’re [Ruby and Sapphire] so close, they cannot stand to be apart”. As the light cover is connected, you can notice how both characters are, in fact, together. Since early episodes of the show, it is explained how fusions were a representation of two gem’s relationship, Ruby and Sapphire formed Garnet, a gem who with time grew and learned more about who she was as her own person and the embodiment of Ruby and Sapphire’s love, thus also representing what self-love should be. It’s quite difficult to describe how the entire universe of fusions in Steven Universe works, but I do adore how Rebecca Sugar has put together a show that features important topics like these that had not been done in a cartoon before.
With my light cover project, I intended to create the symbols of both characters to represent this topic of all kinds of love, I really enjoyed creating this concept with Illustrator, I’ve been having a lot of fun using this program, knowing to identify the tools was very challenging but after being more familiarized with the app I really enjoyed using vectors and its anchors to change the figures to create the inner part of my design for the light cover which, are both character’s gemstones and how they look like in the show.
Facet-2F5L cut 5XG
Hello, my name is Sofia and for my Illustrator project, I decided to create a series of stickers as fan art from the show Steven Universe. I call it, “Facet-2F5L cut 5XG”, which references the origins of the very own Peridot, a main character from the show, that is present as part of these stickers. The message I tried to convey for this project was the individuality of oneself. Yet again, I am fascinated with the topics that Rebecca Sugar (creator of Steven Universe) covers in her show, for my stickers I wanted to create some “fanart” of Peridot and things that represent her and she loves. From her pumpkin friend to her stuffed alien. In the show, Peridot goes through a series of events that challenge her to change her perspective on a planet she was bound to destroy, she goes through a lot of character development from where she started as a “single-purpose gem” to her very own unique self. She gets to experiment with the ever-changing planet earth and throughout the show, she breaks the barrier that restricted her from discovering different options of who to be. The message, being more than I was intended to be, resonated with me a lot and it’s why I inspire from this character so much.
With my knowledge of how to use Illustrator, I found it very rewarding to have used this program to create one of my favorite characters with lines, adjusting the strokes, the fill and the colors for each one. In the end, I would look back and tried to improve the design to be more aesthetic and pleasing to the eye. I really like how the final piece came out and I’m glad that I was able to add more designs than originally planned.
Animation Projects
Visual Narrative
The purpose of this assignment was to come up with a short story that could tell a story in a short period of time. We formed and together we began sketching out concepts to for our animation until we found one we felt could communicate a topic that could resonate with us and our audience. After finishing up our second storyboard, we began creating our animation.
I had the opportunity to create this with my classmates, and good friends, Maya and Erin. Each of us were assigned a different role to create our story and put all our work together in After Effects at the end. Most of the animation was done in Photoshop, our main character and “the demon” (blob for the friends :p) were drawn frame by frame, however, background movement, special effects and background audio was all done in After Effects.
Our story was very based off the idea of how everyone has to face their inner demons, thus our title “Demonium”, latin for demon. At the beginning we are all so frightened of even accepting they exist that we try to ignore and run from them but eventually we can gain the strength to face them and overcome our fears. We wanted to create this story because we know that many people can relate to this challenge of facing your inner demons, this is why we chose to give our main character a plain look, this way our audience could easily connect with him and see themselves through him. We also decided to show little of the monster in our animation because everyone has a different perspective of what their greatest fears and challenges are, this is why when we created the monster we wanted him to deliver a frightening vibe. At the very end of the animation we are able to see how our main character is able to overcome their fear and by doing so, the color (representing accomplishment and peace of mind) returns to their world.
One of the challenges on doing this project was dealing with the short amount of time we had to get to our final animation. We had two weeks to create about a minute of animation and a lot of times it was tempting to go back and fix small details to perfecting the product but time did not allow for going back and changing a lot. It was very stressful but in the end our group scheduled accordingly and managed to finish our animation before deadline with a product we were both satisfied with and very proud of.
Mood Scene
The task for this project was to create a walk cycle of an original character that could convey a mood. I have to say, the creation of this entire project has been one of the works I’ve enjoyed doing the most in Freestyle.
We began by creating a set for our character to walk through. We were given all materials that we were to need and from there on it was up to us what became of our set. For this, my team decided to inspire our set from backgrounds of our favorite cartoons and base our mood from the relaxing and calm vibe that a forest would usually give you. We relied a lot on the lighting to communicate our mood, we used a slight shade of purple and green to give our forest a soft and relaxing scene.
Character Design
Now that we had our set ready, we had to create a character that would fit our scene. Individually, we sketched out a few ideas and came up with our characters. Then we drew them digitally and based on our drawings we created a doll resembling our character. This is Iris! You can read a brief description of who she is on the picture below.
I had a difficult time creating my character as a doll since I had previously never sewn anything before, this is why the dress in the doll changed a lot as I tried to work with the material I had in hand and the color concept that I already had.
Finally, after having used Dragon Frame to capture frame-by-frame our doll walking, I added the walk cycle video to After Effects along with our background set. In After Effects I was able to give my walk cycle light and even give my character a shadow! I think that was pretty cool. After Effects gave me the opportunity to add effects on videos that I’ve always wanted to learn how to do! After also adding some background music, I exported my final walk cycle.
There were a lot of challenges during the creation of this project but I really appreciated that with the help of my friends and teachers, I was able to find a solution to them. One of the biggest obstacles I had to face was adding a completely different digital walk cycle with a completely different character than planned, I was able to work with a tight schedule to create a new digital walk cycle to add to my final walk cycle video. Special thanks to Mr Cho for giving me support to get my final production done!
Story
Fresh Start
Her walk to school was usually very quiet. Hoping to avoid any eye contact, Brooke’s brown eyes often, if not always, are glued to her feet, watching her every step until she arrives at her destination. Attempting to fight her way to the other side of the classroom without being noticed, she clutched onto her notebook, keeping her head low with her short red hair hovering over her cheeks creating a small cave only for her. As soon as she got to her seat her eyes glued back to her notebook, where she would often scribble or begin to write some adventure for her mind to wander around. Her assigned seat at school was mostly lonely, although there were numerous students surrounding her, none of them made her any company, not unless the teacher was to assign a team project. Brooke was not a fan of these types of assignments, she was not surprised but every time she was assigned to work with someone else there was always the “Can you say something in English?” question or the “is your hair dyed or is it naturally like this?” or the “so, you’re American!” comment. At first, she found it flattering but she began to get tired of the same thing over and over, and none of these kids seemed to be interested in more than “it’s naturally like this,” as an answer, nothing more. Nobody, so far, even cared to remember her follow up answer: “and, actually, I was born in Glasgow…”
Who even knew where that was located? Well, at least she knew.
After today, it would mark her first month as a regular student to the school she went to. In the past, she had known no social interaction from kids her age, not as often at least. School used to be at her own home, her father had given the time of day for 5 days a week to be her teacher. He was a Superman kinda guy. Now, it was all new and different, as if she had completely traveled to a whole different planet… It was only Brooke in that small world. For the first time since she arrived, she had realized that maybe she wasn’t the only one who was stranded in their own small world. There was a girl across the room who was silent. Brooke knew the girl would sometimes look over at her, she could feel the glances and with the passing of the days, Brooke had grown curious as to why this girl seemed to be interested in her.
Brooke’s eyes hesitantly traveled to the girl across the room, with an ounce of hope the other girl was not looking back at her. As Brooke’s eyes landed on her, her heart began racing and immediately realized her mistake. The girl was looking right back at her. As quick as it started, Brooke’s eyes fell once more at her desk and froze. Her cheeks began turning to a red color without her noticing it. She knew the girl was looking at her now, like those times you knew someone was watching you and you felt their eyes on you. Lucky enough for Brooke, her hair created that mini cave over her eyes to keep her from “accidentally” looking over once more. For a single second, she thought of looking back. Maybe she should’ve.
The bell rang and cut through the moment allowing Brooke to escape the embarrassing scene. Brooke almost began to clumsily stumble as she hurried to organize her things to leave for break. She headed outside not long after holding onto a pen and notebook avoiding the possible stare of the girl.
Brooke let a big sight out and sat down at the farthest wall away from people she could find. She began scribbling some more in her notebook. Not very long after, she noticed a dark shade spread over the writing on her notebook and ever so slowly, it began to grow until the shadow had taken over her whole body. Her eyes moved up until they landed on a new girl, Brooke remembered her from class but she did not know the first thing about her.
“Hey, my name is Sol, we met before, Ms. Alvarez paired us up for the English assignment?”
Brooke hesitated at first, her hands clasped together on top of her notebook trying her hardest to keep them from fidgeting.
“Hi” Brooke managed to say as she placed her pencil down.
Sol sat right next to her blocking her from any possible view toward her other classmate, who Brooke didn’t notice, had followed her and sat on the other end of the wall and was looking at what was happening. Brooke’s eyebrows furrowed for a moment in confusion but soon her expression was replaced by a soft smile.
“Why are you still doing schoolwork? Class is done,” Sol pointed out looking down at the notebook Brooke had been holding onto
“I-it’s not really classwork” she began, half trying to close her notebook.
Catching the clue as she stared at her notebook, Sol nodded, chuckling, and changed the topic. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” Brooke replied timidly.
“My dad told me foreign students don’t usually stay in new schools for very long, is that true?”
Brooke furrowed her eyebrows once more “foreign?” she asked
Any other time, any other person and any other way, Brooke would’ve assumed she hadn’t meant to be rude, that she genuinely just wondered if Brooke was just staying for a while. The scene did not play like that.
“Yeah, you only stay here for a while,” Sol said beaming. “Or do you not understand what foreign means? You’re not from here”
After a pause trying to process, Brooke finally managed to reply.
“Excuse me?” her eyebrows rose in utter surprise.
Sol grinned and lifted her left eyebrow “you’re leaving soon right?”
“Why would I leave?”
“You don’t belong here. You’re not like us and this isn’t your country, at least that’s what you said. You weren’t born here so, why should you stay?”
Brooke couldn’t move and soon realized she had been biting her lip to try to keep herself calm. Once again she found herself trapped, only this time the situation was even more frightening. After what felt like an eternity, Brooke bottled it all her newfound feelings and spoke firmly: “This might not be the place where I was born, but it is the place I’ve loved since I can remember, it’s where I grew up and… it’s my home. That’s why I should stay, and I am sad to know that my presence is a bother to you, but I suppose you’ll have to get used to it.”
Stunned and left with little words, Sol stood up with a flushed face and marched away without bothering to look back. As soon as she was gone, Brooke rested her head back against the wall. She rubbed her temple feeling her body shaking, but there was a feeling of relief with that sensation. She had done something right, and for once, it felt good to have been her own best friend.
It couldn’t have been very long after Sol left when she would come to realize she was not alone anymore. The girl who had been looking at her in class had seen everything, and now she was approaching her. At first, without saying much, she sat next to her. Her hands holding a piece of paper.
“Hey, I’m Alina,” she said sitting in the same place where Sol had been shortly before. “I meant to say hi before.” She continued with a smile, ”that’s really cool what you did there, she usually gets away with that stuff.”
Brooke analyzed Alina’s eyes for a moment, they were green, hazel green she had not seen in anyone before, and they were truthful.
“I don’t know if this is a good moment…” Alina spoke. There was silence for a few seconds. Even with what had just occurred, Alina’s company had become comforting, and Brooke didn’t want her to leave.
Alina looked down at the paper she was holding and Brooke’s eyes followed as she handed her that same paper.
“I hope you didn’t think I was stalking you,” she laughed.
Brooke fixed her eyes on the paper. It was her. It was a drawing of her.
“You have really pretty facial features,” Alina pointed out.
Brooke hesitated, unable to find the right words to describe her gratitude. She’d never come to imagine that her first encounter with Alina would be as significant as this.
“That’s very kind of you,” Brooke said with a smile stuck on her face.
“Well, call it my act of kindness of the day,” she chuckled.
Brooke stared at the drawing for a few seconds before she looked back up at Alina as she said, “So, you’re from Glasgow…”