For the explorations unit in WebAudio, we created a website using responsive web design. The idea behind this website was to make it so that it was aware of the placv tform the user was visiting on. For example, if you are looking at my website from a desktop computer, it looks a certain way assuming the window is big enough. If you are viewing it on a phone, the layout is different.
This is also the last website I made at freestyle. It displays work from the Blink and humor units.
I’d like to take a moment now to reflect on my experience at freestyle, as it has almost come to an end. It’s quite a bittersweet thing kissing something like Freestyle goodbye. I’ve had my share of things I’ve produced here that could have been better, as well as my share of things I’m proud of. But beyond that, the people here are truly a community, the teachers and students alike are incredible people. I’m proud to be membered among the students of Freestyle, and I know I will not forget my time here, as I have learned much about website creation, visual design, audio engineering, how to write an effective and entertaining research paper and a host of other things.
The goal of the Blink unit was to explore our subconscious. We had several activities where we would delve into the processes that went on in our subconscious. We read a book called “Blink” by Malcom Gladwell. It is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read, and it goes into detail about the ways in which our subconscious works. We also wrote Blink writes based on given prompts and made art based on these same prompts. The art I made based on the prompt of "anticipation" is below. The idea behind the piece is this:
For my amplified piece, I took a drawing I made with colored pencils and gave it a dreamy effect using various filters. The drawing is of an alien race crash landing on a planet already inhabited by other aliens, these native aliens are looking on as ghost like creatures walk towards them. My piece is symbolic; it represents an extraordinary circumstance, my Blink write had to do with the idea that the life we live, while it might seem mundane much of the time, really is extraordinary, and that there are so many things to be excited about and thankful for. In my amplified piece, I have a picture of a person in the foreground pointing towards one of the incoming ghost aliens. In the background on a hill in the distance, a group of the natives also watch in wonder. The point I am trying to get across in my piece is that in almost any circumstance it is always possible to step back and say “that’s amazing.” Whether it be referring to life in general or specific things, even in the most trying of times, there is almost always something to point at and say “It’s a beautiful world.”
The new technique I used in Photoshop was creating a “soft glow” on parts of the image. The goal of that was to give the image a dreamy quality. The new font I used was “Escape Great” because it has a very stand out quality, and I wanted that because I had the opacity lowered on the font. The new plugin I used was the “CircusDaze” plugin because it allowed me to add more dreamy effects to the photo and manipulate the feeling it produces.
The humor unit is exactly what it sounds like. We each studied comedy of our choice and then performed a comedy routine of our own creation. I chose to deal with absurdist humor. My comedy routine is me, as a wizard, ranting about getting run over by a cop on a residential street near a school. I make the situation as ridiculous as possible, especially in regards to the cop. My goal was to challenge negative stereotypes about police officers, and to get the point across through exaggeration that officers of the law aren’t always jerks on power trips.
Caution: I do make use of explicit language at one point in my routine. The rationale behind this will make sense when you watch the video, but the idea is that the cop accuses me of swearing at him, saying that I told him he f*cking sucks. I respond by saying that I didn’t say he “f*cking sucks” and he arrests me then and there on grounds of swearing at him. The goal of that part is exaggeration of the idea that police officers try to provoke people into doing things that the officer can arrest them for. Again, with the end goal of challenging these stereotypes through satire.
Humor Design Artist statement:
For my humor project, I drew a picture of a police officer holding a gun about to arrest me. He is arresting me because I said that “he sucked.” I said this because he ran me over in his car going ninety on a twenty five. He is also holding a doughnut. The main type of humor I used was absurd humor, there was also an element of caricature to it. Though I was trying to challenge the stereotypes made about police officers by exaggerating them.
I drew this entirely in Photoshop with the help of reference images for some of the elements. I made use of brushes to aid in the creation of plants. I used many different layers in this project, I remember there being at least one hundred of them. I thought about taking some pictures and including them but I ended up just using drawings to keep a consistent style.
For the WebAudio explorations unit, we were to explore a technique in WebAudio that we didn’t previously know. I chose to learn about a number of third party plug ins that I installed to Pro Tools, which is a program for recording music (or any kind of audio.) The first plug in that I experimented with was something called a vocoder. A vocoder takes audio input and outputs it with a synthesiser sound. You’ll hear the vocoder in the background of the pre chorus. I learned how to use all the crazy knobs and settings on the vocoder. I also dealt a lot more with compression than I ever have, and utilized compression on vocal tracks in specific ways I had never done before. Jordan Albert was also in on the process.
