In this Narrative unit we explored the art behind story telling. In English we wrote an actual story about whatever topic we wanted, I chose to do my story about a college student going through struggles with both his academics and his personal life. While we were making this story we were learning illustrator in Design so that when we were finished our story we could make an illustration about it. We used Illustrator to draw our character; however, we didn’t actually draw our character. That was too easy, we named 5 traits about our character and then we found one animal, reptile, sea fairing creature, insect, and bird that corresponds to a trait. After we choose our different creatures, we drew them on Illustrator and merged them to form one giant made up creature. Then we made a background that had some connection to a setting in our story, but was also unique. This came out to a huge illustrator project that reflects our story from English.
During this unit I improved in so many ways, I improved upon my Illustrator skills, my ability to not procrastinate, and story telling. Even just looking back to the beginning of this unit I realize how far we have come in only one unit. I valued this unit for all that it taught me including story telling. I really hate writing, but in this unit I learned a lot about story telling techniques and I started to enjoy it. My original story was really dragged out and not very descriptive, I ended up re-writing it 3 times but at the end I fell like I ended up with a good final product.
“Character Questionnaire”
It was harder than we thought just to think up a character with distinct traits character quirks, a personality, and motives. This Character Questionnaire was meant to help us create a character, in a certain background, and with definable traits.
What’s your name?
How old are you? I am twenty three years old
What are your two most physically defining features that cause people to recognize you? I wear glasses and I always have two different socks on.
How do you typically dress? What do your particular clothing choices / accessories say about you? I always wear shorts or sweat pants depending on the season and weather. I also always wear a sports team shirt or a shirt that has some movie reference on it. However; I usually have a jacket covering it which suggests that I am scared to show everyone how much of a nerd I am.
Empty your pockets. What’s there?: Gum, a paper clip, my phone, headphones, and my ID
Where were you born / where have you grown up? I was born in Hawaii, but I grew up in Los Angeles
Where do you live now? (give a location and type of living space, for ex: renting a room in a mansion in Los Altos Hills): I now rent an apartment with two of my friends, and we live a block away from the UCLA campus.
Where are your favorite places in the world and why? My favorite places in the world are the movie theatre and the beaches in Hawaii
What’s your primary mode of transportation? My primary mode of transportation is my bike, and public transportation
How do you make a living (what’s your source of income?) I don’t make money, I just accumulate college debt, but I do work at the local ice cream shop year round. I also have a summer internship with apple.
Who are your parents? My father is a college professor at UCLA, and my mother is a politician running for mayor
Do you have any siblings? I have a younger and older brother
Are there any other family members/relatives that are of special significance to you?
Did you have a happy childhood? Explain: Yes, but it was kind of dull because I never truly found my calling until my Sophomore year of college
Where have you attended school? (And are you in school now? If so, how’s it going?) I am attending UCLA for graduate school, and I just finished undergraduate from USC where I transferred after two years of community college.
Are you religious? Why/why not? I am not religious but I will raise my kids to make them a little religious
What do you like to read? Watch on TV? Favorite movies? Music? Other art/entertainment? I love watching the CW’s arrowverse shows on TV as well as shows like Star Wars the clone wars All American and How I Met Your Mother. Some of my favorite movies are deadpool, the mcu, Star Wars, Ride Along 1 not 2, and 21 + 22 Jump Street
How do you best express yourself? I like to listen to music and draw to express how I am feeling.
Do you have art/music talent? Not really but I do like sketching sometimes
What is your taste in art/music? I just listen to whatever is on the radio or today’s hits
What is your most prized possession? My limited edition Tony Stark prescription Edith glasses
What is your greatest achievement? Graduating from USC’s undergraduate program.
Relationships:
Are you in a romantic relationship? With whom? Describe them by choosing several of the details listed above. No
Are you satisfied with the relationship? Why/not? Not in one
Do you want to be in a relationship? With whom, and why? If not, why not? Yes but I don’t know who
How did your last relationship end? It ended when we went to different graduate schools
What kind of friends do you have? My friends are other nerds
Name your best friend. Why is he/she your best friend? My best friend is named
Name the friend with who you are the least satisfied. What’s the problem? I don’t have any dissatisfying friends
Do you have enemies / rivals? Name them, and briefly indicate the conflict you have with them. I don’t have any enemies
What conflicts among your friends or enemies concern you the most? I am concerned because we are about to get a new apartment and only three of my closest friends can move in with me.
Look deeper:
What’s weird or quirky about you? Why do you think you have this weirdness / quirkiness? Is there a story behind it others don’t know about? I am constantly shifting and squirming. It is because when I was a kid I was shot with a stray bullet from across the street where a convenience store was getting robbed, and it still hurts to sit on the spot that I got shot in.
What do you wish others would understand about you? That my dad being a really harsh teacher should have no affect on how they view me as a person.
What don’t you want others to know about you? (This could be a painful or embarrassing secret): That I secretly want to be living in Hawaii, but the colleges aren’t very good there
What do you worry about? Why? I worry about my future because I want to be successful, but I also know how hard that is.
Do you think you are a leader or follower? Why? I am a leader because I have a lot of good ideas and I am very good at directing other people’s talents in useful ways.
Are you practical or a dreamer? Why? I am a practical, but I still like to dream of a future where I have achieved everything I want to in life.
What’s your greatest fear – what’s terrifying to you? I am terrified of having no impact on the world, with just living for about 65-85 years with significance to my life.
What’s your greatest regret in life? That I didn’t play a sport in college
Who has let you down? Have you told them? If you haven’t, what would you say to them? No one has ever really let me down in any significant way.
When have you let yourself down? Explain: I let myself down in my Junior year of highschool, when I messed up my grades so bad that I had to go to a community college for two years before transferring to USC
Who do you need to stand up to? Have you ever stood up to anyone, or have you tried to stand up to this person? How it go? I once stood up to my high school bully, we got into a fight and I beat the shit out of him, but then all his friends came and beat the shit out of me
What do you want most out of life? (By the end of your life, you want to have…?) I want to be successful and raise my kids to have a fun good childhood
What do you want most this year? This year I aim to see my brothers more
What do you want most this week? To do well on all of my midterms
What do you want most today? I good steak dinner with a side of mashed potatoes
Choose at least 2 of the last 4 questions and explain: What’s stopping you from getting what you want?
I can’t really get a good steak dinner because it is an expensive dinner
I also can’t see my brothers more often because one of them is out of state living in Hawaii. He is older and lived there for about 8 years of his life and I only lived there for 3 years. So he misses it more than me. My younger brother is studying abroad for his junior year of college, and he is in Denmark where my fathers side is from. However, I will see both of them soon for Christmas
How do you think you need to change? I need to become more outgoing. I have a lot of friends but I never really go to a lot of parties or anything like that
How do others think you need to change? Other people think that I need to spend less time playing video games and procrastinating
How do you feel about at least one of those people who thinks you need to change?
I think that they are all right, but they all also have stuff to change about themselves. For example, my parents often tell me to not procrastinate so much but they are both all work no play and need to loosen up a bit.
Plot Map
This assignment was meant to help us have a place to start, we made a rough description of our character to help us bring good visual detail to our story. We also set up a narrative structure as many stories do follow a similar, but sometimes different structure as they go through their story. The Narrative structure was meant to make our story not just a block of text, but a well flowing story with a beginning, middle, and end.
Rough Description:
Tony is having a really hard time, he just can’t catch a break. First he just got dumped by his girlfriend. Then tell the story of how that happened. Then he failed his multi variable calculus midterm, then talk about the story of how that happened and it was partly because he couldn’t focus because his girlfriend dumped him.
Narrative structure:
Explosion
Complications
Rising Action
Climax
Falling Action
Resolution
Status que
The English Short Story
The Narrative project for english was a short story, which was the narrative we based the rest of our digital media and design projects on. This assignment was basically to craft a PG story about a character we made up. Mr. Greco incuraged us to write what we know, or to make a story about things that we at least have a modicum of experience in. I took my inspiration from my brother who had recently gone off to college. The idea of college is also hovering over all high school students, especially juniors. Using this inspiration I chose to write about something I knew, struggling with a computer science project, and school in general.
One of the things we did in digital media to supplement our story, was we recorded ourselves reading the poem. After we had the raw recording we added and intro and exit music to match the tone of the story. We also added in some sound affects that are necessary for the story.
For this whole process of writing and recording our story I learned the value of redundancy. While writing my initial short story I had no clue were I was going, and my initial final draft was a horrible 5 page 1 paragraph rant about a character with very little emotion and visual description. I re-wrote it into a much more concise 2 page, story about a college student named Tony who was having a problem with both his academic and social life. However, it was still missing something, I was telling the story instead of showing it, there was very little visual detail and not enough character development. The third and final time I re-wrote it I did my best to incorporate more visual detail, and character development. Even though it was difficult for me I think I did an ok job.
Sometimes backtracking is required to achieve progress
Tony is sitting alone in his dorm on UCLA’s campus where he studies to become a game designer. It nears the end of the fourth quarter of his freshman year. Banging his head on the table, Tony was at a loss. He couldn’t get his stupid code to work, everything he tried just created more problems. He could feel his father’s expectations weighing down on him, the burning sensation crawling through the pit of his stomach, and most of all the bitter taste of failure. Tony sat there in his tiny dorm that he shared with two other students, both of whom were being loud and obnoxious. He couldn’t think of anything to make it work, he tried every algorithm and strategy he could think of to fix his stupid game, but all he could think of was Robin. Robin was his ex-girlfriend who he had broken up with a few weeks before. “Lamp shattering,” Tony steps into the common area of his dorm to see that a bunch of drunk idiots has knocked over a lamp. Tony yelled at them with a passionate rage, “What the fuck are you guys doing, it’s 3 o clock in the afternoon and you guys are getting drunk and breaking shit.” Grabbing his laptop and charger he stormed off to find a quiet place to work.
Tony walked the mile and a half to Starbucks; he hadn’t planned on getting a drink, but he found himself wanting to order a triple shot espresso. He sat down and worked for hours, the peace and quiet aided him so that he was able to solve part of the problem. His code still wouldn’t work but he at least made progress. Just as Tony was thinking of going back to his dorm, he saw Robin, their eyes met. She orders awkwardly and sat as far away as she could. They both sat there for 10 minutes or so before he gathered the will to walk over there and talk to her. He walked up to her and awkwardly said, “Hi.” Rudely she said, “What do you want, I am busy.” Tony responded apologetically, “I am sorry.” Robin replayed raising her voice, “Oh, you are, well I am sorry too, sorry I ever loved you.” Other people started looking at them weirdly. Tony said in a hushed tone, “can we talk about this somewhere else.” She started to pack up with a dismayed, “Fine, I will give you five minutes. I’ll come to your dorm at 10 o clock tonight.” With a slight head nod Tony replied, “Yes, and Thank you.” Tony woke for the third time that night to the incessant noise outside his dorm. A fire struck within him, the burning desire to go shut all of his annoying roommates up. Not being able to sleep Tony went to work on his code. Still not being able to figure out his code he briefly considered asking his dad for help. However, Tony was still avoiding his parents. Tony was avoiding his parents because they were mad at him for breaking up with Robin. Both of his parents though that Robin was the perfect girl for him. Although, perhaps the more prominent factor for them was that she was a lot like both of them and they all shared a lot in common.
“Knock, Knock, Knock” Robin was knocking on Tony’s door. Tony opened the door to see Robin sanding there, there was a long awkward silence then Robin said, “hi,” Tony also replied saying, “hi,” after another long awkward pause, Robin said, “I am sorry for being late, I didn’t want to come, but I also didn’t want leave things the way we did.” Tony replied, “Thank you for coming, I just wanted to tell you why I left you and hope that you will take me back.” Uncomfortably Robin said, “I’m listening,” Tony explained saying, “I am sorry, I just wanted a change. I was your boyfriend for over 4 years, you were the first person I ever went out with. I didn’t want you to be the only person that I would ever go out with. I am so bored of the same old routine, we have known each other for so long that nothing is a surprise, nothing is spontaneous. I want the excitement of a new life, I wanted to have the real college experience. I just wanted to take a break for a few months, but I realize now that I don’t want to explore. I don’t want the college experience; I just want to be with you.” After a long pause Robin responded saying, “I still want to be with you, I just can’t have you dump me again, I don’t want to get back together and then have you backtrack and want time away again.” Almost as if a light bulb light inside Tony’s mind he responds saying, “wait backtrack that’s it. I need to use a backtrack algorithm to fix my code.” Robin, “What?” Tony replied saying, “Just wait I need to write this algorithm.” After a long pause of Tony typing Robin said,“Screw this, Screw you, I am leaving.”
Tony got to work on his backtracking algorithm, it took a little while, but he eventually got his program to work. He fell into a deep depression after Robin left, and even though he received an A in his computer science class he wasn’t content. Tony realized that he would never be truly happy in life if he continued living like he was. So he switched to become a psychology major. Tony spent the rest of his life learning about the mind in search of happiness. THE END
Honors Analytical essay
In his story, In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway describes a modernists impression that is split into many short stories. These short Stories are emblematic of the troubles and experiences in war time. These stories show Hemingway’s own opinions at the time. The main theme of the book is an individual experience, it is written almost as if the reader is the narrator. The reader is shown the main events throughout these stories; however Hemingway gives no background information or context for the stories. The reader is given very little about the outside world, only what the characters in these stories do. Hemingway likes to write stories that are relevant to how he feels at the time, current events, or sometimes just how life is.
One of the stories in In Our Time, The Quai at Smyrna, has the author describes a normal day in the life of an ordinary soldier. Similarly to the other stories, Hemingway doesn’t give the reader context, or even basic information about the setting of the story. In The Quai at Smyrna, Hemingway doesn’t provide information about which war it is, against who, but it can be inferred that the American forces and the Turkish forces are working together. In this story we are given very in depth descriptions of the harm happening to everyone. Through the eyes of the main character Hemingway describes how the main protagonist didn’t mind witnessing women giving birth to children conceived through rape, some women even gave birth to dead babies because they were continually being raped while pregnant. The main character even said it was not a free or fun way to live but he didn’t mind. This shows Hemingway’s fondness for writing about the dark side of life shown in the story The Quai at Smyrna.
Ernest Hemingway liked to write what he knew. He also liked to write what was experiencing at the time, and his feelings about it. Hemingway was a complicated person and kept on getting married and divorced. During the short amount of time between wives he wrote a book called Men Without Women, which depicted Hemingway’s feelings about women, “The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”(Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women). Hemingway thought that Women are only a distraction for men. That they were good lovable people, but will inevitably and inescapably drive you insane as he says, “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”(Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women) Hemingway wrote this directly after breaking up with his wife, and it clearly expresses his frustration with his former wife. Nevertheless due to his complicated relationship with women he was re-married less than 1 month later. He remained married up until his time of death, when he killed himself at the age of 61 in the year 1961.
In another story Indian Camp the reader is shown an interesting relationship between a boy(Nick Adams), and his father who is known to the reader as the doctor. We could have this relationship because of Hemingway’s own strained relationship with his father, seeing as his father killed himself. In this story Hemingway describes a young man of around age 14 going to an Indian village with his father. The narrator of the story is this kid, he describes in great detail his adventure to the village. Once he arrives at the village him and his father are led to a hut where there is a women on the bottom bunk who had been in labor for two days and needed a doctor. This is why they had been called there, his father was a doctor and immediately got to work to help this woman. Nick’s father had to perform surgery because the baby had gotten flipped over and needed to be flipped back over. After they successfully delivered the baby Nick went outside and started to reflect about his experience as his father inter, he decided that he didn’t like it. Then Nick’s father went to go find the father of the baby that was just born to say congratulations. Nick’s father found the man he had his throat slit, and the razor was next to him. In this story we see a young boy and his complicated relationship with his father. Again Hemmingway is using events of his own life to inform his writing. He had a difficult and unresolved relationship with his father who killed himself.
Ernest Hemingway uses short stories to leave a feeling of wonder in the reader of In Our Time. He tries to make the reader become attached to his many stories, and characters. In his story we even see some evidence to support the idea that In Our Time’s main character Nick, resembles Hemingway himself.We see this idea that Nick could in fact resemble Hemingway in the story The Three-Day Blow. In this story Hemingway shows Nick under age drinking with his friend, “He went out to the kitchen and came back with two glasses and a pitcher of water. Nick reached the whiskey bottle from the shelf above the fireplace… They sat in front of the fire and drank the Irish whiskey…” This quote shows Nick stealing his father’s alcohol to drink suggesting they both have a problem as Nick’s father has boos and drinks a lot, and Nick is stealing the alcohol to drink. In real life both Hemingway and his father had drinking problems. So argue that was part of the reason they both killed themselves at a young age. Nick also resembles Hemingway in the short story Cross-Country Snow. This story depicts Knicks love for skiing, ““There’s nothing really can touch skiing, is there?” Nick said,“The way it feels when you first drop off on a long run.” “Huh,” said George. “It’s too swell to talk about.”” This quote shows how much Nick loves skiing, as he says that nothing can even come close to feeling. Hemingway describes all the reasons Nick loves skiing, but it is the same reason that he loves skiing. One of Hemingway’s favorite pastimes was skiing, and we see that through the words and actions of Nick.
Throughout the book In Our Time, Hemingway depicted his fondness for writing what he knew. Nick, while different, had very many similar traits to Hemingway. Some of these traits and hobbies were not good and perhaps led to Hemingway’s end. Just like his father, Hemingway died from self-inflicted injury. However, his unique writing style stays with us.
This Honors Essay was extremely challenging for me for many reasons. Chief among them being that I am horrible at writing essays. I also spent a lot of time analyzing Hemingway’s writing and doing research, but I couldn’t find much to write about. I was also busy re-writing my story multiple times so I was pre occupied with other English work. In the end this is my least favorite project here at freestyle and one of my worst essays in my high school career.
Geometric Light Cover
Iron Teksler(Artist Statement)
In our first semester Illustrator final for digital media we got to illustrate anything we wanted. I chose to make and Iron Man mask and the arc reactor symbol to show my love for marvel movies, and in specific Iron Man. I really liked this project because I had the freedom to create an artwork about a topic I love, and also advance my skills in Illustrator. This project helped me to realize that when making an Illustrator document into a physical form, it might not turn out the way you think. For this project we were carving out the design, so my preliminary draft would have just been the outline of an Iron Man head. No inside details. It was very difficult for me to conceptualize at the beginning but eventually I realized that I had to make line breaks in the outer shape so that it would appear as an implied shape made out of lines. This allowed the eyes mouth and other details in the middle to show. However, I also had to change a lot of the small details I made as the cutter was not that accurate.
This final also taught me the price of getting behind in digital media. It was the final week and I was so focused on other classes that I forgot to do the final and I started the day before it was due, the Thursday of finals week. Even though I did a lot of work on it that day I still hadn’t realized that the completely closed head wouldn’t work. Mr. Flo told me it wouldn’t work after I had thought I was finished, but it was late and I had to leave. The following day we didn’t have freestyle classes so I finished my other finals and then hung out with friends until 7. After that I went to go watch The Rise Of Skywalker, a 2 and a half hour movie, after which I got home and worked on the project. I finished minutes before it was due, and I submitted the project around 11:50. While everything did work out I learned the lesson to keep track of projects and make sure I finish them on time.
Illustration Project Sticker
Mark 23(Artist Statement)
In this illustrator project I used many different and new tools that I had yet to explore. I used these tools to help transform my iron man geometric light cover design from last semester. As this object was made into a different medium I got to add color and different types of details. With the geometric light cover I had to limit my design to an outline of the head with line breaks and far less detail, as the detail would cause problems when printing. With my new design of a sticker I was able to add all of my smaller details, along with some interesting colors. The initial challenge was to simply create the shapes that made the mask; however, afterward I had to determine the colors of all the different shapes. I came up with about 6 different possibilities of color combinations, and gradients. In the end I went with the most unique gradient that has more of a metallic look to it.
In this project I really began to value the gradient tool as it opens possibilities not only for making something cool and a unique color, but it can also show things like shadow, glare, metal, and much more. I wish I had realized the scope of the gradient tool in some of my earlier projects. In this project I also learned the value of doing something right the first time. As I was making some of my details I made small mistakes that were quite noticeable, I attempted to fix them by just filling in that space with other shapes. However, this led to problems once I tried to change colors, add gradients, and especially and strokes. Next time I will do one specific part to perfection before I move on, as it will become more difficult to fix later.
I had a lot of fun with this project, and I hope to keep on doing Illustrator projects so that I may further expand my skills, and become unstoppable with Illustrator.
Design
For our Design work in the conceptual unit we focused on doing a lot of Illustrator work. We initially learned the basics of Illustrator through a few early project were we traced images, exploring all of the tools. Once we had gotten to a sufficient level of skill and knowledge with Illustrator we started to make our creature that embodies our English character. This was a really fun process and we improved upon out Illustrator skills so much throughout this process. We found that once we finished both the creature and the background some of our early designs were at a noticeably lower level than the rest of our project, and so we did some revisions to get our initial designs up to par.
Illustrator practice projects
Learning Linear Perspective
learning to use pen tool and gradient
Practice Tracing an Image to help with pen tool
Practice Text in Illustrator, and making text into a shape
To practice gradient in a circle
Practicing gradient text
After we learned all of these skills we put all of this work together into our big project, the creature and background that represents our story.
Sometimes Backtracking Is Required To Achieve Progress(Artists Statement)
My short story is about a young man named Tony who is a freshman at UCLA. During his time there he struggles with both his love life and his classes as he strives to be the best he can. Tony has recently broken up with his girlfriend and is now struggling to focus on his coding project that he must finish. I have chosen to represent the scene where he figures out what he must do to fix his programming, by putting his dorm in the background.
This project was amazing and I had a lot of fun with it; however, at the beginning I had no idea how hard, tedious, and time consuming it would be. I had a basic outline of my creature pretty quickly and I thought I was almost done, but I didn’t consider any of the details that I hadn’t done yet. The devil was in the details, the details took so much more time than anything else. For the creature, the details of the turtle shell and the face took the most time because the face needed to be scaly like a reptile, and the turtle shell needed to have a bunch of subtle lines and patterns on it. For the background, the moon took the most time because it is completely comprised of small shapes that I filled with white or black to show the details of the moon. This took a really long time because I had to zoom in and draw each shape at 64000% zoom. I made my creature up of many different animals, insects, etc to resemble the main character from my story. I used a turtle shell to show that my character, Tony, is sort of a shy introvert that would rather have alone time in his dorm than party. I used the face of a chameleon to show that he is not very noticeable and is good at blending in. I chose to use the wings of a crow to illustrate how he is a conniving, tricky, and a smart person. I also used a parrots beak to show his intelligence and capability for real one on one human connections. Overall, I think my project came out pretty well; however, if I was able to do it again I would want to parts of the creature. I would want to give him legs, have no tail, and have a different face using fur.
We also learned about color theory and the principles of design. These are some of my drawings that I used to learn these design principles.
