Explorations Animation and Presentation
Introduction
The Explorations unit is the final project of my junior year, Its idea is quite simple: explore new media and answer the question “How can you find, explore, and/or expand your passion?”. For my Animation project, I decided to design my own Pokémon and animate it as if it were in one of the games. For my Digital Media project, I decided to sing Happy Birthday, by Stevie Wonder, because it’s a song of celebration. Finally, for my English project, I decided to write a poem about my Insomnia.
Process
To create my animation, I started by designing Mantitan, a Water/Fighting-type Pokémon. I was inspired to make a Pokémon based off of a mantas shrimp, and would later base it on the pre-existing pokemon, Venipede as well. Next I began sketching all of the frames of my animation, and polishing them over with my final lineart. My next step was to color everything, which took me a while. I then added some GUI and other elements to bring the animation together.
My lineart
After all my elements were done, I imported everything into premier pro where I added linear movement with keyframes, added sound effects, and added music.
Final Video
Reflection
I am proud of how my animation turned out, because I accomplished a lot in the small timeframe we were given, and I think it looks alright as well. I valued brainstorming possible designs, as it isnt something I usually do. Altogether, I benefited from this project by gaining more experience in character design, and animation.
Explorations Music Recording Project
For this project, I chose to collaborate with my friend, Joshua, by singing a song with him in unison. We got to enter the audio recording studio at Freestyle Academy, and were introduced to the master system and were taught how to use it. Our goal was to reflect the celebratory tone of the original song. I believe that we didn’t achieve are goals, but I still value the experience of recording myself singing, as it was very fun.
Album Art
For this project, we went through the process of using the music recording studio. The takeaways that we gained from it was that it was surprising how clear our voices came out after we used the microphones in the studio. Learning how to use the master control machine that was for the microphones was an interesting experience. It was cool how the machine could control so many different aspects of the recording process. For example, we could control how loud we could hear each other, how loud the audio of the backtrack was, and also how loud we could hear the other person in the other room. All the kinds of functions in that single machine were straightforward to understand. We just had to press a few buttons and turn the volume knob until it was in the right place. Another thing that stood out to us was the different kinds of instruments, many of the instruments we haven’t seen before. It was almost tempting to play around with some of them especially since they looked set up already. Overall, our experience in the music recording room is positive and it seems like something useful for future projects.
Us in the recording studio
Editing our recordings in pro tools
Explorations Poem
Introduction
I decided to write my poem about insomnia because I struggled with sleeping from late may to early june due to the stress of the end of the school year. On the first few days of the project, we had a professional poet come to our class, who helped us make a couple of warmup poems. I wrote about the flaws of the schooling system, as our assignment was to write a poem based offf of a newspaper article. Next I wrote a poem about death, as our assignment was to compile different lines from pre-existing poems to create a franken-poem. Finally, I wrote a poem about not understanding poetry, as our assignment was to write about how poetry made you feel.
click to read – all of my poems
Poem
Pyramid of Night
Jumped into night free of sleep
Black eyed day, figures sink away
A moon of silence, just as I
All the Freedom I used to seek
A moon, a sun, no stars
All the work surrounding me
All my freedom all my past
All my future will, and dreams
Jumped throughout the day
Black, energetic night
There was me, there was nothing
There was me there was everything
