Documentary Magazine Article
This was the first major assignment that incorporated skills and projects from all three classes at Freestyle. Through this, I learned a lot about connecting different forms of art and media. In the research paper, I combine two different writing styles of a typical research paper and a creative story. The writing process was hard, but also an enjoyable challenge for me. I absolutely love writing and want to pursue the topic in the future, so the writing portion of this project really helped me expand on how I write. Adapting this writing into a magazine article was a first for me, and helped me express my writing artistically. Adding graphic design elements and formatting the piece into a much more visually appealing way allowed me to gain a new perspective on digital media as a whole. It was a fun challenge to do this and try it for the first time.
See https://freestyleacademy.rocks/~VeeL/documentary/ for more details on this much larger project!
Explorations Project: An Illustrated Poem
I had so much fun with this project. Poetry is something I’m very passionate about, and putting one of my own poems into an illustrated form like this was such an interesting process. I’m happy with the increased symbolism I achieved and the illustrations in general. I learned a lot during the process, like how breaking up the poem into pages takes a lot of thought, how to best place the lines on the illustrations and making them stand out, and more about the coloring process through experimentation. I would definitely do this again, and I’m actually hoping to do this with several more of my poems.
See https://freestyleacademy.rocks/~VeeL/explorations/ for more on this piece!
Stop Motion and 2D Digital Animation Composite
This project was a lot of fun, since it was a combination of stop motion animation and digital animation. We initially designed our characters and their backstories, names, and personalities based on their design. Then we created the actual puppets. We used wire, plastic, stuffing, fabrics, and a mix of other materials to create this posable puppet. What was also fun was how unique this project was for everybody. We all designed different characters that we used different methods to make into physical puppets.
See https://freestyleacademy.rocks/~VeeL/narrative-1/ for more details!
Zenith 3D Animation
To be honest, I was so tired by the end of Senior year. I knew for this final project, I wanted to make a simpler animation, but still be a work I feel passionate about working on. So, I decided to experiment with Blender’s Grease Pencil tool for 3D animation, and bring back an old 3D that I could expand upon. Grease Pencil is something I’ve wanted to try for a while, and now was the perfect opportunity. This tool is basically drawing 2D lines on a 3D object, and if used correctly, can make the 3D model appear 2D. This was still a fairly simple and stress free task too; I already knew the basics of 3D and 2D animation, so I wasn’t learning a completely new skill. I also included a lot of humor, which lightened my mood while working on the whole project and actually made it fun for me. I brought back a model from a previous project that I struggled with a lot, and tried to turn it into something I was actually happy with.
I already had some prior knowledge of using Blender, so starting this project wasn’t too difficult. The hardest part by far was figuring out the Grease Pencil tool. It was hard to manage the 2D lines in a 3D space, because if you change the camera angle after drawing a line, the line appears to shift. Basically, it was hard to get the line in the right spot and find the right angle to draw it. Even though I struggled, I decided to embrace the unpredictability of it. I made the style messier than what I initially intended, and tried to make the model look like it was drawn by a little kid. I ended up really liking this style too, and will definitely use creative improvising like this in future projects.
If I were to go back and change anything, I would spend less time trying to perfect Grease Pencil so I had more time to animate. I ended up cutting a lot from my original storyboards, and although the final storyline still works, I think it would be a lot more fun to be able to animate the entire thing.
Overall, this project turned out to be extremely fun for me to do. I loved reworking an old model I originally hated, and building upon my 3D modeling skills by adding 2D elements. This was a valuable experience to end off my Senior year with, and I’m very grateful to be able to do and share this work with Freestyle Academy and the rest of the world before graduation.
See https://freestyleacademy.rocks/~VeeL/zenith/ for more on my Zenith project!