For our first unit of the Senior year, our goal was to answer the question, “Who am I?” For the most part, we did this through our essays in English, where we wrote about our beliefs and values. Here, I’m putting some of the things I wrote and the related production projects.

This I Believe

The purpose of this project was to write about the thing that we believe most strongly and present it, not in a persuasive way necessarily, but in a way that illustrates why we believe what we believe. For me, my belief is that what makes my life meaningful is the people that I meet and love. In English class, we wrote a short essay about our belief, and in Digital Media, we made a video of the essay. Here is what I wrote:

I have never really grappled with difficult questions, like the meaning of life. But the answer to that question dawned on me very suddenly, in the context of violin. For me, what gives my life meaning is the people I love.

I’m a regular ABC (American Born Chinese). I started playing violin when I was six years old. At that time, I couldn’t really say that I enjoyed violin at all; I only liked it when I could show off to my friends. When I was seven, I almost quit twice. The reason why I kept playing was because the music school I went to had a policy where you had to tell the lady at the front desk that you were quitting a month in advance. For both of the times I tried to quit, within that little month-in-advance, I backtracked and wanted to keep playing. Looking back, that was a very smart policy.

Ten years later, I cannot imagine my life without violin. Honestly, violin is basically my entire personality, which is probably not good, but the fact of the matter is that I actually love the violin now. It could have just been an effect of the time, but I really think that it was because I had found a community around violin, and through that community, I found meaning in my instrument.

I can remember the moment I realized that I loved violin. I could immediately identify the source of my feelings: my orchestra. The thing about my orchestra (California Youth Symphony) is that we have a summer camp before the season starts where we basically go to a forest and play our instruments for eight hours a day. On paper, that doesn’t sound very interesting, but that summer camp is what creates the close community that I love and made me actually care about classical music. That and our orchestra manager has given me a lot of food over the years, so I am eternally indebted to her.

There isn’t anything that I really like about the violin itself. It hurts to play, it kind of sounds like screeching, and violin music is generally very technically difficult. However, it is my mentors and my friends, the connection that I have with others, that has made me enjoy it so much.

(since making the video, I have revised the essay)

To make this video, I recorded myself reciting my essay and compiled a bunch of images together using Adobe After Effects.

Mandala

Because it was college essay season, one of our projects was supposed to be relaxing. Using Adobe Illustrator, we created mandalas. Since it’s a part of the Reflections unit, I put in my personal flair by adding lots of hearts, animals, and plants.

I love wombats. Here is a “process” video, which I actually made after finishing the mandala.

We also made a colored one, and I decided to make an infinite burger.

Artist Statement

In creating these mandalas, I valued the opportunity that I had to express myself in a very low-stakes way. Making mandalas on Adobe Illustrator, you can draw almost anything and it will still look fine because of all of the symmetry. For both mandalas, I just drew whatever came to mind. My black and white mandala has plants and animals on it, because I love plants and animals, and for my colored mandala, I was just inspired by the idea of an infinite burger. This assignment was a good way to start getting used to drawing things again, because I really didn’t draw much over the summer.

Since this quarter’s overarching theme is “Reflections,” I think that through the mandala, I learned that I value expression over abstract beauty. The prettiest mandalas usually have lots of floral and geometric shapes, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it that way. I wanted to share my love of wombats, and my idea of an infinite hamburger, so I did it my way. Even though my products aren’t really super beautiful and awe-inspiring, I’m happy with them because they express me.

Photoshop

We learned how to paint and use some more advanced features of Photoshop. Personally, I have been painting digitally for at least four years now, and I have been making photo composites with Photoshop for a while too, so I kind of felt like what we did in this project was a repeat of what I already knew. There were a couple tools we learned that I hadn’t used before though, and I’m glad to have learned them.

Painting

For this project we were supposed to make use of brush packs to paint something. Honestly, I’ve forgotten what I used, but I think it was either the Kyle gouache pack or the Kyle oil pastel pack. I didn’t use any special effects on this painting.

Artist Statement

With this painting, I wanted to make use of the new Photoshop brushes I got. I used the Kyle gouache brushes. The thing that I struggled most with was an idea to paint. I wanted to draw something more complex. I wanted to draw a fork going into a cake but I couldn’t find a good reference for it, so I just went with something easier. I draw a lot of faces. I wanted to mix up the colors because faces are pretty cliché. I thought it would be fun to have all the colors have the same saturation and lightness, and just different hues. I like the rainbow in the eyebags and the stroke shapes in the eyebrows and hair. I just wish that I chose to draw something more interesting, and that I could have tried to get more of the paint texture in there.

Whenever I paint stuff, it makes me really appreciate how creative people can be, because I always look at other people’s art and wonder how they come up with such good ideas.

More Photoshop things to come…

Animation

For this part of the year, we just worked on learning the fundamental techniques of 3D modeling. We are using Maya and ZBrush, though since we are at home, we had to get the free trial ZBrush, and the free trial is running out this week, so we might not be able to use ZBrush anymore.

Concept design

For our final 3D modeling project, we will be animating a character doing various things. That starts with the character concept design. I’m making a squid who is holding a coffee mug.

Maya Modeling Practice

To start, we made tables just by adding shapes to the scene, slicing them, and moving the slices. I made a froggy table to accompany the famous froggy chair from Animal Crossing.

Then, we learned how to use image planes for references and actual shape planes in Maya to make a Greek temple. This has also been rendered properly.

To learn the extrude tool, we made fire hydrants. The entire hydrant started as one cube.

We also made a weapon in Maya for our character. Mine started out as a trident, because my character is a squid, but it ended up being an axe.

ZBrush Modeling Practice

The second 3D modeling software we use is ZBrush, which is useful for details, because you can sculpt more easily.

To familiarize ourselves with ZBrush, we made skulls and heads.

We also took the weapons we made in Maya and added details in ZBrush.