Narrative 1

The Visual Narrative project in Freestyle put students’ storytelling abilities and creative expression to the test, as it pushed us to use different mediums to craft clear narratives and story structures. In English, students explored narrative storytelling through reading, and eventually creating their own, flash fiction stories. In Digital Media, we learned how to properly utilize visual art software, such as Adobe Illustrator, as well as music software such as Pro Tools.

This unit was honestly pretty challenging for me, as I often struggle to put my story ideas and creative ambitions into clearly established narratives, so initially, I struggled a lot with finding a way to create narrative work that really captured what I wanted it to. Through working through this project however, I really feel I’ve been able to improve not only my ability to craft stories and clear narratives, but my confidence as a writer overall.

In English, we were asked to create a short “Flash-fiction” narrative story. In class, we reviewed several flash fiction examples, such as “Thank You Ma’am” by Langston Hughes and “The Flowers” by Alice Walker, in order to gain inspiration for our stories, as well as to learn important story elements to integrate into our own narratives. To start brainstorming, we wrote a Character Questionnaire, in which we we tasked to answer questions from the perspective of our protagonist in order to properly flesh out their character. We also created a plot map in order to draft out the most important points in our story and pace them accordingly. During our writing process, we frequently met with other students to bounce our ideas off of each other and improve our stories through peer feedback.

To produce the audio version of my story, I first recorded one take through with me reading out my story and uploaded the audio to Pro Tools. There, I clipped out and deleted unwanted noises, such as breaths in between lines, and rearranged the clips to my liking. After that, I imported royalty free music and sound effects that I thought enhanced the ambiance of my recording and organized them to match the different highs and lows of the story.

I personally really value being able to write this story, because it challenged me in the main form of writing I’ve always felt unconfident in, narrative writing, so being able to create a story that I put a lot of effort into makes me really proud. I know that it’s far from perfect, but if you were to tell me at the beginning of this year that I had written this story, I would’ve never believed you, so I see that as a big personal accomplishment. I also really appreciated getting to exercise the skills we learned last semester with Pro Tools again.

Freestyle Academy · Story By ZeytinE (2022)

“Rainy Day” by Zeytin Ercan

It had been pouring non-stop since last Friday. Juliet was sinking into her mother’s ancient couch, the events of the past week weighing heavy on her chest. Her mother was in the kitchen preparing a cup of peppermint hot cocoa, a favorite of Juliet’s, masking the familiar smell of cigarette smoke with holiday nostalgia. She sank further as she dreaded the moment her mother walked back into the living room, the moment she had to face her again. The moment her mom opened the door for her, she couldn’t even fully look her in the eyes, only catching a glimpse of her painful grimace, barely masked by her usual warm smile. Just that was enough to punch a hole in her stomach. These were certainly not the conditions in which she thought she would be seeing her again for the very first time after leaving for school. She’d assumed it would’ve been for Christmas, which, granted, was only a few weeks away, but if that were the case, she wouldn’t be awkwardly stirring in her childhood living room with the rest of her future uncertain.

Up until last week, Juliet’s life had a set narrative, a beginning, middle, and end, each of which she had meticulously planned and worked for tirelessly. She had dreams of graduating with perfect grades, becoming a perfect doctor, living a perfect quiet life in the perfect quiet suburbs, and finally dying at a happy fulfilled old age after living the perfect life. She had spent her time thus far putting her all into everything she’d done to achieve that. Her round brown eyes framed with dark circles, a proud symbol of her late nights studying, would always glint with hope, no matter the life she temporarily missed out on in the process. She’d always told herself that one day the sacrifice of her childhood would mean something, that it would amount to something perfect, something infinite. She held onto this hope the same way she held her breath when the days were too long, or not long enough.

For a while, it appeared her hope had materialized. She got into the school of her dreams, her teachers adored her, her peers envied her, her younger siblings looked up to her. She had reached the finish line, the happy ending she always believed in. 

Yet here she sat, melting into her old rotting couch, days after dropping out of med school.

In an attempt to clear her head, she paused for a moment and turned to the window, ignoring the dead flies and spiders on the sill that seemed to stare her down, like they knew something she didn’t want them to. She tried desperately to focus on the rain. When she was little, she would cling onto rainy days like a warm blanket, wrapping herself up in the sweet sleepy white noise and blurry windows. While her siblings would always breathlessly beg and whine to their mother to let them play in the muddy puddles, Juliet was content waiting inside, with a front row seat on the arm of her couch, excitedly crouched on her knees so she was just tall enough to peek out the window at the shimmering water. Her favorite part was always the big finale, when every so often, a rainbow would sneak out of the sky and smile at her. She was always amazed that the chaos of a water show she’d just witnessed could result in such a beautiful painting of color and light. 

Now the rain felt cruel, taunting her mercilessly. The raindrops hitting the pavement, once reminding her of cheerful laughter now sounded like a bitter snicker. It seemed to get louder and louder, crashing in her eardrums, each drop screaming, You’re a failure, you’re a failure, you’re a failure. No longer beaming with the inviting glow of perfection, the outside world now seemed tainted by the cruel reality that she wasn’t perfect, or special, and that there were people in the world who were better and smarter than her, people who could keep up. People who seemed to effortlessly walk on water, while she found herself nearly drowning. People who-

She felt water well up in her eyes as her vision became blurry, just when she heard her mother’s footsteps carefully making their way to the living room. Panicked, she hurriedly rubbed the tears onto her sleeves to erase the evidence of emotion from her mom. She winced at the sting of the rough fabric on her raw, chapped face. No matter how hard she wiped her eyes, the tears kept welling up, coming back stronger with every attempt to stifle them. Her mind was racing. The last thing she wanted was for her mother to see her crying. Not now. Not when she had thrown her entire life down the drain. Not after she had disappointed her entire family after promising to make them proud. She didn’t deserve to cry, to feel. At this point her tears were rolling uncontrolling, as she choked in-between sobs. 

She turned and caught a glimpse of her mom, who was carrying a tray with peppermint hot cocoa in her favorite yellow mug. Juliet accidentally made eye contact, and even through her tears, she could somehow see her mother’s eyes perfectly. They looked startled, then calm, as if a tension had finally been released, as if a weight had been finally carried off her shoulders. Her mother carefully placed the tray on the coffee table, and made her way to Juliet. She grabbed her gently and brushed her fingers through her hair, telling her it would be all right. Juliet wanted to say something, anything, but all she could do was cry.

She lifted her head off her mother’s shoulder for a brief second to look out the window again. The rain had stopped, and although the glass was still stained with raindrops, she could barely make out the familiar markings of a rainbow starting to appear.

Pro Tools interface for my short story audio!
The Adobe Illustrator interface for my short story album cover art!

For this project, in Digital Media, students created unique designs using Adobe Illustrator and produced them through a physical medium of their choice, (stickers, embroidered patches, clothing prints, etc.)

My final illustrator sticker project PNG
My physical sticker outcome
My Illustrator set-up while creating my stickers

For my Illustrator Project, I decided to create stickers of two of my favorite fictional characters, Sailor Jupiter from Sailor Moon, and Alice from Alice in Wonderland. I was primarily inspired to choose this project because of my love of those characters and my love of animation in general. Growing up, I spent most of my free time watching cartoons or reading comics, as it took me out of the real world, which at that point in my life was much needed. As a result I grew a huge love for animation and drawing in general, so I see this project as a thank you to all those stories and characters that gave me that love. Moreover, I love stickers and using them as a way to express yourself, so it was the perfect medium choice for my project. Through this project, I developed my skills in Illustrator, which I was previously not particularly confident in, mostly because I was more familiar with Photoshop, and although the two programs have many similarities, Photoshop (in my opinion), is easier to utilize for drawing. The main struggle I encountered was tracing over and coloring my initial rough sketch on paper. I had to get the hang of using the pen tool to trace, and the live paint option to color, both of which took some getting used to, but by the end it felt a lot more comfortable. This project helped me improve both my skills in Illustrator, as well as my general digital media skills, which will continue to benefit me as I use technology to help create art.

For this project, students wrote lyrics and produced a song parody of their choice. This process included selecting the song, writing the lyrics, recording the audio, removing the original vocals from the song to create isolated instrumentals, and mixing everything together in Pro Tools.

I decided to write a parody of Grover Washington Jr’s song, “Just the Two of Us” about apple cobbler. I wrote my parody in November, around Thanksgiving, so I naturally had baked goods on the mind. I thought it would be funny to use a very romantic and sensual song to convey my love for apple cobbler, and the lyric structure for the original song was simple enough to easily create new lyrics to.

Lyrics:

The Autumn seasons coming by

And I need to satisfy

My craving for a pastry good

Cherry and rhubarb are just fine, 

If I wanna pass the time

But there is another fruit I’d choose

Apple cobbler

Or some tasty apple pie

Apple cobbler (Apple cobbler)

Apple cobbler

A la mode would be divine

Apple cobbler

Won’t you try?

As opposed to our conceptual unit, which primarily focused on analog animation methods, during our narrative unit, animation students learned how to utilize digital resources to aid in animation, such as Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe After Effects.

Our first project of this unit involved creating our own fictional character, modeling a puppet after them, and creating both a stop motion and digital walk cycle. The first part of the process was creating a character bio, in which we drew both profile and side profiles of our characters, as well as writing a short bio about their personality and backstory. Then, we crafted puppets out of various craft materials and filmed a stop motion walk cycle animation of them. Then, using Photoshop, we animated a digital walk cycle. Finally, using Adobe After Effects, we edited both walk cycles together.

My character bio and puppet for Nutmeg!
My puppet walk cycle
My digital walk cycle

Our next major project was to combine our skills with Photoshop and our skills with After Effects to create a short animated lip-sync clip. To do this, we drew each mouth movement corresponding to a specific sound, and exported them separately from the base drawing. Then, in After Effects we edited the mouth movements to match up with the audio clip we chose.

My Photoshop set-up for my lip-sync animation
My final lip-sync animation!

Arguably the biggest project we had this unit was our Visual Narrative Animation. For this project, we got into groups of four and worked together to create a 1-2 minute animated short using the skills we’d practiced earlier throughout the year. This project was personally super fulfilling as well as challenging. I was really lucky to work in a group of good friends who I collaborate really well with, so the story writing process was fairly simple since we were all on the same page for the most part. I think the most enlightening part of this project was just how long it took to make a 90 second animation, even though we had four people constantly working on it both in and out of class. Our group set out to make something silly and fun, but also something that we would ultimately be proud to have worked on, and I really feel like we achieved that with our project. As someone who’s admired animation, and particularly animated shorts, for so long, it was really fulfilling to be able to experience that process for myself.

The creation process for one of my scenes in our animated short, “Big Business”!
The final product of our animated short, titled “Big Business”!