NARRATIVE
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The Narrative Unit is where we as students learn how to express ourselves through story. Throughout my years in Freestyle, I’ve learned that story can be told in any form, shape, or size. It is a fluid thing, in that the stories you create can be real or made up. It can be a picture or a song or even just words on a piece of paper. This year for the Narrative unit, our projects are a lot more diverse and allow us to creatively explore story in various forms. In English we were asked to create a short story of about 5-6 pages or more about anything we want. This short story would later have a book jacket created for it in Design. Aside from the book jacket we were also asked to create a surreal art piece as well. All of these projects would then be put into our websites created in Web/Audio with a book trailer for our stories included in it.

Before we create our websites, we start off by sketching out how we want it to look like. This is important because when you make a website, you want it to correlate with the products you are putting on it and make it user friendly. For example, if you were making a website for sandwiches, you aren’t going to a picture of pizza as an intro for it. Also you want to make it so that your website is easy to navigate, so you can mess around as you sketch to see what is best. During this unit in Web/Audio, we learned about responsive web design, and how to design for different platforms such as tablets and phones. For my website, I wanted to keep it simple like my book jacket/story, so I kept the background solid and added accents to it, using images and a nice font.

Story

Rosemary By Zipporah Alcaraz

Rosemary Bradley was the girl who lived next door. The girl who hung around my house 24/7 and grew up with me. As children, Rosemary and I were inseparable. We had the best adventures. She had this blanket that she took with her wherever she went and she created the most amazing things with it. When you first see it, it’s simply a blue blanket with a teddy bear stitched into the corner, but slowly it shifted into things such as magic carpets, a superhero cape, and whatever she desired it to be. Whenever we went off being the kids we were, the blanket helped create chaotic makeshift forts and whatever was needed in the current quest we were on. It was with her at all times and at all places and there never was a time when I saw her without it. However as we started getting closer to middle school, the blanket that used to be so near and dear to her heart, slowly became the plain simple object that it was. And as we started getting closer to high school, I slowly became the young boy who lived next door.

I’m not exactly sure when we started drifting apart, but I think it’s when she started hanging out with the girls at our middle school. Once they became friends she became a completely different person. She started caring what other people thought, talked differently, and I guess to put it in a very sexist way, she became a “girl.” Rose was always pretty, but when she started brushing her long locks of blonde, putting on mascara, and throwing away her basketball shorts, she became someone on a completely different level of attractiveness. Sooner or later, she started hanging out with the “cool” crowd, and I was sort of pushed away to the side. Our usual hangouts were canceled for several reasons. Some including “Madison invited me to sleepover at her house,” “There’s this pool party on Friday,” “Jake is taking me out on a date,” the list goes on.

I wasn’t really angry or annoyed that she kind left me hanging, it was bound to happen eventually. I mean why would she hang out with a dork like me, when she could be popular and “go party.” I think the only thing that bothers me the most is how she didn’t really stay true to herself. I mean yes people change, but there should still be parts of you that you keep right? She used to be so imaginative and real with people, but now she’s boring and fake. She used to be interested and curious about people and the things around her. She used to say hi to me. Like come on! Is that so hard?? Okay I’m getting all riled up now. Calm down, Mason. Anyways my point is, I wish a small part of the girl who brought her blanket with her wherever she went is still around somewhere deep down inside her.

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Reflection: When it comes to writing stories, I don't think I'm the best. It's very difficult for me to come up with an idea right away. As I was writing this story, I went through several drafts before being satisfied. While writing Rosemary, I knew where to start and how to end it, but the middle was the roughest part. Throughout this unit, I learned a lot about narratives and short stories, which was a great experience. A wise man once told me that when writing a story, you must revise, and revise, and revise. If I have the time, I am definitely taking his advice and editing this story to make it much better.

Design

In Design we created both a book jacket based on our story, and a surrealist piece of art. For the book jacket, we were asked to create the front cover, back cover, and side flaps. The assignment for the surrealist piece of art was to take at least three pictures and photoshop them in a dreamlike way.

Relection: During the Design part of this unit, I was able to explore different techniques within Photoshop and Illustrator. For both projects, I really struggled with trying to figure out what to do. I had an idea, but I kept having to revise my idea because of my limited skills. Within Illustrator, I learned how to use the concept of repitition to bring a cohesive look to my book jacket. In photoshop, I learned how to create depth and create blending effects to add into my surreal art piece. Although both projects proved themselves to be difficult, the challenge of creating/finishing them was very fun and entertaining.

Book Jacket Thumbnail
Surreal Art Piece Thumbnail

Rosemary is about two childhood friends who start to drift apart as they grow older and find themselves through life. Throughout the whole story, it is in the perspective of Mason, a 17 year old boy in high school, and as you read you gain a sense of how he feels about his friend Rosemary. To Mason, Rosemary has always been there for him. There isn’t a memory from his childhood without her in it and they’ve been inseparable since. However, as the two begin to grow up, their interests start to change and they begin to grow apart. Within the story, Mason voices his frustration of wanting to stay close with her, but the social aspects of their lives have changed the dynamic between the two of them.

Since Mason holds Rosemary up in a pedestal, I really wanted my cover to focus on her. I decided to create a silhouette of a girl and frame strands of Rosemary around her to make her the focal point of my cover. I didn’t want to take a picture of a real girl and put her on the cover because throughout the book, Mason is still trying to figure out who this “new” Rosemary is and what to make of her. I also wanted to keep the book jacket very simple, because the story is simple, in that friends can naturally drift apart from each other and the fact that one would want to stay together makes sense. Rosemary is supposed to be a natural coming of age book in which people can relate to, and I wanted my cover to represent that.

For my surreal art piece, I wanted to exemplify how people have different layers to them, and sometimes you need to open one up to see the rest of who that person is. I had a dream about a girl with different layers and I thought about what that meant to me. When you first meet a person, it is often hard to get a read on them and the first impression you have on them is not always who they are inside, so I decided to use jagged rocks. The rocks show how on the outside people seem rough and it’s difficult to breakthrough to them sometimes. The hands on the rocks are meant to show that they are breaking the rock layer apart, but I feel that I should’ve made them bigger to emphasize that.

In my picture, the next layer shown are flowers, and this is to exemplify the complex sensitive part of people. Once you pass the point of getting through to a person, you start to learn more about how they think, what they like, and who they are. Flowers have several parts to them, and are known to be given to those you care about, so I used them for this layer of my piece. I ended with eyes because they are known to be the “windows into one's’ soul.” If you get through all the different layers of a person, you’ll truly see them for who they are, and hopefully care for them wholeheartedly.

Trailer

In Web/Audio, we were given the task to create a trailer based on our book with music, animations, and photos. We had the choice to either work by ourselves or collaborate with a partner, an I decided to work on this project with my friend, Nic Faurot. For our book trailer, we decided to use Nic's story which is about a town where children disappear at every beginning of fall. Check out the trailer if you want to know more.

Reflection: I usually don't enjoy animating objects in ToonBoom or AfterEffects, but I had a lot of fun creating my book trailer with Nic. My favorite thing about making the trailer was probably creating the music for it. Nic and I sat in the studio room for awhile trying to come up with creepy chords and ideas, and after a few minutes we already got started on recording. The trailer took sometime because we were both trying to figure out how to produce what we wanted in AfterEffects. Overall the experience was truly challenging and allowed me to create something I have never done before.