“Who Am I?”

The main theme of this unit was, as the name suggests, about reflecting on our life as well as our Freestyle experience. Each of our different classes helped us express this in different ways. In my primary elective, Animation, we created Google Doodles that either reflected an event on our birthday or our views of our time at Freestyle, as well as nametags representing ourselves. My Google Doodle was inspired by the Apollo landing that happened on my birthday, April 20th, while my nametag showcased my love for animated movies and how they always fill up my head. Another animation project was to create a model in the 3D modeling program Maya of an object that held personal significance for us, and I made an origami carp, representing the attachment I try to keep with my Japanese roots despite growing up in an American suburb my entire life. In my Digital Media class, we were exploring the mechanics of audio in Pro Tools to make recordings known as perspective pieces that reflect our life experiences or perspectives. We also explored the video editing tools in Adobe After Effects in order to make an accompanying video piece to our perspective essay. Finally, in my English class, we took on a very important piece- our personal statements for college. The lynchpin of these essays was an exploration of our personal lives and struggles to help us really present our best and most vulnerable selves for colleges. We then had to record the essay in Pro Tools. All of these introspective activities are what give the Reflections unit its name, and define “who I am”.

Perspective Pieces

As part of our Reflections unit, we were required to reflect upon our own personal experiences or perspectives. Through this assignment we were able to make use of our newly acquired Adobe experience with working with After Effects. For my piece, I looked at what I viewed as an inequality of the language of race. The reason I chose this was as an Asian growing up in America, a country often highlighted for its racially complex infrastructure as well as its history with racial discrimination. As an Asian American I found it important to remind people of how in order to be closer to that idyllic place of equality we would first have to reach a level where everyone understands everyone else’s struggles. Part of that starts with the language we use. This underlines the way I like to try and think critically.

ARVE Error: Mode: lazyload not available (ARVE Pro not active?), switching to normal mode

Adobe After Effects

In this snapshot of After Effects, I am putting a zoom animation on this photo and linking it to a specific part of the audio.

Personal Essay – “As I Thought”
I just really wasn’t thinking. By the time I had come to my senses, it was clearly too late – I’d flung a chair across the room and could only look at my classmates’ expressions of shock. I can barely remember what had taken control of me that day. Was it the temper issues? The Asperger’s syndrome? The difficulty I had controlling my emotions? Whatever it was, I think it was clear to my parents and teachers that my school life wasn’t exactly going to be easy.
It wasn’t as though I had wanted to be like that. No one would. Even when I had all these counselors and teacher’s aides there trying to guide me I was still making mistakes, which only frustrated me more. Even when my parents would try to talk to me I would still fail to listen at times. When I met kids my age who I felt I could call friends, I still drove many people away with off-putting habits like biting off my still-developing nails, eating the chewy pink erasers off of my pencils, picking the grey chunks of mucus out of my nose, or even pulling out my bushy black hair.
But the answer to emotional control I was looking for was always at my fingertips, with a small Game Boy Advance I received from my Grandmother. If I couldn’t find my way of learning in the real world, why not try the digital one? From the many regions of the Pokémon world, to the rolling fields and rugged mountains of Hyrule in the Legend of Zelda, there were many options to choose from. And as I grew older my game collection only grew, the sleek white double-screened Nintendo DS, the simple and compact Nintendo Wii, and the cutting edge, jet-black Nintendo 3DS all added to my shelves. Through video games, I built my first friendships, playing alongside new friends who I could talk to with ease about the games we played together. When the days at school were hard, I always knew a place where I could belong. Games had the patience to deal with me when I was upset or scared, almost like they were willing to listen.
Through video games, I fulfilled a hidden desire to feel more understood, to explore a newfound creative side of myself. It felt as though the games themselves understood the kind of person I was as I began gaining my sense of whimsy and imagination exploring these wonderful vast worlds and gaining a drive for expression as I drew my favorite characters. It was as though I was honoring them for the creative impact they had on me.
That creative drive flows through me to this day, and as I entered high school it only got stronger, thanks in big part to Freestyle Academy, a media arts program in my district. There I got to explore a profession I had been dreaming of for years: animation. And for someone like me, who values the time with his head in the clouds and would love nothing more than to provide the world with inspiration that would help other people like my younger self, I knew it would be a great career choice.
But I might never have gained that creative will without my many years with video games. The values I developed during that time are like tools in a role playing game. I have gained the skills of patience and open-mindedness, the spells of expressive desire and the will to explore, the weapons of true and hardened connections with others. Without those tools I could never have learned how to love the person I was, to accept my condition and adapt to it, to forbid it from defining me. Or at least… that’s just what I think.

 

Class Production

A huge benefit of being an Animation student at Freestyle is the opportunity to be able to use the 3D modeling and animation program Maya. As part of our self reflection we conceptualized and modeled objects that reflect an aspect of ourselves. I chose an origami carp to represent the fun I had in my Japanese class and the way it allowed me to connect back to my home culture. Below is some of the process pictures of going from sketching to modeling the carp.

Starting in our sketchbook we layed out at least 90 sketches of different objects we thought represented us before then recreating our final sketches in Photoshop. We emphasized playing with shape, texture, and shading. After this we layed the diagrams from Photoshop into a Maya map which we used as reference to create and build our models. To finish, we ran them we ran them through Substance Painter to give our models textures. 

A Photoshop sketch which was made into a diagram for modeling

The final model with color and a texture

I value this project because of the opportunity it gave to me learn a new 3D modeling program, an incredibly useful asset in my desired major and career, animation. I am also interested in game development and animation and this will likely be a major tool for that.