As the goal of the unit was self-exploration and finding different ways to cover the question, “Who Am I?”, I found different modes of expressing my answer to this question in each class. In Animation, I expressed my habits in how I animate while I explored a unique fact of my date of birth while I allowed my art style to flourish while covering this fact. In English, I wrote a narrative focusing on my struggles throughout my life and how they helped me with my talents. In Digital Media, I wrote an opinion piece and used the tools we learned in class to make a recording of the opinion piece.
Personal Essay
I’ve always been a storyteller. I remember when I was seven years old and running around with the other boys, coming up with characters to carry out adventures. I was hyperactive and creative – all of the fantastical possibilities were endless – yet just on my fingertips. But as soon as I sat down in front of the homework I’d be assigned, I’d bounce my legs and my mind would buzz as I begged to go somewhere else. I could not sit still, and my mind would blank out every time I tried to focus on the piece of paper in front of me. Little did I know at the time, I had, and still have, ADHD.
The effects of my ADHD were severe. The parent-teacher meetings I had over my issues with attention were endless, and my grades would slip incredibly often. At one point, I had a four-page list of missing assignments. Every year I’d go through the same cycle of missing assignments, sinking grades, and interventions on my struggles with attention. I even had a fourth grade teacher suggest I get tested for ADHD, but that didn’t go anywhere until years later. Not to mention I was constantly at odds with my peers, for my inability to pay attention led to hypersensitivity and frequent outbursts due to my short temper.
When I was about fifteen years old, I still struggled greatly in focusing in school. After looking around my classmates and how they handled school, I realized that what I was experiencing wasn’t normal. After I talked to a friend about her experience with ADHD, I realized that my experiences were incredibly similar to hers. That was when I decided I needed help, so I sought out a psychiatrist for a proper diagnosis. Sure enough, I was diagnosed with ADHD, and promptly prescribed medication to deal with my disability. Now, my treatment hasn’t been perfect; I have gone on and off the medication, and I’ll still struggle with attention at times, but I have found that ever since I spoke up and advocated for myself, my condition has improved exponentially. With the medication, I’ve been able to focus on the tasks I have to do much better, and my confidence from finishing assignments I normally would’ve taken much longer to do has increased.
But with ADHD, some quirky attributes would show as well that weren’t all so bad. A common aspect of people with ADHD is something called hyperfocusing in which the person afflicted will find that in the rare instance they somehow manage to focus, they put all their energy and effort into focusing on the subject. This tends to happen with a special interest of the person. In my case, my special interest happened to be in fictional stories. If I couldn’t focus on whatever was the task at hand, I’d be imagining the amount of worldbuilding I’d be able to do once I get my hands on a keyboard; I’d envision all sorts of dialogues my characters could be having with each other. Even if I couldn’t focus, I’d still be thinking – thinking so much, I’d develop my attention to detail when it came to building a narrative and developing characters. These are useful aspects in being able to tell a good story, and I’ve always wanted to write a story with complex, fleshed out characters that belong to a strong, persuasive theme. But with my ADHD, it’d be near impossible to make these stories a reality. But when I advocated for myself and asked for help, I was able get resources that would help me cope with my disorder, which made it more possible to put my talents into use. Essentially, the help of others would let me discover my full potential.
This is what happened in my path in discovering my dreams, what I wish for in a career. I want to be able to tell a good story to a wide audience, which is why I want to be an animator and a novelist. I love writing, but I also love visualizing my creations, and I admire the attention to detail and wide ranges of potential for expressing emotion in animation. And in the end of the day, I like to sit back and read a good novel, explore the “what-if’s” and see how these complex characters can teach me a lesson. It’s what inspired me to write, to create. And now that I have the resources from the people who care about me, these dreams can come into fruition.
My personal essay was an assignment for English that was assigned in order to practice writing out a college essay. I outlined a traditional essay structure and used the examples in the book College Essay Essentials by Ethan Sawyer to figure out a narrative to write out. Figuring out a struggle I dealt with in life was easy, it had to be my ADHD, then I gave some thought into how this helped me grow as a person and what I learned from it. From there, I wrote out a summarized story of my struggles with ADHD and formatted it as a proper essay. It was an enjoyable assignment that helped me answer an aspect of who I am, in that I cleared pointed out my flaws and talents.
Perspective Piece
It was interesting to use my experiences being raised in a Christian household to put together this piece. Using my previous experience of using Sony Vegas at home, I was able to figure out how to use After Effects and I decided I’d use this project as an opportunity to make something aesthetically pleasing. Essentially, I used my previous knowledge of keyframes to figure out a way to implement keyframes into After Effects and make the visuals and text slightly more interesting, mostly by playing around with the positioning and using a principle of animation to make the animation of the visuals more interesting. I was both able to express my opinions and frustrations of being raised with organized religion as an LGBT+ individual and create something that looked nice in my eyes.
Animation Production
As an exercise, my teacher Mrs. Copete had us recreate the same image in four different perspectives to better understand the animation software Maya. Basically, in order to pull this off I created different meshes and transformed them using the Move, Rotation, and Scale tools. The Scale tool was the most useful out of all of them, considering these were very simple polygons that only required edits in scaling. The real difficulty was understanding how the change in one perspective would change the image in a different perspective, so I would have to consider both perspectives in order to match the image Mrs. Copete wanted us to recreate. It was a simple exercise that helped us understand how perspective worked in Maya that also helped us better understand how the amount of polygons in a mesh applied to the overall geometric shape.
The next project Mrs. Copete had us do is recreate an item that personally relates to us in MAYA. Considering how I am an artist who frequently makes traditional art, I decided to make a mechanical pencil. I tried to make an interesting design for the pencil, one that kept it recognizable but still differed a bit from standard mechanical pencil designs. This was an incredibly difficult project, for I’d have to make much more complex meshes with a larger amount of polygons. I had to take account symmetry while I also created complex geometric shapes. This meant I couldn’t just use the Scale tool, I’d also have to select partial vertices and faces of the mesh and incorporate both the Move tool and the Scale tool to recreate my design. The mesh broke several times and at many instances I’d have to delete faces in order to fix the shape. I also had to map out the mesh on the UV Editor, which at first was very difficult because after I combined each individual mesh to one object, many shapes in the object became asymmetrical and practically indiscernible. I exported the mesh to Substance Painter and painted in the texture, then I imported the texture into Maya.
This was a vert difficult project, but overall, it helped me better understand how geometric shapes apply to the proportions of an object and even incorporate geometric shapes to 2D art to better understand the proportions and how they should work in a 3D setting. This is helpful in being able to draw with much better proportion or realism, so overall I’d argue that working with Maya helped me become a better artist.