Visual Narrative Project is a project that we are creating, which is about a fiction story in first perspective. We are not only creating as text, but in many other ways, such as animation or film. This is a project that could inspire our creativity. We worked on each classes we are taking in Freestyle, and it is a difficult and hard work.

In English class, we first designed our own narrative story, which is about the story of characters we created ourselves. It is hard because you need to think all the characters and story details yourself, without anyone’s helping. I valued a lot from it, and I learned the skills against boring stories. I remember we watched an animation last semester in English class, and it is about a man who love a woman and want to meet her. Even there is a lot of trouble during the story, they finally met at the end. It is a very interesting story.

In Digital Media class, we recorded our own narrative story and add sound effects and musics to it. The music and sound effects made our story more realistic and interesting, and made people want to listen to it more. We also design our own webpages and draw or make pictures using Photoshop and Illustrator for our website banners. I learned a lot of skills about how to use different Adobe applications to make different files.

In our Animation class, we made our own narrative animation. 3 people in a group and we all have our own jobs. My job is to do the animation part, and my group mates are doing color and lines. It is very hard and needs time, but it was fun. I learned to draw many movements of body in it. As a story teller, I improved my speaking and performing. In visual, I drew animations that I never drew, and it is a good experience.

The English assignment was to write our own short narrative story. My inspiration for my story is a story in a drama from Korea. I recorded the audio version of my story in Digital Media class, and I tried many times because I always read the words wrong. From writing the short story, I improved a little my grammar and learned how to make the story more fluent. In recording it, because I recorded it many times, I went fluent for the final version.

Iridescent

Faced with my parents’ divorce, I couldn’t do anything about it. I lived with grandma, but she never cared about me. People in school said that I’m ugly, dirty, and smell bad. I was used to the dirty words that were deeply engraved on my desk in the corner, and disgusting spittle on my locker door.
At a normal day back home, I saw she was standing not too far away from me. I ran towards her and stopped near her, but I didn’t have the courage to talk to her. Fortunately, she seemed to notice me after a while.
“Janice?” She asked with a disgusted tone, “Why are you so dirty?” I didn’t answer back. Then she took me to her home. “Go take a bath and leave. I’m going to work.” she said.
“Mom…Can I stay here?” I cried.
“No. Go take a bath and leave.” She sat in the room and didn’t even look at me once.
The next day in school, I felt something changed. People that usually hate me come to talk to me, in a friendly voice. There weren’t any disgusting things on my locker door, and my desk had been changed after I went to lunch. “You are so pretty! I never know that you were that pretty. Can I be your friend?” A girl that hated me the most said, with a lovely smile. I realized that it was my face that had changed my whole life.
“If I look pretty, everybody likes me. I want everybody to like me.” That’s what I thought when I was in fifth grade.
At the age of eighteen, I was able to finally walk into the new world that only belonged to adults. I had already made a lot of attractions, and I thought things would be going very well, after all. But after a few days, another girl resisted my plan. I found that people are not only talking about me but also another person called Selena. She is a beautiful woman, I admit, but I hate her. I am so jealousbecause I should be the one that everyone likes, not her.
Finally, I discovered something fatal about Selena. Her face was fake, it was from doctor’s knife, and it was not her real face, and I was going to tell everyone that she did the plastic surgery, and she was actually ugly. Before that, I went to find Selena.
“I already know that you did the plastic surgery, and I am going to tell everyone.” I said, “Don’t you feel ashamed? If everybody does that, it will be not fair to people like me.” Selena put her head down, didn’t say anything. “Tell everyone yourself, or I will.” I started to shiver, because she looked familiar, just like… just like what my childhood looked like.
“Sorry, I know it is embarrassing that I did the surgery, but please, I finally started a new life without being bullied in school, I finally made friends, so can you please spare me?” She looked at me, with her teary eyes. I felt very guilty, and uncomfortable, so I ran away.
On the way back home, I pondered a lot about the situation. I seemed to forget why I wanted people to like me so much and forgot what I experienced in my childhood. I realized that Selena is similar to me, she just wants people to like her, and she had been bullied until college, and I was the bad person who was going to cause difficulties toher, just like people who did to me in the past. How bad had she been bullied that forced her to do surgery? I started to want to know her more. It seemed like I met a confident person, and we all have similar but totally different experiences.

Audio Progress

This image is my character Janice I designed in my short story. I like pink color so I made the whole picture pink. The end of the story is a happy end because Janice found out her mistake, so she is smiling in the picture. I drew for a long time of it because I am still not very good at using Photoshop.

In Animation class, I did a project with 3 class mates about a narrative story we create, and we animated it. It is about a thief who stole a diamond in museum, and a girl detective shot him and he died.
The most difficult challenge in the animation is timing. Sometimes I cannot estimate movement such as jumping take how many time, and I could animated wrong. When it happened, I need to animate the whole movement again. However I was slowly understanding the timing, and it went better at the end.  I want to thank my group mates Shannon and Hanna because they did more work than me, and I wasn’t here during the pitch and designing.

The Animation

Behind the Scene