The Visual Narrative unit at freestyle challenged us to explore narrative structures in a variety of mediums. In English, we read short stories and one longer work, and analyzed them for symbolism, narrative devices, and much more. We were then tasked with writing our own flash fictions with the techniques we learned in class. In Digital Media, we explored music through MIDI and were tasked with creating our own experimental pieces. After that, we recorded our short stories and made them into audio dramas. We then learned Adobe Illustrator and made our own illustrations that we could turn into anything we wanted. In Animation, we made character bios, walk cycles, puppets, lip syncs, and full narrative animations.
Overall, I value thew storytelling skills I developed this unit. I pride myself as a storyteller, and learning good storytelling techniques helped improve my stories and my writing. I value the ways I learned to elevate stories using sound and how to play around with creating my own music. I enjoy the freedom I can now use to explore stories in more creative ways, not just in writing.
English
In English class, we were tasked with writing a story that was under 1000 words. We were challenged to pack a ton of symbolism and information into such a short story, which proved to be quite difficult. We started off by planning some of what we were going to write about. I wanted my story’s setting to be quite vague, partially because I don’t like writing setting descriptions, but mostly because I enjoy unconventional stories. We had to choose a central theme to build our story around, which was a challenge, as I struggled to come up with something that didn’t feel cliché. I ended up going with a theme of grief, and its manifestation as a physical monstrous being.
Digital Media
In Digital Media, we produced an audio only version of the story we wrote in English. This was relatively simple, as we had already learned how to use Pro Tools in the previous semester. It was fun to add in music and sound effects to enhance the story.
Mirror
It was sitting in the corner of my vision.
Staring.
Hovering.
Always there.
I don’t remember exactly when it first appeared. My memories of that time were blurred and hazy. It sits in my peripheral, formless and shadowy. It breathes down my neck. It’s there as I wake up, as I go about my morning routine, as I sit in front of a canvas staring blankly, for hours on end, and it’s there as I go to sleep.
I try not to think about it.
I take Ruby and Tardis out of their cage to play in the morning, watch them scamper over their play structures and sniff any new toys. I put them back in their cage and they curl up in a pile, chattering their teeth causing their eyes to bug out to show that they’re happy. They don’t seem to notice it.
I ignore it.
I go to the store for the first time in weeks, walking through the isles to find paints, and it follows me. I ignore it.
I sit down at my desk, sketching ideas, and it slithers up to sit on my shoulders. I ignore it. I look down at the crumpled sheets of paper instead.
I look at the mirror to the side of my desk and I look away, quickly, resolving to shutter the mirrors like one would shutter windows. For now, I ignore it.
I turn back to the canvas.
I stare. I stare and I stare and I stare, until the page melts and twists. Nothing comes. I just hear the heavy breathing of it in my ear. I can almost make out whispers. Of what, I could not tell. The breathing and almost whispers get louder in my ear the longer I stare at the page. I ignore it and ignore it and ignore it. Too much. Too much. Too muchtoomuchtoomuchtoo-
Ring ring ring
I pick up the phone.
‘Hey how are you doing?’
The crackling of her voice through the phone manages to break me out of that spiral.
‘Oh y’know. The usual. The ever long suffering life of an artist as it were. I’m fine.’
‘Haha! That’s good to hear! I was wondering if you wanted to hang out sometime? I thought you might get pretty lonely now that you’re living all on your own.’
‘Heh, it’s not so bad. But sure. Sometime next week? I have to get back to work now, sorry.’
‘Yay! All good, don’t worry, bye!’
I keep it together. She doesn’t notice it hanging off of me, she thinks everything is fine. Everything is fine. We have fun on our hike, and I am quietly grateful that we did not hang out at my place. She might get the impression of something being wrong. I can’t help but notice a hole in the place of something that should be there.
I go home. Weeks pass. No work gets done.
Every time I think about what I’m supposed to be working on, it’s like there’s a hand over my eyes. Maybe there is. I ignore it.
It grows in the corner of my vision. It knows when I ignore it. It gets agitated, its metaphorical teeth bared. It grows and grows and grows.
It starts interacting with my world. Little things at first. I feel it tapping on my shoulder to get my attention. I ignore it. I wake up in the morning to find my paints rearranged. I ignore it.
Crash.
A plate is shattered across the floor. I clean the shards up. I ignore it.
It gets more persistent.
I ignore it.
I pick up a brush for the first time in months. I decide that I would just paint to see where it gets me. I don’t get very far. I still don’t know what I’m doing. What I’m supposed to be doing.
I work a little bit each day. Something to distract me from it. The thing I’m ignoring.
It still grows, and grows, and breaks plates, and cups, and bowls. I sheepishly buy more. I wonder if the cashiers ever wonder why I buy so many dishes.
I paint. It’s not turning out the way I want it to. I start over. And over. And over again.
It starts grabbing my hand. Guiding it how it wants. I shake it off and ignore it.
I paint. It’s still not turning out how I want. I paint. I paint. I paint.
It grabs my hands forcefully now. Makes them move the brush the way it wants. I ignore it.
I paint and I paint and I paint.
Rrrrrrrip
The canvas has a large gash in the center. Over someone’s face. Over their face.
It flings my brush into the mirror to the side of my desk, shattering it. I look down at the shards on the floor, the covering I had put up not keeping the mirror together. I see its form in the shards.
I acknowledge it. For the first time ever, I really see it.
I stumble to the floor. I sit under my desk. I curl up. I sob.
I see all of the things that I was ignoring. All of the memories spent together, all of the months spent pretending I was fine when I was not. I can make out its shape better, despite the tears blurring my vision. It looks an awful lot like an absence of them.
It sits down beside me and I curl up into it, shoving my face into its shadows that feel like soft blankets. I don’t remember falling asleep.
I wake up a few hours later, head pounding and tears dried up on my face. I can’t remember the last time I cried.
I stand up, peeling my face off of my arm where the tears stuck them together like glue. I sit back at my desk. I tape up the hole in the canvas, and move to the easel. I paint. It sits at my feet and I acknowledge it. It slithers up to my shoulders and I acknowledge it. I let it guide my hand and my brush.
We work well into the night together. With every brushstroke its form gets clearer. It looks more and more like them.
I don’t know what will happen to it when the painting is done. I don’t know what I thought would happen to them if I even acknowledged it. I don’t know if it will ever go away, but I think it might get easier to manage.
We find out together.
I think I told a good story using effects and music. I could probably improve upon it by adding in more music to move the story along, and my reading of the story could have been more dramatic, but overall, I think I did okay. I am most proud of my SFX choices in my audio production, as I feel that they really help convey the suspense of the story. I especially like the heavy breathing sound effect that I added to represent the thing. I appreciate that I learned how to produce an audio only story, as I enjoy listening to audio only stories. I feel like I can use the techniques I learned from this project to create more audio dramas in the future.
During this unit, we made quite a few illustrations in various programs to use as cover images or just to explore and create something. We made cover images for our audio short stories, and made exquisite corpse illustrations. We also made a final illustration that we could turn into whatever physical object we wanted.
Exquisite Corpse
Our first illustration using Adobe Illustrator was our exquisite corpse, that we collaborated on with a group of our peers.
My groups exquisite corpse turned out quite fun in my opinion. I enjoy how different they all are.
Overall, the project was quite fun and I enjoyed getting to play around with illustrator. I technically did this project when I hadn’t learned very much about illustrator yet, so I used this opportunity to play around a bit and learn some things for myself.
Short Story Album Cover
The next illustration project we were tasked with was to make an album cover for our short story audio production. I wanted the cover to feature a cracked mirror as it is important to the story. It was fun to play around with shapes and gradients to make this. I also added in a pen, as art is also important to the story.
Illustrator Project
For our final illustration, we got to use all of the knowledge we learned using illustrator to create something that we could turn into a physical object of our choosing. I decided to make clothing art to put on the back of a jacket. I found the opportunity to wear something that I created to be quite enticing, and I knew that I probably would not have a similar chance to do that in the future.
Artist Statement
Using illustrator for image creation as opposed to photoshop was an interesting experience. Overall, I do think I enjoy using photoshop more, as it is closer to a traditional drawing program, but illustrator has its uses. I appreciate that you can create vector images in illustrator, but in a way that gives you a lot of flexibility in what you create.
I chose to create clothing art because I knew that I would not easily have another opportunity to do so. I also knew that I wanted to make a jacket that had something to do with feathers or wings, as I find drawing them is quite enjoyable. I decided on a person with wings for ears, which is a design for a species that I like to draw occasionally. I enjoy when a shape is both rounded and angular at the same time, which is part of the whole inspiration for the composition.
My overall thoughts about this project are that I kind of do not like using illustrator, but that I enjoy my final product so much that it makes up for that dislike. I think it is so cool that I am now able to wear a piece of my art.
Being creative with illustrator was quite difficult compared to other applications, as illustrator isn’t a traditional drawing program. I did enjoy learning the skills required to use illustrator effectively, but I don’t see myself gravitating towards it for digital illustration. I do think it is quite good for graphic design as it is a vector program, and can be scaled to any size with no pixelation. It was quite fun to play around with and I greatly value the skill it takes to learn any new program.
Music Recording Project
▶ Hollow Moon
⏸ Hollow Moon
In order to learn the Pro Tools software, we got to record a song in Freestyle’s recording studio and then mix it together ourselves. We did this in groups of 2 or more freestyle students, and my group decided to play and sing a cover of Hollow Moon by the Crane Wives. My friend played guitar and our non-Freestyle student friend played bass, and we all sang.
The three of us all listen to the band the Crane Wives, so we decided to learn and record their song “Hollow Moon”. We split the vocals up, making the verses solos with us all joining in on the choruses, and had Arc Kamprath on electric guitar, Kira Pelkofer on bass guitar, and El Baltz and the rest of the group on vocals. In the end, we were only able to learn the instrumental for the first 2 thirds of the song before the recording session, so we didn’t record the full song.
Our takeaways from recording in the studio are that learning the technical side of recording is quite difficult. We didn’t really know how complicated recording sessions were; we assumed that you just went into the studio and performed your song. Seeing the different parts that go into recording something with multiple instruments and singers, it was a lot more complicated than we thought.
We had two guitars and three singers, so the process had lots of layers. We recorded the instruments first, doing multiple takes with different mics and recording methods to see what sounded better, and then set up three mics to have us all sing at once. We learned how to set up the headphones in the recording studio so we could listen to the metronome and the instrumental track as we sang. After recording, we learned how to use Pro Tools in order to mix all the audio tracks of the individual instruments and vocals from the session together.
Through this project, we learned a lot about how recording technology works, and had lots of fun performing our song. We look forward to possibly learning more songs and recording in the studio again.
Experimental Music
▶ Experimental Music
⏸ Experimental Music
To get to know Pro Tools better, we learned how to make MIDI music. MIDI music is a form of music where instead of instruments, you make music entirely through electronic means. MIDI blocks stand in for notes and play a sound that they are coded to produce through virtual instruments. I took the word experimental to heart when creating this piece, and really got to play around with different sounds. For most of my interstitials(short music pieces in the longer piece), I quite literally clicked random notes to place MIDI blocks and see what sounded good out of those. I titled my piece Some Kind of Video Game because it sounded like video game music to me.
For the experimental music project, I did not really have a lot in mind in terms of inspiration. It was only after I finished the project that I realized that the interstitials sounded like video game music, so I unconsciously took inspiration from various video games that I have played. I am most proud of how the faster interstitials sound, because they were made mostly by spamming various midi notes until I found a section that sounded somewhat okay. I value the ability to make music without knowing an instrument or any music theory at all really. I liked that I got to really play around with random digital instruments to make something fun.
Character Bio
In animation, to start off the narrative unit, we made character bios for the character we were going to animate for the first part of the unit. I chose to animate my character Euphrasia. This was meant as a reference for our walk cycles, and also was to flesh out the characters backstory a little more. Since we also were making a stop motion walk cycle, we had to build a puppet of our characters. That process was quite interesting, as I am not much of a sculptor, but I am proud of the final result. We made the puppets using molding plastic, wire, and cut up chopsticks for the base. The head and hands were made out of air dry clay, while the body was made out of a lot of layers of tape and paper towels. Her clothes are made out of fabric and glue.
Walk Cycles
After finishing the character bio, we had to animate walk cycles. We started with the puppet walk cycle. The puppets had screws in their feet that allowed us to anchor them to a peg board. This allowed us to pose them without having our hands be in frame, making the green screen process smoother.
After we finished the puppet walk cycle, we started on the digital walk cycle. I used photoshop to animate the entire thing, using its frame animation tool. My friend described this character as having a pep in her step and depression in her eyes. Joyless whimsy if you will.
Finally, we compiled both the digital walk cycle and the puppet walk cycle into one composite walk cycle.
Lip Sync
To start off the spring semester, we made lip sync animations. We had to choose an audio and animate a character saying the words in the audio. This was a fun project and I am proud of the result. For my animation, I chose an audio from the fiction podcast The Magnus Archives, and animated the characters in the clip.
Narrative Animation
For the final project of the narrative unit, we were tasked with making a short animation that told a story. We worked in groups for this project, and had 6 weeks to work. We divided up the work within our groups, with someone doing backgrounds, someone doing backgrounds and animation, and me doing animation. I ended up being a slow animator, so I didn’t animate that many scenes, but I am proud of the scenes that I did end up animating. The animation started as a storyboard turned into an animatic to figure out timing, which our group leader did.
After the animatic, we started work on the actual animation. We made ours about a praying mantis detective who was working a case on a mysterious grafitti artist. That artist ended up being a little spider girl, who reminded the detective of his own childhood.
Reflection
Overall, the animations that we made in this unit challenged me, the final narrative especially. I enjoyed making the puppet for the stop motion walk cycle and am really proud of my work on that. I also enjoyed doing the digital walk cycle, despite the time it took me to complete. The lip sync animation got me to really think more about timing my animations, and allowed me to learn more about Adobe After Effects. The final animation got me to really start to consider what makes a good animation when it comes to story, and also a bit of how to manage my time better, as I could have done a lot more for my group had I done so. I enjoyed all of my finished animations for this unit, and I am looking forward to future units in animation.