For the Conceptual Project, we began learning ways to communicate with abstract forms through multiple different projects that tested our creative thinking and communication skills. We focused on creative risk-taking, challenging us to ask “How can I use unconventional forms to express myself?”. With professional equipment and software, we expressed our views and stories through poetry, music, art, experimental film, and web production. This project made me try new forms of expression I had never worked on before; In Film, we learned many new technique and ways to get our message across without using characters or a narrative, traditionally films tend to have a start middle and and end or have a story narrative that they follow, for this project we had to do it without any of those getting our message across with the feeling that the viewer gets from watching rather then watching a character feel those things. I thought that being able to bring together all our classes together for this one project was really interesting because it let us pursue different mediums for our expression.
Haiku
Our Haiku project was the first one that we started with and introduced us to a few workspaces that we were going to use many times through our Conceptual project. We were tasked to create a haiku that was based of off a set of random emotions and experiences in English class along with a picture that went with it. In digital media we animated it and included a soundtrack and a recording of ourselves reading it out using Premiere Pro.
I really liked the haiku project because it helped us use different tools and mediums in order to enhance parts that separately wouldn’t have the same impact.
“Why Art?” Essay
Our “Why Art?” Essay project an english class piece where we delved into different artists and read a their New York Times opinion article on why they believe art matters. We discussed with the class on the different views of why art mattered and got to share and learn about different artists and their views. After this we chose a different artist who’s message related to the one of the article which we read, connecting their ideas while doing an analysis of three works of art. The article that I read was written by Doris Salcedo and the artist that I made connections to her ideas and art was Keith Haring.
You can also listen to the essay below.
Our next step for our why art presentation was to present our project. Instead of reading the essay aloud to the class we instead created presentations in order to convey the main points from our essay and make the connections between the artists we chose in class. Some goals I had for this project were to make sure to memorize most of what I was going to say so that when I was presenting I could look at the class instead of my notecards. I also wanted to have minimal text on the slides for them to look more professional.
Photoshop Blend Mode Editing
Our Blend Mode section was all about learning some of the tools of photoshop in order to mix/blend two photos together and manipulate them in various ways in order to achieve the outcome we wanted, weather it was, lighten darken or creatively mix two. I thought that the blend modes in photoshop were super useful to make a photo look exactly how I wanted it too, if it was underexposed I could duplicate the light pixels and fix the exposure, If it was overexposed I could do the same to achieve the outcome I wanted from the picture. I thought that the photoshop blend modes gave me a way to rethink photos. Before I did this project I assumed that the photos that were too dark were stuck like that but now I know that they can be changed and updated to look how I like.
Conceptual Film
In film class this year, we focused a lot on our camera work and on how to build a story that could captivate an audience. So far, i’ve enjoyed myself immensely in this class. Film and video creation has always been something that I have enjoyed doing, and this class has only made that even more true. This past semester, I have valued working on the aspects of film that I struggle with, and improving them the best I can so I can make even better films.
My conceptual project started with creating a document outlining what I wanted to have present in the film. If you are to read it and compare it to what my film actually turned out to be, you would see that it looks nothing alike. In our film class we are constantly revising and changing what we have showing and how we want to tell a story which in many cases turns out to be nothing alike the first idea you come up with.
My Experimental Flm
Creating this film took multiple days of shooting, working out what aspects I liked and didn’t like when we presented raw footage in class, Through this process I learned what worked with the audience and what didn’t giving me a better idea of what I wanted the final outcome to look like. Editing this film took upwards of 6 hours as my rough cut ended up being much different than my final outcome. Because what you see on screen is limited I experimented with using sound as a vessel for your imagination.
