Explorations

The explorations project was a very open-ended unit that happens right after documentary. The unit is only a couple weeks long, so the project is meant to be way smaller than anything else in freestyle. The point of the project is to practice a skill related to film, make something with it and teach the skill to the school. The focus was more on the skill rather than the product. The topic I chose to focus on was storytelling, more specifically the hero’s journey. My original plan was to make a synopsis for a film and storyboard it. I soon found out that I did not have enough time to complete this task and instead I opted to work on the synopsis. I still wasn’t able to finish because I had never written a synopsis like this before and I had to do some research on what to do. I had a vague idea of what to write about, but I was not used to writing this type of paper or expressing my ideas in this way so I had to overcome some writer’s block in order to get work done. I ended up being really doubtful of my ability to write things and I second guessed a lot of the decisions I made in relation to the story. My process for this project was pretty simple. I sat down and wrote, I had some ideas for characters and their relationships with one another and a basic plot / world, but when it came to getting those ideas I have onto paper in a coherent way, I struggled a lot. I valued this project because it took me in a completely different direction from where i expected to go with it. I had to work to get all of the work from my other classes done while also making sure that I would have something to present for this project.

Another part of the explorations unit was to make an infographic about the topic we studied. My process for making my infographic went smoother than the synopsis. All I had to do was to take the steps for the hero’s journey and visualize them in a simple and self explanatory way. One problem I came across when working on this project was that there are lots of different models for the hero’s journey. I ended up going with a combination of a couple of the simpler versions with seven total steps versus 17, because I felt that an infographic showing the broader and less detailed steps for this narrative structure would be more visually appealing.

Experimental Music

While working on explorations in english and film, in digital media we made music. Earlier in the year we learned how to use the program pro tools to record voices and live instruments. For this unit, we learned how to make music in pro tools using virtual instruments and plugins. The music we made in this unit had to be experimental, so I had to think about what could make a song experimental. I am not very adept in music at all, so I decided to play around with some of the weirder plugins.