Introduction
For me, this project was a lot about embracing your creativity through many different forms of art such as music, experimental film, and the production of my website. This was definitely a big challenge for me because we were really required to step out of our comfort zones, especially for the experimental film. The same thing for English, students started to explore self-expression through poetry and Haiku which isn’t a thing that I am used to in traditional high school English classes. Sometimes, it was difficult to really tap into that other creative side, but I really pushed myself in all of these projects. Another thing that was a new challenge for me was that we were required to combine our projects from English and Film with the new Adobe skills we learned in Digital Media. But, once I started to get the hang of all these new skills, I had a lot of fun with my projects. I also feel much more confident when required to utilize applications like Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Audition. Overall, I really enjoyed these couple of months for the Conceptual projects and I have learned so many new skills.
Something that I have grown to appreciate about being a Freestyle student is the amount of creativity and expression here in the community. At Freestyle, students are encouraged to expand their ideas using the amazing technology available. I really enjoy the fusion between projects with both Digital Media and English. We utilize all the apps and skills from Digital Media and use it to animate, add sound, imagery, or voiceovers to our projects. I feel that this does an incredible job of exemplifying the feelings that are expressed in my English projects. I also have a newfound for English class due to Mr. Greco’s wonderful course. His take on English is so refreshing after taking AP Lang my Sophmore year. The way we look at texts and art is extremely unique, as we analyze work by incredibly unique artists. Most times we search for the deeper meanings about society and ideas presented in the work.
Haiku
In English class, we learned a lot about Haiku writing, so of course Mr. Greco challenged us to write our own. While writing a Haiku may seem super easy, I realized that it was much harder than I thought when I actually sat down to write it. Another factor that made this difficult was that we were given a randomized prompt that we had to use as inspiration for our poem. My statement was “I am experiencing the feeling of doubt through rebellion.” After finally writing a Haiku that I felt was usable, we had to use our photography skills to take a picture that had a similar feeling to our Haiku. Then, in digital media class we put all of these aspects together in Premiere Pro. We animated our photo with the different lines of the poem and added music affects to enhance the feeling.
For the Haiku Project, we were starting to learn how to use Adobe Premiere to edit pictures along with audio. We had to write the haiku in English class, based on a concept statement that was randomized for each student. We then had to edit our finished Haiku with a chosen audio and text style, learning how to animate text onto a page to match the rhythm of the audio.
Why Art?
For this essay in English class, we were assigned to write a piece where we chose one article and connected it to one artist. I chose Georgia O’Keeffe because I love her use of vivid colors which stood out to me a lot. I chose an article from the NY Times titled
“Art Is A Different Kind Of Cosmic Order” by Brian Greene. This was quite a challenge to write because I didn’t have any prerequisite knowledge of Georgia O’Keefe and her life before this assignment. But I really value this assignment because now I know how interesting her life and her inspirations were. Something that this assignment also taught me was that it is possible to appreciate a piece of art and its inspirations without necessarily wanting it to be hung up in your room. It was also so interesting to pick apart the smallest details from every piece and I found myself noticing things that I never would usually observe about a piece of art.
~You can also listen to my essay recording here! ⬇️⬇️
Photoshop Blend Mode Editing
In our Digital Media exploration, mastering Photoshop’s essentials involved a focused study of blend modes. We navigated the nuances of brightening and darkening images while seamlessly merging photos for a cohesive visual narrative.
Our journey began with hands-on exercises, employing blend modes on example images to grasp their versatile applications. This practical foundation laid the groundwork for confidently transitioning our skills to personal photographs.
Applying blend modes to our own images was a creative revelation. It not only showcased technical skills but also allowed us to tailor techniques to our unique visions. Experimentation with light, shadow, and color gradients became an intuitive process, resulting in visually compelling compositions.
This practical approach not only refined technical proficiency but also nurtured our artistic sensibilities. The synergy of theoretical knowledge and hands-on application empowered us to transcend traditional image editing boundaries. As we progressed, our edited portfolio became a testament to our evolving proficiency in the dynamic realm of digital manipulation.
Film
Experimental
To start out Film with a bang, we used our conceptual statements from English class to make an experimental film. This was a really fun first project because it was sort of just “art for art’s sake”. We didn’t really know much about how to use our cameras except for the basics, so it was really cool to just try new things and be creative. But, I faced a lot of difficulty with this film because we had to figure out how to express the feelings of our statement in an abstract way. I really struggled with coming up with a metaphor or something that I could film for this. To be honest, it still isn’t my favorite, but I’m proud of it nonetheless.
Writing this synopsis was really interesting, and also something that I had never done before. After giving our first pitches, we used feedback to try and write a pitch. It is really interesting because you can tell from just reading it that basically all of my original ideas were scrapped and changed. That is one really important thing that I have learned so far in Film is that 99% of the time, your idea will be completely torn apart and changed with help from collaboration and ideas from classmates. I have really appreciated and enjoyed my classmate’s help and I think that they really assist me with developing my ideas into a story that is stronger.
Here is the editing process for my film. It was a really interesting process and I learned how much longer it takes to edit a film than one would think. We also learned colorgrading which was super interesting and I had a lot of fun trying to make the red color pop.