My name is Michaella Gumila, I’m currently studying Digital Media at Freestyle Academy here in Mountain View. I’m really passionate about visual arts as a method to communicate and empathize with other people. I have some background in fine arts, including illustration, painting, ceramics, and photography. I hope to gain and strengthen my skills so I can apply them to the real world. The goal across our classes at Freestyle for this unit is to dicover who we are and what we stand for as individuals. We did this through a variety of projects, including a personal essay that we ourselves chose a prompt for. In digital Media, we also created a video about life lessons we have collected over the years. Using After Effects, we gave each scene the Ken Burns effect to keep veiwers entertained and interested.

Click here to read my personal essay.

Emptied eyes stare, reflect tender tension trying to tear through the terror from within, project shadows hanging precariously above vulture carved cheekbones weighted with tired turmoil. And you will glance down at your reddened raw ravaged palms and notice weeds sprouting from underneath your fingernails, their resilient roots pushing pushing, pushing like the voice in your head beckoning you to the edge, spouting reckless irrationalities as promiscuous as the fountain of life.

“Fuck. You fucked up. You fucked up. you fucked up, you piece of shit, you stupid useless piece of shit.”

Shut up shut up shut up. Stop. breath. Now do it again. Breath. Keep breathing breathing breathing This is what I was meant to do. This is what I’m here for, I’m here for you they’ll say. They’ll keep you alive, if only so you’ll keep pushing the wind out of your lungs faster and faster and faster and faster until something fractures and shatters and breaks and eventually it will if it hasn’t already.

You will want to scratch out your irises to remove the dirt beneath your eyelids, plucking out eyelashes in a blind shameful misguided attempt to eradicate the infestation in your head. And eventually you’ll resort to poison pesticides disguised as pills to designed to kill those pesky dandelions developing beautifully around your faint diluted voice.

In Freestyle design class, we had a project where we were to go out and shoot 30 images with three different exposures then merge them into two black and white HDR images and juxdipose them against each other in diptych format.

The top image is a close up shot of a stained glass window from a church. The glass is textured, reflective and quite beautiful. However, because the image is black and white, the glass has no color and loses much of its beauty, its just broken glass. In my personal essay, I wrote about how I would avoid looking at the altar by staring at the very eye catching windows. The first side stands to represent my experience with being forced into a religion and how I’ve resisted and rebelled. It is juxtaposed by a local playground that represents my childhood, innocence and freedom.

I merged the three shots of each image into two HDR images in Adobe Photoshop. After desaturating each HDR image, I increased their contrast through levels and using diagonal design, adjusted the angle of the images to make them appear more interesting, dangerous and unstable. If I could have changed anything about my diptych, I would have shot each image again, but the first shot of the stained glass windows would be further away to reveal the whole picture. And the second shot would be empty of people.

We were asked to access our passion and make a short video using Adobe After Effects about a topic we have a strong opinion on. I care alot about mental health and the human experience so I based my video on a story about someone going through a mental or emotional breakdown. The character starts off very isolated and they verbalize all the thoughts going through thier head until they reach out and call for help. I did alot of soul searching, looking into myself to come up with the script for my video. This taught me about self awareness and