Introduction
“How can I use unconventional forms to express myself?”
Throughout this conceptual unit, we have explored different ways to creatively express ourselves through things like poetry, music, experimental film, and web production. At the same time, we developed technical communication skills by using various applications and modern equipment to produce and enhance our products.
What I value in being a Freestyle student is having the creativity to try new things without being bound to guidelines and rubrics that we are traditionally in normal schools. This has allowed me to push my creative thinking skills that I feel like I have lost over time, which was apparent immediately as I often struggled early on to make decisions and form ideas that I felt excited about. Freestyle providing such opportunities to create independently and within groups allows for a lot of fun and gives you a chance to produce something you can really be proud of.
Photo Haiku
Our first conceptual assignment in English was to create a haiku, a Japanese poem composed of seventeen syllables, based on a random conceptual statement generated for us and pair it with an original and fitting image. After finalizing our haikus in English class, we then took our poetry in our digital media class and created a video with music to pair with it. To do this, we took our image and lines of poetry from our haiku and added additional effects and creative details in Adobe Premiere Pro.
The bottom left of the screenshot holds the media that was used in the creation of my Haiku. In the top left of the screen is where I added the effects (or keyframes) that allowed my lines to move. The timeline in the bottom right was where I ordered and organized the media. And of course, in the top left is the video that was being produced.
Why Art?”
We started off the “Why Art?” unit by reading the play Red by John Logan, a story about the artist Mark Rothko and his apprentice Ken, in order to inspire and elicit our individual feelings on why art matters. After reading and analyzing Red, we were assigned to research a pre-20th-century artist of our choice and read an article from a list curated by our English teacher. These two assignments directly led us to write our “Why Art?” essay that connected the works of our artists to the purpose of the essays.
On the left, you can click on the image to read my essay. However, if you would rather listen to my Why Art Matters essay, you can listen to the audio below.
Photoshop Blend Mode Editing Section
1) What I value from learning and doing this assignment is now I know how to enhance photos that have the potential to look really good but are messed up due to an issue with the photography.
2) I could see myself blending two photos sometimes and the paint tool to make things pop more, however, I mainly envision myself using screen, multiply, or overlay to make different photos look better most of the time.
Film
Soon after starting film, we dove into our biggest project so far which was our experimental films. We took our conceptual statements from english, mine being: “I am exploring the feeling of sentimentality through collecting,” and trying to visualize these statements in abstract ways. After pitching and revising our original film ideas, we started getting raw footage and showing this footage, rather our “dailies” to the class. Receiving feedback on our dailies further developed our ideas and eventual films. After working on our films for a month or two, we finally got to enjoy and watch each others films, showing off the fruits of our efforts.
On the left is my Experimental Film Synopsis. This synopsis truly reflects what I created in my final film because I ended up completing this a month past the due date. My excuse for not getting this done initially is that I really didn’t have an idea that I was super excited about. I struggle making decisions, and this was no exception. I was jumping from idea to idea, all the way up until the weekend before our final cuts were due. Luckily, I had a bunch of footage that I was able to finally create a product that I could feel confident and proud about. And after a month of having a missing synopsis, I was able to write the idea and meaning behind my experimental film.
The process of creating our experimental films began with our pitches (as I have mentioned previously). We spent quite a bit of time curating our ideas and experimenting with different raw footage through our dailies. After we had spent about a few weeks on that, we started to work on our rough cuts. Personally, my rough cut was really rough because I was still struggling with the initial step of creating an exciting and motivating idea, so my rough cut did not have much direction. My situation was particularly stressful because I had a barely qualifying rough cut and the final cut deadline was approaching very quickly. In a last minute effort to save my film, I consulted with some experts: my sister Bryn and her boyfriend Matan. Brainstorming and experimenting with these two really helped me push forward with my film, ultimately allowing me to create my final product (you can see below).
The bottom left-hand corner is where I stored all the media, both audio and visual, in making this film. The window in the top left is where I do my editing, such as making my actor a silhouette and the greenscreen turn red. On the far right, you can see the image in the film before all the editing to see the before and after. The top middle is where I see the film I am producing and what the viewer sees in my final production. And lastly, in the bottom middle is the timeline where I place all my media and develop the sequence of my film.