Conceptual

Throughout the Conceptual Project, Juniors at freestyle developed creative thinking and communication skills to answer the question,

“How can I use unconventional forms to express myself?”

Throughout this unit, creative risk-taking was highlighted through poetry, music, art, animations, experimental film and web production. This challenged us to express our opinions through our own personal values. We progressively developed our technical communication skills by learning to use a wide selection of modern professional equipment and applications such as DSLR Cameras, Tascam Audio Recorders, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Animate, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Audition, Avid Pro Tools, WordPress, and Google Apps.

Throughout my journey at freestyle, I really valued the creative possibilities and trust provided by my teachers to explore my creative endeavors through my English and Digital Media Classes.

Photo/Video Haiku

In our English we were prompted to create a poem. My conceptual statement to inspire my writing was ‘Trust through taking care of a pet’. This also carried on into our Digital Media class. We created a spoken video of the Haiku poem we wrote. Below is the video. I have also included a picture of the editing process which was done on premiere pro. I enjoyed this project as I was able to create a poem based on something I’m very fond of and was able to express my feelings on the subject.

Why Art?

The ‘Why Art?’ unit in our english class, we wrote an essay focused on expressionism of art through a variety of art forms. I read of the jazz musician Sonny Rollins and of the famous painter Salvador Dali. Through these artists I learned how different art forms are interconnected like music and paintings. I also delved deeper into the symbolism their art provides. Through this symbolism I learned art matters because its eternal and a piece of history. Through art we can express profound emotion and meaning that we can relate to and be inspired from because art comes from our life experiences and emotions.

You can also listen to my ‘Why Art’ Essay in the audio below:

‘Why Art?’ Enhanced Video Presentation

After gaining knowledge on these artists and their work, we presented a slideshow showing each one of our artists and some of their artwork. The goal was to teach everyone about our artists and the different things they went through during their life. My presentation includes fun facts about my artists along with some of the deeper meaning associated with their work.

Photoshop Blend Mode Editing

In our digital media class, we were assigned multiple photoshop blend modes assignments. These included learning to use the application Photoshop to enhance, edit, and combine different images we have taken throughout the year. Below are examples of different outcomes from these assignments.

Experimental Film

During our conceptual unit in class, we analyzed many experimental films and the different techniques used to produce an excellent film. This unit was interesting as the type of media created wasn’t very traditional. We focused on sending a message through an abstract lens, maybe even through something that doesn’t make sense. My conceptual statement was ‘Trust through taking care of a pet’. I instantly knew my film was going to be abstract so I wasn’t going to include a typical pet. So I decided to make my pet a rather strange looking plant. Overtime, through my everyday care of this plant, it would grow and blossom to reveal the deeper message of trust

Here is my original film synopsis, this original idea would eventually be tweaked and adjusted to create my final idea. A synopsis includes a step by step order of events that will be seen in your film. I would keep the plant idea and its growth, but fix up the rest of the story.

Premiere Pro Interface

This was my Premiere Pro interface, the platform I used to edit my film. On the left are all of my clips, to the right of them is the timeline with all the edited clips/audio. Above those, is the video preview to display my work.