The Documentary unit was one of the toughest parts of the year yet. It was a fast pace couple of months that just blew by in an blink on an eye. We continued to expand our skill in digital media by spreading the knowledge we knew about adobe apps. We learned Illustrator, Indesign, Photoshop, and also expanded our skill in Pro Tools. In English, we read many more books including Freakonomics, They say I Say, etc. We also wrote a whole documentary paper on someone/something. This really gave me a new experience in interviews, and learning about a culture and being able to write about in a way that was appropriate. We had to go through personal interviews and writing down notes about the topic that you learned about the person. Then we continued to do research on the side to create a big paper all about our topics. Animation was a weird class this semester, I didn’t complete everything because I didn’t feel very motivated about the topic. But we still learned many more skills and also learning how to use After Effects for Animation. Also using the Ipad to draw frame by frame creating cool videos.
Animation
Another project in Animation that we worked on is also the Lip Sync. We had to first create a character with Photoshop. Then we had to make a serious of different lip shapes to match different letter in the song that we picked. Then, we brought the files into After effects and then applied the lips to certain points of the song to make it look like the character in lip syncing. This project was very challenging because it was hard to create lip shapes that fit to the character. Since I also picked a song that had a lot of lyrics in little time. That made it the most challenging.
The image above shows the After Effects process. You can see that there are many many layers of the different lip shapes I had to include in. The different ways of putting all the parts together was very challenging because there were so many different files from different adobe applications. The character was from photoshop and also the 12 different lip shapes had to be imported individually. Another big factor of the lips were that you had to make sure that there was no green outline behind it because then you could be able to tell that there was a green screen.
Documentary Project
Chinese New Year
I did my documentary study on the Chinese New Year. Chinese New Year is a tradition that I’ve celebrated every year of my life, and it’s always a big part of the family during the months of February and March. But I never learned the true history of the holiday and why its so important to the Chinese people, and how it has spread to many different countries like America. The person I chose to interview was my grandma. This is because she has lived all her life in a rich Chinese culture that loved the New Year. I interviewed her on her thoughts about her year. She then began telling me how every family celebrates the tradition differently and there is no “correct” way to celebrate it. My grandma cares about the family always being there, showing that there is always a big bondage part to the Chinese New Year. Its a way of bringing everyone together in a weekend and celebrating the culture of the tradition. Other than my interview, I also did a lot of research on the history of the New Year, where the idea was originated from. And I was very blown away about the things that i learned during the process.
In Digital Media, we had to create a Magazine Article related to our documentary subject. So I had to design an magazine article in InDesign. InDesign was a very fun tool to use because its not like the others. You were able to put sentences together in the app much easier than the other apps like Illustrator. I think that It is a very Powerful tool to use in the future.
Overall, the documentary unit was a really fun one. I am glad that I was able to learn so many new skills in Indesign, Illustrator, Protools, After Effects and more. I believe that these apps will be really helpful in the future to create content for clients or friends. I don’t think I’ll ever forget this section of my high School career. With everything that happened during the year. I was not emotionally in the right state to do work, but since I still got through it and learned a lot of new things really tells me that everything will be okay eventually no matter what. that time really fixes things. I’m really thankful for my teachers that are so understanding and to those that helped me through these hard times. Next Year I will continue to work hard if not even harder to perfect my projects and I’m very excited to see what things I can create in Film next Year.