Narrative 2

English

Lyrical Essay: link

The Lyrical Essay challenged students to interview and learn about a perspective of someone from a different culture, religion, or experience. I chose to seek out a 2nd generation Japanese American female to discuss how she viewed herself as well as saw herself in popular American media. We then had to construct a lyrical essay to explain their personal experiences to an outsider.

 

Design

Movie Poster and Packaging:

The premise of my film revolves around a female spy who is sent on a special assignment. As she embarks on an adventure in Europe she is met with a challenge to retrieve the world’s largest diamond. She fights her way to the top and works hard to stay underground. Once she finds the diamond she is faced with her greatest enemy and has to fight her way to safety. Although she was doubted she was able to get the job done and improve her skills along the way. Her confidence and need to reach her goal kept her motivated to keep moving forward.

I designed my movie poster in Illustrator and took the minimalist approach of drawing the silhouette of my main character and emphasizing her ruby red lips. After multiple drafts I decided to design my font with my rebellious theme in mind. The rough edges and dark color help emphasis this as well. For my movie packaging and ticket I used the same minimalist approach and brought in the aspect of the diamond, bullet, and a kiss mark. I used a box fold to create my package and added a similar theme for my ticket. All together my ticket, package, and movie poster are meant to show clean lines and intrigue viewers to watch the film.  

Freedom Project:

The Freedom Project gave students the opportunity to pick and design a mini project based on the skills we learned at Freestyle. For my Freedom Project I worked with fellow design student Kaitlyn Ecklund to create a cooking tutorial of a 3 layer hot chocolate cake. We both have baked together on multiple occasions and this was a perfect chance to bring our love for baking into our work at Freestyle. We used a variety of overhead rig shots as well as improved our baking skills by creating marshmallows from scratch. She mainly focused on finalizing our recipe while I did the filming and editing.

Alphabet Name Photography:

This photo project was a fun riveting challenge where students were asked to walk around campus and find objects and take pictures in order to represent all the letters of the alphabet. After we were finished our next goal was to create our names with the objects. This started out as a challenge for me but once I began to embrace my creativity it began to be more exciting. There were endless option for what you can do as well as what objects you can turn into letters.

Street Photography:

The Street Photography project was our first practice project that taught us the importance of blending in to our environment and capturing real emotion and moments. After capturing around 100 photos we sorted through to find a moment that moment of emotion. I personally enjoyed finding shots that captured joy like my final image below titles Smiles.

Citizen Photography:

The Citizen Photography project went along with our Lyrical Essays in English. Our challenge was to go out into the community and take street photography in order to capture raw emotion. What this meant was that we had to blend in enough with the crowd to capture images of people in their most venerable state. This was scary to imagine at first but after the first few shots it was easy to fall into the assignment as well as challenge yourself to take a more “dangerous” picture.

We then used photoshop to create a silhouette image of our focus. We used quotes from our lyrical essay and interviews to capture the moment in time and show the greater meaning. I really enjoyed creating the Diptych as well as being able to learn how to manipulate text. It was a new skill and although tricky at first is something I am glad to be able to do overall.

Japanese Stab-binding Book:

The Japanese Stab-binding book was a large multistage project that really put our art skills to the test. We began by constructing the cover, frame, and backing then worked our way to create the contents of our book. The story shown in the book goes along with our lyrical essays from the Citizen Project. We used a variety of mediums such as painting Kanji, macro photography, sketching, as well as quotes to bring our stories to life. We used photoshop to turn our macro flower and nature pictures into watercolor art. Our illustrations are painted on tea dyed Japanese newspaper and include two elements that go along with our Kanji. Overall this project challenged students to work with our hands and create something that not only shows our editing skills but our traditional art skills.

Digital Media

EDM Music:

The EDM music project was a chance for students to explore and begin to learn Reason. We had to use a various amount of instruments and sounds in order to come up with our own unique sound. We then combined all the songs together with the rest of Freestyle to see the differences of what we created. I myself had never used Reason before and was excited to learn the basics and see what I can create.

Mandala Black and White and Colored:

The Mandala project was created in illustrator and really helped express our creativity as well as experiment with different rules of design. I personally have always loved to doodle mandalas and know how long they take to create. Being able to draw them in illustrator gave me a new way to create these beautiful patterns. The illustrator template we created is also very user friendly and allows anyone to create something that is visually appealing and symmetric.

Mandala Build Video:

Mandala Reflection Video: