ART 305 PROJECTS
Online Video Tutorial: 5 Watercolor Tricks in 5 Minutes
At first I had a lot of fun figuring out which watercolor techniques I wanted to use for my tutorial and filming the techniques. I was happy that I didn’t make any mistakes during filming, and I was able to do the technique portion of the video in one take! But then my luck was over… My computer hard drive was full so I spent two hours deleting old photos and unnecessary items off of my laptop in order to get the video clips I filmed onto my laptop. Once I finally imported my video clips into iMovie, it took me about an hour of attempted editing to realize that my 24 minute video of the techniques was close to impossible to edit and ultimately unusable. It turns out that I am a chatty tutorial giver and was talking over most of my video, which made speeding up the sections of painting really difficult since the voiceover was necessary for the tutorial to make sense. After a full day off work dedicated to this project, I realized that I had to start over. I was pretty frustrated at this point, especially since I was quite happy with how the techniques had turned out. When I went to film the techniques again, I also realized that I was out of watercolor paper and had to use the back of an old watercolor painting from my watercolor pad for the project. Just my luck today! I approached the second round of filming with 3 main points - 1. I had to cut down the number of techniques I was doing, 2. I had to talk less!!, 3. I had to use my time talking more carefully and only at the beginning of the technique, and then stop talking completely so that I could speed up the video and turn down the volume while I painted.
Since I was now crunched for time, I had to rush through the filming portion of my techniques and I was not as happy with how they turned out the second time. But, my second round of editing on iMovie was FAR less frustrating and I was able to get the hang of it much better than before. I was a little frustrated with the sound, because I was filming on a Saturday afternoon when my roommates and neighbors were around and lively, plus I live underneath Long Beach Airport so there were constantly planes flying overhead. The sound of the video wasn’t as noise-free as I’d hoped, but I find background music kind of annoying and distracting so I decided against adding it.
Overall, I am satisfied with how my video tutorial turned out, but I know it’s not perfect and it definitely came with some blood, sweat, and tears! But as always with projects in this class, I learned valuable lessons that will apply to my teaching career. I’ve realized that your work is never going to be perfect on the first try, and that you have to be patient and comfortable with editing and making changes to your original plan. I’m also proud of myself because while I did get super frustrated with iMovie and its idiosyncrasies during this project, now that I’m done I can’t believe how far I’ve come with iMovie since the beginning of the semester. I still don’t really enjoy using iMovie, but at the beginning of the semester it was like a foreign language to me and I have become a lot more comfortable with it!
Since I was now crunched for time, I had to rush through the filming portion of my techniques and I was not as happy with how they turned out the second time. But, my second round of editing on iMovie was FAR less frustrating and I was able to get the hang of it much better than before. I was a little frustrated with the sound, because I was filming on a Saturday afternoon when my roommates and neighbors were around and lively, plus I live underneath Long Beach Airport so there were constantly planes flying overhead. The sound of the video wasn’t as noise-free as I’d hoped, but I find background music kind of annoying and distracting so I decided against adding it.
Overall, I am satisfied with how my video tutorial turned out, but I know it’s not perfect and it definitely came with some blood, sweat, and tears! But as always with projects in this class, I learned valuable lessons that will apply to my teaching career. I’ve realized that your work is never going to be perfect on the first try, and that you have to be patient and comfortable with editing and making changes to your original plan. I’m also proud of myself because while I did get super frustrated with iMovie and its idiosyncrasies during this project, now that I’m done I can’t believe how far I’ve come with iMovie since the beginning of the semester. I still don’t really enjoy using iMovie, but at the beginning of the semester it was like a foreign language to me and I have become a lot more comfortable with it!
Check out my FlipGrid! I designed this FlipGrid as an example of an introductory set for a unit on animation for my future classroom.
Animation Project ~ CHASING CORAL
For this project, we were asked to create a 30-90 second animation using stop motion or rotoscoping. As someone who isn't super great with photoshop and doesn't love staring at a computer screen for hours on end, I went with stop motion. I love painting with water color, so I used this medium to create my pieces. I knew I wanted to tell an underwater or fantastical story, but at first I was pretty stuck on where I would go with this. One of the examples shown in class was from a previous student who created a stop motion inspired by a young woman who wanted Death with Dignity. This led me to think - what is a cause that I am passionate about and would be inspired enough to tell the story? I immediately thought of the Netflix documentary Chasing Coral, which I have seen a handful of times and each time I am equally in awe of the stunning beauty and cinematography and depressed by the shocking fact that we are going to lose it all, and soon, if we don't do something. I was also inspired by their use of time lapse in the documentary, and thought this would translate well in stop-motion. I painted and drew all of the pieces on water color and mixed media paper, and I just used my iPhone 6 to capture the images. Painting the pieces took a lot of time, and I did run into some frustrations using iMovie to put together the animation. My original storyboard was a little too complex for the time constraint, so I did have to cut out some scenes and simplify others. While I was definitely stressed over time, I had a lot of fun with this project and seeing my idea come to life was really exciting.
PSA - If you haven't watched Chasing Coral on Netflix, please please please give it a watch! Even if you aren't a sea-lover or an environmentalist, anyone with an appreciation of art will be in awe of the incredible beauty of the coral reefs and the tragically beautiful way in which they glow before their death.
PSA - If you haven't watched Chasing Coral on Netflix, please please please give it a watch! Even if you aren't a sea-lover or an environmentalist, anyone with an appreciation of art will be in awe of the incredible beauty of the coral reefs and the tragically beautiful way in which they glow before their death.
Here you can find my storyboard for the animation, which had to be edited down throughout the process.
Morph Masterpiece Group Lesson Plan
With my teammates Viri and Travis, we designed an open ended lesson plan for advanced high school art students that uses the Google Arts and Culture app to engage students in the topic of appropriation in art. Here is my teacher sample, morphing feminist Judy Chicago's "Pasadena Lifesavers Red #5" with eight images of women painted by men in male dominated art movements throughout history. To learn more about our lesson plan, check out the following materials and see teacher samples from Viri and Travis. Usually when a professor announces that there will be a group project, my initial reaction is dread. I'm the kind of person who would rather just do things myself, and know that they will get done. I also like to be held responsible only to myself, so that if I slack off no one else but me has to bear the outcome. However, I can honestly say that I thoroughly enjoyed working with Viri and Travis! At first it took us some time to brainstorm and line up on the same page, but we ended up working really well together and collaborating on a great project where everyone did their equal part.
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My Art Inspiration Podcast
When I discovered that our first project was going to be to create a podcast, I immediately felt nervous. When I realized that the topic of the podcast would be ourselves, those nerves infinitely multiplied. I am not very tech savvy, and I am not a huge fan of talking about myself. However, when I started to write about what inspires me as an artist, the words flowed easier than I had expected. As I started using Audacity and playing around on iMovie I was quite surprised by how easy it was to create my own little movie. Uploading the video from iMovie to YouTube was also a breeze. One thing I did struggle with was timing the photos to go along with my words. In some cases, I didn't have enough photo content to match what I was discussing, whereas in other cases I had too many photos to go along with my words. I had to play around with many different time frames in order for the flow of the words and photos to work together. Overall, I was impressed with the ease of this project which initially was quite intimidating.
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