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Image Title: Who Am I?
As a first year college student, I have gone through a lot of brand new experiences in a very short period of time. Some days, I feel like my inner sense of self is changing so rapidly that I can hardly recognize myself. When I first started this project, I wanted to stretch out parts of the picture to convey this sense of feeling pulled in all kinds of directions all at once. As I started working on the image, though, I found that forming a colorful, distorted, and choppy portrait was a better representation of the multitude of feelings I have been experiencing as of late. Some parts are bright culminations of texture and color, while others are bleak splashes of darkness. As with the ups and downs of starting this next chapter in my life, this image is scattered and alien, but still inherently human to the core.

Image Title: Bohemian Rhapsody Movie Poster
In the movie Bohemian Rhapsody, it was shown that Freddie Mercury had a very easily recognizable outline. Not only that, but he frequently struck iconic poses in his performances that evoked a sense of power and passion. For my interpretation of the 2018 biopic movie poster, I made an effort to highlight Mercury as a focal point, with the beams of light cast behind him as a visual contrast, much like how the movie is just as much about Mercury himself as it is about his life as a performer. My original concept for the poster was to make up a biopic about a band from scratch, but I decided to change courses when I realized that this idea would be too difficult to pull off. While there is not a great deal of movement in the poster, the light beams give a good angular direction to the design, making it feel less flat and more multi-dimensional. In the end, I believe the choices I made for this poster produced a very effective minimalistic design.

Video Title: Haiku Project
There was a certain feeling of tranquility that I was aiming for in this assignment, with the haiku I selected being one about water and a sense of smooth flowing motion. At the start of the video, there are some shots of an old blue car driving along a road in the afternoon. My thinking with the inclusion of these clips was that much like water flowing in a stream, cars can flow down roads and be guided from one place to another along one directional path. There is then a transition to a leaf covered in dew drops, alluding to the fact that even when water is motionless, it can still be beautiful and pristine. In the corner, a scene of waves rolling onto a beach appears, accompanied by the sound of flowing water. This contrasts with the stagnancy of the dew drops on the leaf, and serves to show the multitude of motions that water can behold. Two last scenes then appear, both filmed by me. The first is a brief video taken on a path on campus in the rain. The rain comes down through the course of the video and into the next, which depicts a flower moving ever so slightly in the breeze. These two scenes depict the rain mentioned in the haiku, and how even though rain can sometimes be viewed as a correlation to sadness, it can still be beautiful when backed by a scene of fall trees or a brightly colored flower.

Video Title: Animation Project
When I listen to this song, I have always imagined the shapes and colors of the album cover moving around and changing size as the song plays out. For this animation video project, I wanted to try to execute these visions, both with my own shapes and drawings and with direct cut-outs from the album cover itself. Even with all these shapes and colors, I still wanted to keep the entire video pretty simple and grounded, so the background remains stagnant through the entire video, never changing from black. I am not completely satisfied with the beginning of the video, but I was trying my best with a new program that I was unfamiliar with. At the end of the video, I wanted to give credit to the band while still keeping with the overall color scheme and artistically placing the words on the screen. My thinking with this was that it would not detract from the video or feel out of place at the very end. I am not sure if the feeling of the song is portrayed through this animation, but it is still a piece that I will never forget.

Video Title: Final Project
For the last project in this course, I wanted to expand on the ideas I started in the very first project we completed. I chose the prompt regarding a reflection on how Covid has impacted our lives, and through the imagery in this video, I did my best to convey my personal experience in the matter. At the start of the video, my heavily edited self portrait appears with the colored blocks flying off in different directions and existing around the edges of the frame. My thinking with this animation was that all the pieces of my life that I thought were solid began to slip away from me and fly away out of my control. There is then an image of a clear blue sky with a few clouds floating around, showing how I was able to find a bit of happiness in the strange situation that Covid put my life in. I was suddenly much more keen to be outside in nature and spend time with family. Then my portrait reappears and the clouds that had just left the frame begin to return and cover my face, showing that despite being able to find some solace, I was still experiencing a very difficult reality. The entire frame then starts to glitch, and the metronome that had been clicking steadily while my face was on the frame starts to lose control. This represents how despite my love for playing music, I started to feel that it would not be beneficial for me to be a musician anymore because of just how much Covid impacted the global music scene. At the end, there is rainfall that crashes down on my face, which shows just how miserable the whole situation was.