Category: Year

Structure of Digital Storytelling:

In this world, there are numerous ways to tell distinct stories: Poems, Movements, Puppets, etc. Nonetheless, we can also do it digitally via animation, music, short films, and photos. We explored different types of them, what are their features, how people make it interactive and what messages do the creators want to tell others.

Pixar Story Structure

After this activity, we had the chance to write our own story using the formula we learned in class, the Pixar Story Structure. And down below is my short story:

Once upon a time, there was a teenage girl named Trisha, living with her busy single mom, Christine. She is the kind of person who loved to go to parties at night and whenever her mother tried to give her some lectures, she hated it and also gave mom a repeated manner, which are staring blankly, rolling eyes and walking past as if no one was there.

Every day, she received a party invitation from her friends to hang out, have some drinks and dance at their houses. Trisha never has dinner with her mom and would always be annoyed by the coughing sound from her mother’s room at night. In the Kitchen cabinets, there are filled with medicines, syrups and whenever she tries to reach out to have a closer look at the medicine bottles, Christine would run to close the cabinet, saying they are some fever and stomachache pills, just in case she needed it. Not only that, but she even locked the cabinet doors so Trisha couldn’t open it anymore.

But one day, when Trisha came back from school, she didn’t her eventful mom around. It seems pretty quiet at home, but Christine left a note for her. It was written, “Sorry honey, mommy is busy at work and will stay at my friend’s house tonight. I’ll be back tomorrow, so just prepare your own dinner and be a good girl, ok?”. Without much concern about her mom, she turned out to be happy.

Because of that, she decided to throw a party at her own house because she never got a chance to do so before. While enjoying the night, a call rang into her phone from an unknown number. After three times ignoring the call, she picked it up annoyingly, but after hearing what the speaker said, she suddenly fell on the floor with flows of tears dropping. The contact was actually from a nurse, asking whether she is Mrs. Christin’s kin because there’s a patient with this name, fainting right in front of the hospital. Christine was diagnosed with Asthma four years already, but she never had a proper treatment.

Because of that, Trisha ran straight outside the house to find a taxi to go to the hospital to see her mother. However, when she arrived, the doctor had already prepared for a surgery because her mom is in a very dangerous state and required a emergency treatment. Trisha had to wait outside for a four-hour surgery procedure to finish.

Until finally, two nurses pushed out the patient’s bed and moved it into the recovery room, and behind them, there was Trisha, crying out loud like a baby and hoping to touch her mom. After three rest, Christine finally woke up. When Trisha saw it, she ran to hug her and apologize for every single mistake she had done before and promised to be her mother’s good daughter from that day on.

Photography Basics:

In this round, we had such amazing lessons about how to use cameras and some basic photography shots. We also learned about the Exposure triangle, which I used to doubt about for months. Before taking this class, I thought to myself that we could just use the auto mode and didn’t have to check any other function. But now I came to realize that I can play around with different modes and try to challenge myself with this equipment, which in fact helps me improve my skills.

Videography Basics:

Not only did we get to know more about photography, but we also delved into quite a similar field; Videography. We tried out some tips on how to keep the camera steady, which microphone is better in certain situations, etc.

This year, I started to learn more about this serviceable program called Adobe, which is full of software for editing pictures, creating graphic design, making books layout, etc. But before getting into all of these kinds of stuff, Cinda (our facilitator) taught us about researching skills and the two types of sources such as Primary source and Secondary source.

Primary sources are sources that were recorded that the time when certain things happened. Some examples for it would be Diaries, Newspapers, Interviews, Letters, and Photos.

Diversely, Secondary sources are sources that were recorded sometimes after the events happened. For example: Biography, Book reviews, Articles about some histories and Reports.

Each of the students was required to pick any topic of their interest to do some research on. At that instant, my topic was about Public speaking, so I have to find a picture from back in the Roman period when Cicero (Roman orator) publicly denounced Catiline (Roman senator) as guilty. This picture was painted at the time when this peculiar event took place, which makes it a primary source.

Consequently, I began to do more research based on the Secondary sources available on the internet to find the credible ones. After finishing all the work, then I had to insert all the information in a software called Adobe InDesign in order to create a poster which was our homework for the week. We need to apply all the knowledge we learned about Adobe program into this project. By doing so, it required to have at least two pictures. The first picture would be the one that was edited with five changes in Adobe Lightroom and another one would be the finished product after applying five functions I’ve learned about Adobe Photoshop. Each change gives us one point. The more points we get, the better our learning get.

This learning experience was very tremendous. It helped me learn by doing it and not writing it down because sometimes, taking notes doesn’t help me much, but practicing it physically and visually helps a lot. This is just the beginning, yet I get me interested in this field already, so I’m hoping for new and exciting lessons in the next round.