Moving to New York City from Providence, RI was quite a big adjustment. I chose to come to Parsons and study Communication Design, but I knew coming into my foundation year that I would be doing a lot of all around art. I believe that this has allowed me to not only become a more rounded artist, but also come to terms with which mediums I like to work with the most. My studio class is definitely the best example of this. I had 5 projects, all of which forced us to work in different mediums and on different topics. My second project was a film project and after working on that, as well as a film project in another class, I realized that film was something I wanted to seriously pursue. My studio teacher, Mimi Kim, definitely had an impact on this as she was a high energy teacher who was always very into the assignment we were doing. Having linked seminar and studio assignments helped my writing assignments not feel “left out” because most of my work was art.
One of my favorite projects from the year was my Individual Research Project for my Integrative Studio 2 class. This project was completely open ended, allowing us to do whatever we liked as long as we could plan it out and it was on a meaningful topic. I chose to do a short 5-10 min film that was based on my first semester adjusting to life in college. I set myself goals as to when I finish the script, when I would start filming and finish, and when I would finish editing the film. The final goal didn’t end up turning out as well as I expected, but for my first attempt I definitely think it was really good. I had shot short films before, but never with this amount of planning, so to me it was a big accomplishment to be able to make the film.
Another project I felt really passionate about was my Bridge 2 from my Space and Materiality class. We had to design and make a birdhouse based around a bird’s habitat and behavior. I chose the Belted Kingfisher and decided to make the birdhouse have a perch for the bird to dive into the water for and have an interior area for the bird to keep its eggs before they hatch. We also had to make it out of two materials, I chose to use metal and acrylic sheets. I based the colors on the bird, with clear orange windows to represent the dash of orange on their chest and blue as the base color to represent the primary color of the bird. The final product ended up turning out really nice, especially considering I had to make and cut every shape by hand. I was impressed with how easily I was able to make the bird considering how complicated it was.
After completing this first year of classes, there are different certain mediums I want to pursue more in. I am very excited to start creating work directly related to my major, but I am also going to now minor in Film Production, something I wouldn’t have even thought of last summer before starting classes. I am excited to become more experienced in creating digital content, and especially typography considering as I feel that is something I am not very good at creatively incorporating into my work. I am also looking forward to becoming more versed in working with cameras, and more importantly actual film.
