Journal Entries

#1, October 5, 2022

Yesterday I met with my panel for the first time to talk about my plans for my senior project. Here, I was able to get a clearer idea of what I should be doing and what my goals are by the end of the time I have to work on my project. I feel like I'll be able to achieve what I've set forth to do, and I'm excited to get started. I'm not sure how much 3D I'll truly be able to implement into my final music video, but at the very least I'll have learned how to create my own videos with new programs I'm going to be able to utilize to my advantage. I need to get my mentor forms in super soon, so the goal that's most relevant for me at the moment is to get those in and to start working on the instrumental for the song portion. Once I've finished the song I'll be able to work on and complete the music video portion. In December I'll also be able to work with my mentor to record footage for the backgrounds of the video, which I'll splice and edit to my needs. The support I received last night was greatly appreciated, and I now feel like I have a good direction to take this in so that I can complete my project in the way I intend it to be, full of passion and full of everything I need to learn for whatever future I may have making music videos for my YouTube channel or for personal purposes. Additionally, I believe completing my senior project will exceed the 30 hour minimum requirement. There's a lot to be done, and just making the song portion alone can take me up to 20-25 hours. Especially with this, I want to make it as polished and great as possible, so I'm looking forward to getting started on it. Music making is my strong suit, but previously I had just been using a free program on my IPad to splice together a quite poorly made video for my songs. Using Adobe to help put it all together and blender to help create the visuals will open up the doors for me to create things that I couldn't have imagined I'd be able to make two years ago. I'm ready to start!

#2, December 12, 2022

What is a character, and why do we make them? What is a persona, and what's so fun about hiding behind one of them? In the real world, I'm me, but the second I begin to create, I'm 0TS. With this other version of me, I’m able to create my music and art with my own emotions, but at the same time, without the dangers and vulnerabilities that come with attaching my name to my “face”. If you know me, it’s fairly obvious to notice that I’m quite shy and nervous when it comes to speaking. In my music, though, I feel as if my own voice carries over stronger than the voices I synthesize on my computer. Speaking of, as of today, the instrumental to my song has been completed, using FL Studio Mobile, as it was far too overwhelming with this time frame to learn a whole new program for production. Along the way, I faced a lot of difficulty trying to surpass my own expectations of what it “should sound like''-- whether it was up to par with my own standards for myself, or whether the people who are going to listen to it will care for it as much as I do. Most of my songs featuring VOCALOID voices are story-based, which has led my parents to be concerned for my well-being on more than one occasion just out of confusion. “What is this about? Are you okay?”, they had asked me after I posted “Broken Boy Spiralin’!” Last March. I was, in fact, okay, and I was not cracking and breaking, nor was I “screaming from within.” It really was about one of my and my boyfriend’s characters. (This character was, in fact, “screaming from within.”) My song for Senior Project’s topic is just about as concerning to the average onlooker as my other songs, but just like them, it’s also about a character. I’m a storyteller, an edge-filled fifteen-year-old, and a morbid one at that. I can’t help it. It’s too fun. With this instrumental completed, in the weeks following, I’m planning on basically tuning the vocals and mixing them with the instrumental to finish my song, which I’ll explain a bit more in my next journal. Au revoir, until next time, then?

#3, January 9th, 2023

VOCALOID, huh? As much as I’ve been preaching about its glory in my essay, it’s not beginner-friendly at all. I’ve been working with the VOCALOID4 editor for several years at this point and yet it still occasionally makes me want to defenestrate my computer in a fit of hateful rage. One of such occasions is today. I wrote my lyrics last night on a 2AM ADHD rampage, and this morning I sat there staring at my laptop screen in horror as I planned a distant future where I am the inventor of a time machine and I travel back to yesterday to punch my last-night-self straight in the jugular. In all seriousness, though, the lyrics aren’ bad, per say, but they’re difficult as hell to tune. There’s no easy way to explain tuning, but the best way I can describe it is vocal manipulation. I can place a note on the piano roll of the VOCALOID editor, and I can input the phonemes that I need to create a word, but once I’ve created a vocal phrase, I still have to edit it with various different methods to make it sound good. Tuning is the flavor of VOCALOID. Imagine listening to your favorite musical artist’s new song, but instead of it sounding emotional, fun, bouncy, or even simply fitted to the music, it sounded monotone and like the singer wasn’t even trying. That’s what un-tuned VOCALOID songs sound like. The thing is, though, tuning can really drive you up the wall. It’s extremely tedious, and I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with it over time. Especially when my favorite VOCALOID voicebanks aren’t even meant to be singing in English, only having Japanese phonemes available, so I have to tweak them to hell and back. I’m using Utatane Piko and Hatsune Miku for this song, and it genuinely feels like wrestling a bear to make them sing in legible English. Despite that, it’s so very rewarding when tuning works. I hope the finished product shows what I’m capable of with VOCALOID, and my goal for next week is to finish tuning this altogether.

#4, February 19, 2023

This week I finally managed to finish tuning the song! I created a title for it a bit ago, but I’ve been holding off on sharing it until I was sure it would fit with the finished product. There’s still mixing to do, and that’s what I’ll focus on for the coming weeks. It’s pretty nerve-wracking, since I’m going to mix it on FL Studio 20, a more advanced program, which will give it a more polished sound. I know it’s going to be a challenge, though. Oh, right, the title. I’m calling this song Taken Utopia, which is one of the code-phrases my boyfriend made from the lore of the story the song is based off of that we both have been developing. Taken Utopia itself is an anagram for Utatane Piko, the main singer of this song. (Some of the lyrics near the beginning spell out U-T-A-T-A-N-E, so I’m wondering how many people will catch on.) One of the most fun things for me about working with characters while producing is getting to hear Cody’s joy when I publish a song based on our story. He motivates me every day to keep working, and though I don’t get to see him in person a lot, making music helps me to feel closer to him in a way. The isolated story of Taken Utopia is basically a prologue to our tale, and follows a young scientist, Ku, who’s thoughts we follow throughout the song. After losing his adopted son to suicide due to his own child neglect from being so absorbed in his work, he makes a pledge to “rebuild” him through the science of artificial life. Think Frankenstein but he’s not stitching together a bunch of dismembered body parts. Along the way, he builds three prototypes, but remains set on his end goal of reviving his son. The thing is, though, the prototypes began to see Ku as a father as well, and one in particular, named 002, begins to grow jealous and spiteful of never being Ku’s priority… Never being Ku’s true son. Before he knew it, Ku had neglected another child who desperately needed him, and on the day that he was supposed to successfully revive his son, 002 destroyed all of Ku’s machines, exploding them, and eventually tearing a hole in the dimensional rifts due to the experimental nature of Ku’s work. Ku, as well as 002 and Ku’s son’s body fall between the rifts in one final fight, and the whole lab explodes. Pretty morbid, huh? Next time, I’ll hopefully be able to talk about mixing this whole thing.

#5 March 9, 2023 

This last bit I’ve been moving on to the mixing portion of making this song. For a while now, around two years, I had been using the mobile version of FL Studio to mix my song projects. This time, however, I’m able to use the full version on my computer, and I’d say it’s been going pretty smoothly. The main difference between the mobile version and the full is in the UI (User Interface), the former being much, much easier to understand, for me at least. A big challenge for me as well as most young artists is stepping outside of our comfort zones, especially when it comes to exploring new tools for making the artistic experience more professional. I started posting my drawings online when I was eight or nine to a relatively small-ish community, which in hindsight I feel I never should have been allowed to do. Not primarily because of the toxic environment, but mostly due to the comparisons that I would make with my work versus some of the older, far more experienced artists around me that just had better tools. Growing up on the internet like me, probably more than most kids ever did in my generation due to the constant change of schools, homes, and environments in my youth, I’ve come to realize that passion doesn’t tend to be enough to get you very far. Algorithms favor professionalism, clarity, and engagement, and no matter how much I wanted to deny it when I was first starting out, especially on YouTube, effort isn’t enough sometimes. Not always! But in my line of creative work, it tends to be the solemn truth. This leads me to another problem I ran into while mixing– myself. It’s easy to lose yourself in the numbers on popularity-based forums, and for me, imperfection in this case is scary. I found myself listening to the final mix so loudly that my ears rung as I tried to fall asleep just so I could avoid messing up– just so I could avoid being seen as a kid. My pride for my own work is limited, especially hearing this song in its completed form, but I know that in two years time, when I’m far more advanced and am producing fully on FL Studio, I’ll probably think to myself, “this honestly wasn’t too bad for stupid kid me’s standards.”

#6 March 23, 2023

These past few days I’ve been working on the character design aspects of the video portion. In my head, I had already thought of pretty clearly what each character in the video would look like, especially since me and Cody often discuss what our characters look like in relation to one another. The first character I sketched out was Piko, (I would explain the lore in extensive detail behind the name, but then I’d be here for hours, wouldn’t I?). In a simplified wat, his name is based off of the singer of the song’s name, Piko Utatane, and his appearance is quite similar to the box-art of the singer as well. In this alternate universe that the story is set in, motifs of Piko Utatane’s design are commonly seen in its characters, as many of them are clones in-story of our original Piko featured in this song. It’s a bit confusing, and knowing that most of my lovely readers don’t tend to know what VOCALOID is in the first place, I won’t go on for too much longer. This song is set around six years in the past as of today, and Piko is around twelve years old, so he is quite short, around 5’2 or so, and has shoulder length, silver hair and a little cowlick on top of his head. He wears a jacket and a shirt with a spade on it, and has dark circles underneath his eyes. Another central character in the song is Ku, who I had a bit of trouble with in the designing process. I tried to finalize his design around three different times before winging it in the first references for the music video. Ku has jet-black hair, glasses, and a young-looking face. Classic science man. I love drawing mad scientists, so I hope I get to do it a lot for the final product. The last three characters in the video are going to be 000, 001, and 002, the three new “children” that Ku created in his Revival Project. They didn’t need to be too distinct as they don’t play a huge role in the story except for 002, so I mainly drew silhouettes of them for the background. 001 and 002 have P-shaped cowlicks, while 000 does not have a lower body just yet. Next week, I’ll start putting together the actual video.

#7 April 7, 2023

Now is the time where regret, despair, and everything bad has begun to set on me. Making videos is harder than it looks. I didn’t end up using the footage I took with my mentor in Toronto, but I was inspired by the atmosphere of it. Even this beginning portion with three frames per animation was hard. Draw, trace, trace. That’s the cycle and it sucks incredibly bad. I feel like, if it were just one or two animations it wouldn’t be the worst, but since there’s a middle portion as well that needs it, it’s just all dread from here. If I had a better ability to focus on things then maybe this wouldn’t be so hard, but I found myself getting bored and tired and wanting to give up. Making the main visuals, however, was pretty fun. It was the one saving grace to my sanity, and I was honestly very surprised with what I was able to do with it. Using perspective to make the backgrounds pop was very rewarding. I didn’t know I was able to do that until I tried. But, drawing all those awful, devilish, long skinny little wires made me want to break every window in this house and throw the glass down into a pit of molten lava and then throw the lava into the sun for good measures. Aside from the lows, I also experienced some highs. I’ve been using Kinemaster for lyric videos in the past, so using it with its UI was very familiar and didn’t give me any trouble. I went at it, and though it took me an embarrassingly long time, I was able to finish the animations and the base video. Another struggle I failed to mention earlier was my fair share of neurodivergent tendencies that make it very hard for me to finish a big project like this in a short amount of time. Though this was very fun to make, I found myself wanting to do something else the whole time as I simply just got tired. Really tired. I was afraid for a bit that this would stunt my future creative ability due to how much of my brain power I had to spend on this. At this point, I’m just excited for it to be over. I need something to make my art feel fresh again that isn’t hearing this song a thousand times and editing this video for a thousand hours. Just a bit longer to go.

#8 April 14, 2023

This was it. The home stretch. It really was my fault that I took this long to quite literally learn a whole new program in just a few hours to be able to animate text with it. Do I think it was worth it? Yes. Do I think that Final Cut Pro sucks? Absolutely. Am I proud of what I’ve done? Debatable. I’ve been watching it over and over ever since I posted it on YouTube, and it really, really blows to notice all the flaws I didn’t catch. Uploading it was hard enough, I had to delete it once because the video resolution itself wouldn’t go any higher than 360P for some reason, and in the end I was only able to bring it up to 480P. I’m pretty sure that this was a processing error in Kinemaster, but Final Cut was supposed to fix that and I did export out of it, so I was very confused and frustrated, but decided to leave it be because it had already accumulated 50 or so views and I wasn’t about to reupload it again. Another thing that I caught after it was uploaded was the three typos I made that I almost cried once I noticed. Eventually I think I just had to accept that mistakes will be made and sometimes it’s really not bad to let the world see them. The text animation on Final Cut was relatively easy to figure out once I learned the controls, and I think the font and effects look very cool, so I’m happy with them. In the end, when I premiered it on YouTube, Cody and my friends were there and they were telling me how great it sounded and how it was the best song they’d heard from me thus far. That made me really happy, though I couldn’t quite register it. I know that, logistically, I failed to make it as good as I wanted it to be. However, I think that I learned an important lesson on expectations and self-imposed pressure. I’m very, very hard on myself. I want people to see me. I want them to hear me, as 0TS, and love what I have to say. And though I know that this video probably will never surpass even a thousand views, I know that someone, even if it’s just one person, will be touched. I want to keep making art for the people who love my art, including myself.