Freestyle Academy proudly presents
2016 Innovator Project by KirillZ

The purpose of the Senior Innovator Project is use your own passion to innovate, create, and develop your own project.

Project Proposal

For my innovator project, I plan on doing an extended and highly refined version of my short story that I did for English (25+ pages) on top of which I will do a movie poster. I mainly want to focus on accuracy and believability for this since my short story last time wasn’t realistic enough and lacked a lot of details and had some general plot holes.

I have always been mediocre at writing (at best), and I have never really written something over 10 pages (double spaced). I really want to develop my writing skills with this project and to make a really great story, but when it comes to writing for me, it’s really sink or swim, no middle ground. I have also never properly mastered Illustrator and it is something that I have always struggled with.

Project Productions

Read my research paper

Project Reflection

I chose to do a my Innovator based on the idea that I am not a great writer. Heck, I’m not even good. I have always struggled with writing. While I may have great ideas, I never seem to get them out of my mind. A while back in English we did a short story based on a topic of our choice. While brainstorming for the Innovator, I thought of that. I thought to myself “Hey, you know what would be amazing? Making a revised version of the story, but have it be way longer. I know I’m terrible at writing, but it will definitely be great practice for me.”, on top of that I also decided to tag on a movie poster to it, partially because I wanted it to seem like I was making a project that didn’t include a single work, and also because I always wanted to make a movie poster. While I may not have made an amazing project that you see often in Freestyle, I did take away a lot of things. The first thing is what I can do to become a better writer, while you do see a lot of tutorials or guides on how to become a great writer, every person has their own path that will lead them to good writing skills. For some people it may be just flat out doing a lot of writing, for others it’s brainstorming ideas, and for people like me it’s a mix of both with a good chunk of following through on grammar, story flow, and getting rid of plot holes, inconsistencies and paradoxes. Another thing for me is time management. For some people that may not be that much of a challenge, while for others like me, it is. When given any amount of time to do something, I will more often than not, actually start putting in the work closer to the deadline. One of the best things my friend told me that really resonates in me is the following “If I were given a year to do a simple math assignment, I would still do it the night before it was due.”. Even for this reflection, I’m actually finishing it off the day it is due. When it comes to the 21st century skills, I feel like I have accomplished them to a good degree. Like I have said, I may not have made the best project that I could’ve, I have done what I have set out to do. Improvement wise, I have improved on most of them, while others may not have needed improvement. For the collaboration aspect of it, I mainly needed to collaborate for the movie poster. One of the people that I needed help from was Mr.T. I asked him on how movie posters are made and what fonts are used for the posters, etc.. I also needed help from a couple of the guys at Freestyle to be models for the movie poster. I learned a lot when it came to the writing aspect. While it is easy to write an essay on WWII or subjects like that with definitive set in stone facts, it is substantially harder to write something when you literally start from nothing. If I were to do it over, I would definitely brain storm significantly more for this project. Having a more solid plan at the beginning is very necessary for a project like this. This project, while rather straightforward and simple, has given me a lot of new ideas on what to do next for a writing piece and how to approach it next time. Overall I have gained a different approach to how I do things, hence allowing me to put in more thought into something without taking out too much time to do it. I found this project to be one of the most valuable project in Freestyle. The reason I say so is because while Freestyle is a place for creativity and bringing your ideas to life, at the same time we are given restrictions on what you can and cannot do, that in many ways inhibits the ideas of some of the people here, thus not truly allowing them to do what they want. In my opinion, Freestyle should have two of these projects, one being for Junior year and another for Senior year. Having more than one of the Innovator project would definitely allow the students here to really think about what they want and know it ahead of time. Adding to what I said about doing the project over, I would also take more time to look into other ideas, in order to see how I could incorporate them into the overall project. Additionally, doing a substantially bigger project with multiple people would in my idea make it significantly better. It would allow us to do much more work, elaborate our ideas (two minds are greater than one), and overall get things done much faster. I did end up learning that collaborating with people is much more of a necessary skill than I first perceived it to be. The reason I say so is because I’ve always been that type of person that would rather do the work by himself rather than with another person. The reason why is because that person might end up slacking off, not do their share of the work, or not contribute in some other way.