Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Fight, Flight or Freeze: A Junior Narrative Illustration by Max Baler (2018)

Ryan is a really cynical guy but for a good reason. He works for at a dead end job at small telemarketing business and he doesn’t have any friends. With his mom dying when he was young and his dad walking out on them, he’s been alone for most of his life. He likes to argue the negative sides of things and laugh at other people's misfortune. Ryans never believed in fate but he’s about to find out that there may be such a thing. After of series of unfortunate events, Ryan has to walk home from work and go a different way than he usually goes. What he sees in an alleyway could change his life forever. Or end it.

Our assignment was to create a creature using parts of animals that share the same characteristics with our main character. For my character, I chose an aardvark and a lizard. They both were animals that you find by themselves and they seem alone. The lizard I specifically chose because it was small and likes to hide, which is the first idea I had. I thought that a small, hiding creature could represent the parasite of loneliness that a person feels. To make the creature, I first found an image of an aardvark and an image of a lizard and then used them to trace my character. We had to put clothes on our character, so I chose to put some boring work clothes that someone working at dead end, telemarketing job would wear. The background shows a door opening up to an alleyway. The door is coming from the inside of Ryan’s house and leads in to the alleyway. While in my story, the house and alleyway aren’t next to each other, I used it to show that whatever happened in the alley to Ryan, it’s going to stick with him forever. Whenever he walks out his door.
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