My name is Kexin Arc Kamprath. I’m a senior at MVHS and enrolled in Animation at Freestyle. I enjoy drawing and music. I play mallet percussion with MVHS’s Marching Band and Winter Percussion groups, currently playing marimba for MVHS’s 2026 Marching Band show “Neon Dreams“.

core values

I’m not one to typically think about and name my core values, but some things I view as important are creativity, learning from your mistakes, and work-life balance. Creativity drives my interest in art, and I find enjoyment and value in finding ways to express ideas and stories in images. Being able to look at your mistakes and learn from them is something I see as vital to self improvement, and I try my best to be able to use my mistakes as learning opportunities without letting them damage my self esteem much. Having a good work-life balance (more accurately stated as a school-life balance in my case) is something I strive to have, as being too overwhelmed with school work often leaves me with little time to enjoy life and the not school related activities that make me happy.

passions

I am passionate about making art and music. Majority of my free time that isn’t used on music is spent drawing characters I’ve made and trying to figure out their stories. I’ve made groups of characters in collaboration with my friends on multiple occasions, and have a lot of fun drawing and discussing those characters with my friends. I tend to focus on drawing characters a lot more than backgrounds or landscapes, mostly drawing humanoid or animal ones. I like listening to music as I draw. Some examples of bands I often listen to are The Crane Wives, Jhariah, Rabbitology, FLAVOR FOLEY, and Mili.

I’ve played various instruments throughout my life, with the main ones being violin for three years and viola for a year, mallet percussion since my sophomore year of high school, and ukulele since I taught myself to play it back during the COVID 19 lockdown. I used to take singing lessons, but as of now I just sing for fun, typically alongside learning the ukulele chords to songs. I’ve also been attempting to teach myself piano to learn to play songs from the soundtracks of media I like, such as the various piano pieces in Whitepine by ivorycello. I love learning to play musical instruments, and will likely try to learn songs I like on any instrument available to me.

I also like playing video games. I enjoy playing Minecraft and Towerfall with my friends and family, as well as story based games like In Stars and Time, Cult of the Lamb, Omori, The Stanley Parable, the Legend of Zelda series, and many others.

why Freestyle?

I chose to become a Freestyle student because I enjoy making art and being creative, and am looking to improve my skills. I was especially drawn to being able to learn Animation and joining an art focused community. I’m very grateful to be at a school where we have access to so many different technologies & tools to learn and use, and hope to develop skills I can utilize both now and later in life for creative projects.

With this Core Values video, we learned about Adobe After Effect’s text animation feature. It allows for highly customizable editing of text’s position, rotation, color, and many other aspects. This can be used to make many unique text animations, which along with After Effect’s built in animation presets, we explored while explaining some of our core values. A lot of the animations are simply what I thought was visually interesting, but I did link to the word choices where I could: “empathy” was animated like a heartbeat, and “communication” had a typewriter animation. Some fonts were carefully chosen as well; the word “improvement” is in a font that showcases fingerprints, tying in with my value of self improvement and personally putting in work to learn new skills & improve on current ones.

The key dynamic between my technical and artistic choices is that my artistic choices often come second priority to my technical abilities——I can’t make something if I don’t know the technique to bring it to fruition. This generally leads to me researching specific skills within the softwares we use at Freestyle on my own time, to remedy those cases where I find myself wanting to create something I don’t have the technical knowledge for, but for this project I found the highly customizable text animator interface within After Effects, along with the variety of premade animation effects, to be extremely expansive.