My first project at Freestyle was geared toward getting to know who I was as a person and what makes me who I am; family, friends, etc. Being my first project at Freestyle, my Self-Portrait website is pretty minimalistic with its design and level of complexity. I opted for a solid color silhouette style, made almost entirely in Photoshop, with text based links in a single navigation and an internal scroll content area to display the actual writing and images of the site. This site’s content all has to do with getting an idea of what kind of person I am through showing some art I made, some essays I wrote, and listing who some of my friends and family are. The sizing of the site is something that always kind of irked me upon reflection both with the overall body of it and its content area. While it is supposed to be the optimal for smartphones and tablets, the amount of empty space on the screen, due to the small content area, takes away from the appeal a bit in my opinion and would be something I would change, were I to remake the site.
My second Junior web project at Freestyle followed the unit theme of telling a narrative story by bringing together all my narrative works in my other classes onto a easy to navigate, central website. The technical elements of this site remain very alike to my first page with it’s text-navigation bar and body area, except for the external-scroll content area that expanded with the pages content. Aesthetically, the parchment theme went with the idea of telling stories, with I stylistically linked with paper for literary reasons, and I stylized certain text sections, like the nav-bar and links with cursive, calligraphy-like text to give it more personality. This site also displays a number of media pieces which display the knowledge of embedding we learned this unit that makes displaying content more elegant. One aspect of the site I wish I could have improved on more is the repetition of the body image that is used when the page auto-expands to fit more content. There is a slight tear in the background image that can be see when it repeats that I never figured out who to mask fully and still bothers me to this day. Not a huge issue with the site, but it’s a little tweak I’d have liked to make.
This third project website is most likely my most favorite of all of my Junior Web/Audio website. The site was to be shaped around the topic of our Documentary Unit and display all of our work based off our subject of documentation; my topic being a music store in Redwood City by the name of “Gelb Music”. The site’s design is meant to meant to follow a musical store theme with the changing banner of the site being photos taken of different parts of Gelb and the content area confiding in a guitar amp and using internal-scroll navigation. Also, the navigation buttons on this site are rollover jpg images instead of text links. Honestly, I can’t think of a single aspect of this unit that I didn’t do well on, if I do say so myself. I can’t think of anything I would want to change about it page, pretty close to perfect.
My final unit as a Junior was focus on Experimental Art and is kind of hard to explain the as a result. The website I made follows the theme of the rest of this unit’s pieces to a degree, which I was more or less how i feel about growing up, but the design of it approaches that idea through different symbols. The layout and design is meant to mimic a sort of 1950s advertisement which, long story short, makes me feel older for some reason with the content area expanding again according to the amount of text or other content. The site this time is instead navigated through SpryTabs, acting like a navigation box, that hide and show certain content accordingly making this more of a “webpage” than a “website” but the result is really the same either way. The site house my final pieces of my Junior year at Freestyle with various works from all of my classes during the final weeks of the school year. However, if I could change something about the site I would like to rethink the theme a bit in order to give me a more stylistic way to display everything. Still, everything came together nicely for what I feel is a appropriate finale to the Freestyle school year.
For our first unit back at Freestyle as Seniors, we prepared months in advance to profile a person we found interesting and create a whole documentary portfolio around them. A web site, a magazine article and a live presentation was built around this subject which we were tasked with getting to know in depth so that we could describe to the rest of the world what aspects of them make them unlike anyone else. My subject was Josh Friedman, a professional guitar performer, composer and instructor, in Mountain View who takes a personal and adaptive approach to kindling a passion for music in his students. After hours of interviews with Josh and others and research into related topic, I finally made this, a final product that I believe describes who he is best.
Form a band. Write a song. Record said song. Shoot a video. Combine the two. All in just under a month. It’s the music video unit and boy was it a ride. With 3 other people I wrote, mixed and acted to create a original music video using only the resources here at Freestyle. But actually that’s a lot of resources so it wasn’t nearly as hard as it sounds… We worked a lot with Pro Tools and Reason to get the sound we wanted for are song and the film students worked a lot on edited the footage while I just kinda sat back and watched. But really most of the time was spent trying to decide what the band name was going to be. We never really did reach a consensus…
Although we learned to tell a story last year at Freestyle, we learned to do it better this year. I made less mistakes this time. I made some. Just less. Once again we made a storyboard to visualize the narrative and a script to work out the writing but this time we animated with After Effects. Boy was that a trip. In hindsight I love it. At the time not so much. WE fleshed out the whole story in English and created some art to go with it in Design. We kind of got off track a bit with the Surreal sub-unit but the main focus in mostly narrative. But I’ll let you see what I made for yourself rather than describing it here. So press “Go” to go please.
This is it. The last unit! Are you excited?!?! I am excited!! It’s time to explore! At least that was the theme. We got to take time create a project of our own design for a change and explore something that we found interesting. I explored After Effects some more. It was fun. And frustrating. But of course we did other stuff too. Humor, something called “Amplified”. It was fun. The best possible way to end the year and our time here at Freestyle. So, should you feel compelled by your sense of curiosity and/or mystical, unseen forces, click the link below to view it.