The first unit I completed at Freestyle was the Self-Portrait Unit. The purpose of this unit was to learn how I can express myself in various ways, and to be able to put my work out there–the internet–for everyone to see. I believe the biggest challenge of the Self-Portrait unit was feeling comfortable enough to let my emotions flow free for the whole world to see. It is very scary to know that anyone could be criticizing my work at any moment, but I learned that this process is crucial to improving upon previous works. The basic breakdown of this unit was different aspects of my life: family, friends, personal stories, etc. By going through the process of figuring out what is appropriate to write on a website, I learned the impact that each aspect of my life has on my ideology–my personality. On this website you will see the use of basic HTML code functions including: internal scroll bars, rollover text, video podcasts and a wide variety of adobe products.

The second project at Freestyle taught me how to tell a story. Well telling a story can be fairly simple, but when you have to write, edit, animate and photograph this story to help you tell the story it becomes a little more complex. The majority of my time during this project was spent editing my story and then attempting to learn how to use Adobe Flash as it crashed and failed to load things. During the process, however, I learned a lot of useful things: be creative because nothing is false in a story unless you make it so, drawing is hard, and I have a lot more to learn about Adobe Flash. But what I liked most about this unit was learning how to portray emotion. Everyone knows how to feel emotion and react, but to recreate an emotion becomes difficult. This caused me to analyze a few things: “what causes certain emotions to occur?”, “how do I make people see that emotion?” and “does the emotion make sense in the big picture?”. Personally, my favorite piece from this unit is the illustration. If you glance at it, it seems fairly simple, but as you analyze each piece, you can understand the story.

Like most, I love finding out neat stuff that interest me. Well, the Documentary Unit was an opportunity to explore something that interested me. I decided to focus on a facility known as the Gateway Neighborhood Center. Simply, it consists of Mountain View Volleyball Club, Reach Potential, and Sunnyvale PAL. Each organization brings a unique experience to Gateway that makes it one of a kind. Each organization focused on bringing in kids who wanted to improve, and Gateway provided a place for each person to learn to excel in their academics or sports. What really put this project above the rest was the connections I made through this project. I learned stories of hardships and how to maturely overcome them. To say the least, I was scared I wouldn’t be able to represent Gateway as this amazing place as my skills in the software was still very novice. I hope I did Gateway justice. In the book that I created, you will be able to see each aspect of Gateway along with people that help build character and change in the lives of many in the Sunnyvale community.

Remember back to when you were about six or seven and you wanted to just try out everything, but you weren’t old enough or responsible enough to do them. Well the Experimental unit is where I was able to put all of my energy. I learned the importance of being careful when trying to scan broken glass in Adobe Photoshop, how to create decent poetry that actually creates imagery in your mind, and even a little knowledge of working Pro Tools and Reason. I felt that this project really let me express myself because of the many media types I was able to use. For instance, one picture used a photo which I later photoshopped and added a scanned image of broken glass over. Where else can you say that you did that? This unit really allowed me to see that there is no boundary of what I can do with art.

The profile unit was our first big unit of my senior year at Freestyle starting all the way back as a junior. It consists of a research paper on the opportunities created from higher level education, a photogallery of shots of my subject and relevant photos, a magazine article created using InDesign and a media feature after we learned a new tool called Adobe After Effects. The project was amazing for me because I got to learn a lot more about my grandfather's life before I was born, and to reflect on all the skills I have learned as a student at Freestyle Academy up until this point.

Welcome to our main audio unit! The music video unit consisted of composing lyrics, story boarding a video idea, and then creating the final product. From start to finish, my group and I completed the whole project in a few very stressful weeks, but it was a very rewarding experience. Check out this website to see how I used Pro Tools, our studio, and many long hours in a very cold house, to fabricate our final music video. Emjoy!

This is my second narrative unit here at Freestyle and this time around we used Adobe After Effects instead of Flash. Along with this animation, I created a Book Jacket for design and then moved into a surrealist unit where I unveiled my unconscious thoughts. English was all about writing and making a relatable story. Check out all the different components to this project and enjoy! This website also has a page for feedback so if you have any comments, questions or concerns feel free to send me a message!

Well this is it! At least for this webpage. The explorations unit is where I got to explore anything I wanted. I decided to play around with some SVGs and some more Javascript. I messed around with titles in Adobe After Effects and I even attempted to make a game. Pending if I ever finish it. Take some time and look around at all my projects and then take a look at what I got to do when I just wanted to have a little fun.