This site showcases my work from the very last unit of Freestyle Academy; Explorations.
The Explorations unit is similar to the first year's Experimental unit in its free form nature, but it emphasizes the search for an answer to the question, "What Is Thought?"
The main technique I gained during the creation of this site is the ability to make a site responsive. A responsive site reorganizes content depending on the size of the window it's being viewed from. So whether you're on a mobile device or using a small browser window on your computer, this site should present itself nicely.
Freestyle, despite the amount of time commitment required, has been an exceedingly positive experience. I got to work with a closely knit community of peers and instructors, and though it was hard work, never once did I feel like my work was meaningless. It's probably over-prepared me for at least the initial year or two of my graphic design major at Cal Poly SLO, and my skills as both an artist and potential employee in a media-industry job have been significantly augmented. I would recommend it to anyone at LAHS or MVHS with even a passing interest in a creatively focused career or major.
In English, I composed a piece that reflected a book I read, "Ready Player One." It asks philosophical questions about the nature of real and virtual experiences
through an exciting narrative about a near-future distopia where natural resources are mostly exhausted and the majority of the world's population spend all of their time in a virtual reality massively multiplayer game. To view my full write up, download this pdf.
The prompt I'm responding to with this piece and in my writing is the quote by Vonnegut about standing close to the edge. The theme in my written piece as well as the book I read, Ready Player One, has to do with the ability of worlds that aren't real, such as those you explore in popular games, tv, and movies to inspire and instruct. The real challenge comes from finding balance, and making sure that you don't lose touch with what's important in the real world by spending too much time in virtual ones; getting as close to you can to the edge of experience before falling past the point of no return. I depict this in my piece by literally having worlds in the background, and a wise man with a stone tower on a floating island in the foreground. The wise man represents knowledge and character gained from life experience, which makes the tower his counter; a symbol of restriction, rigidity, and unconsciousness. Him being close to the edge of the floating island is a little literal, but hey, it looks cool.
The tower, island and world underneath it were made with acrylic paint on canvas. The old man is lined with a fountain pen and colored with colored pencil and Photoshop. (Everything was touched up in Photoshop after being scanned in.) The night sky, planets and words were all added in Photoshop. I ended up picking two fonts because their appearances suited their respective text and location. "Because a life without escapism" is in Octin Vintage, which I felt looked good carved in stone. The other font, Beauregard, is an ornate typeface I used for "would be very boring," because the point of that line is that escapism makes life enjoyable. (And I guess I find ornate fonts enjoyable.)
The humor portion of this unit was a welcome change-up from our usual work's somewhat academic nature.
The type of humor I chose to use for my project was a mix of absurd, black, and referential humor. The comic depicts a rejected superhero idea; Melodyman.
Melodyman's mission is to change the world through the power of music. Evidently, he doesn't do the best job at that. He tries to bring the mood of a funeral up by projecting some Bob Marley, and the attendees aren't amused.
I made this entirely in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet to make the lineart and grayscale 'colors'. This assignment was a pretty simple affair for me because I do so much drawing in photoshop. I had the most fun drawing Bob Marley, mostly because I was amused by the contrast of the realism of his face with the style and absurdity of the rest of the comic. I'm also pretty proud of the hands I drew on each of the people, hands tend to be a struggle for me. The hardest part was judging how big each element of the panel needed to be. When you only have so much room to work with, the proportions and positioning of objects in a comic have a big effect on the end result.
Explorations is named what it is because you get the opportunity to learn whatever technique or discipline you want to.
Since I'm also taking the AP Computer Science course offered at Mountain View High, I decided that I wanted to use Java programming for my final WebAudio project.
The most convenient way to demonstrate java code on the web is to use an applet. A java applet is a self-contained small java application that you can embed on a website. They can provide much more advanced features than HTML5 or CSS, and are typically used for small programs that need to show some sort of graphical output.
My applet is a 2D side scrolling platformer. You control bouncing ball Cowboy Jones whose mission is to pursue the dastardly bandit Dirty Dave through 5 stages of increasing difficulty.
