Welcome to my Evolution

Hey, welcome to my personal website! This is my project listing page that I made using Dreamweaver. This is my second year at Freestyle, and I have learned many applications during my time here. I know how to use Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Illustrator. As a person who wishes to go into art and science, this has helped trememdously. I don't have a fondness for Protools as it's a struggle for me, but I do love working with Reason, and have made several songs with it that I am very proud of. My work ethic is still in development.

For my Self Portrait website, you are met with a picture of my face, and a piece of artwork of a woman wearing a venetian mask that I made in photoshop right below it. The footer was also created by me in photoshop. The conceptual goal for the site was for us to be able to use links instead of roll over buttons, like what we did for our project page. I made mine along the left side and lining the top of the site are links to the projects that I did. I was supposed to have them as different fonts, but I had trouble saving the fonts that I wanted, so that was a frustrating learning experience. I would suggest checking out my Diptych, Webgems, photogallery, and family page, as they are the strongest points of the website.

My Narrative Website is probably the one I am most proud of, although two of the pages were not completed, and those were the ones that were most important, technically speaking: my animation and animatic. However I was able to finish the rest of the site, and I most proud of this one as I felt confident of my writing. I really like writing narratives as I like creating characters and making plots and backgrounds for them. In this unit I did learn how to use

The Documentary Website proved to be extremely hard for me, as I had difficulty with pretty much everything. I was finally able to contact a man named Richard who worked at Lee’s Comics, a little comic book shop near Costco in Mountain View. From there I interviewed him about comics and their importance, but unfortunately I ran into technical difficulties and had to re-interview him later on. I also interviewed a friend of mine who shares my love for comics as well as a woman who was buying comics from Richard. This whole unit was a learning experience for me though as I learned that I needed to have backup plans, check equipment thoroughly

This is probably my favorite unit out of all four of these. We got to experiment with photoshop to create an art piece, an animation piece, a song, poetry, and music in Reason.

For the Profile unit, we had to find someone who made a difference in the community and interview them and two other people to get to know them better. I interviewed my godfather. He's a man I look up to, and his story was very interesting to learn. Most of what I found about him was unknown to me, so most of his story was a surprise to me. I always knew that he liked helping people, but I never knew to what extent he's willing to help.

For this website I wanted to keep things simple and used colors that reminded me of him as a person. Brick Red and the sublte brick background reminds me of his duties as a fireman, and his love for firetrucks. The blue at the bottom is a jean pattern, which kind of makes the whole design more casual.

I have to admit, I didn't like the Music Video Unit very much. First, being put in a group with people I didn't really know was uncomfortable, and I didn't feel like I was contributing much, but I also didn't know how to bring it up.

The upsides of the unit were the lyrics that I wrote and the art pieces that we had to create. I'm proud of the lyrics I wrote, and I'm really happy with the end result of our video. The music was really cool and catchy, but unfortunately the audio in the music video turned out poorly recorded during the end, and we think it was an importing error since the original recording sounds fine. But anyways.

In Design we also made a music poster, cd lable, and cd cover, and all three were really fun to make.

Go to my site to see my music video and design pieces!

My second narrative unit that we were assigned to at Freestyle required a story, an animation, and learning php for the Web/Audio kids. The story I created was inspired by a post on the thread r/LetsNotMeet on Reddit. The story had someone move into a place and they were haunted by the sound of a violin in the middle of the night even though at the time of their moving in, they were the only house except for what they thought was an abandoned house. Long story short, they found out the house wasn't abandoned and that the violinist might have had social issues since they tried to communicate with the new person, but ended up scaring them instead.

In English I created a story based off of that experience, but it has a much nicer ending in my opinion. In English we also made an animatic in order to help us with our animation. Later we did a presentation on a Surrealist artist.

Then, in Design, we created book jackets that would go along with our story before creating a surrealism piece of our own.

Go to my website to view all of my work!

The Explorations unit was inspired by humor and the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.

In English for the humor project we were asked to create a skit or speech or something else to perform in front of the class that used types of humor. I chose to do a speech and powerpoint that you can listen to the speech on the website. In Design, we also created a work of art like a political cartoon or a character, ect., that went along with our presentation. I liked creating my political cartoon since I was able to improve upon filters and painting.

For the Blink unit in Design we meditated and made art with a variety of mediums, my favorite being the collage and Sharpie®. The prompt that went with it was called Anticipation. The quick writing part of the prompt made me think of what Anticipation was, and the collage I made was probably the simpliest that I could have done, but I still think it's powerful. I feel like dogs are the ones who face a lot of anticipation when they wait for their owners to show up again after leaving for any amount of time. In English, we reflected more on our quickwrite and Amplified it in order to create more of a story or poem or speech, or whatever we wanted. I chose to create a story based on a thought that shot through my mind while I was out sick. For this project we also had to read a book in order to use some of the author's distinct signiture in their writing. I chose The Shining by Stephen King and adopted the way he uses suspense, dark foreshadowing, and an overall metaphor in his writing. You can view the writing and the art on my responsive website that I created in Web/Audio!

But the best part was going out and exploring something new for Web/Audio. I chose to learn how to create a comic that didn't need to load a url everytime and could be controlled with the arrow keys on the keyboard. It was really fun and I feel even closer to my goal of writing and publishing my own webcomic!