I am currently a second year senior at Freestyle Academy! Freestyle has let me dwell further into my interest of visual storytelling and creative thinking by having all the classes play a role in it. I want to major in animation and do plenty of creative work outside of Freestyle that influences a lot of my projects in the classes to begin with. I love working with other people and I look forward to coming to my Freestyle classes everyday due to the one of a kind, supportive community it provides. I have become an organizer, a motivator, a collaborator, and a supportive classmate due to what I have done over the two years at Freestyle.
Click on image to view my projects!
Conceptual
For the conceptual unit in Freestyle, we were required to focus on a specific statement and poetry topics given to us in English class. This conceptual statement consists of an emotion occurring when exposed to a specific experience. Mine was “experiencing the feeling of desperation while listening to music”. From there we were supposed to go in depth on that statement’s provided emotion and experience by branching out into different projects through collaborative work of the English, Design, and Digital Media class.
Click on image to view my projects!
Narrative 1
The narrative unit was something very exciting to me when it was announced. Since I am interested in majoring for animation with character and story development, this unit meant a lot to me already. In fact, each class played a huge role for this unit. The projects transitioned from starting with a short story without dialogue, to a comic strip, to a complete animation.
Click on image to view my projects!
Documentary
The profile unit, or also known as our documentary project, was one of the most dedicated things I had to work on at Freestyle. This project took a couple of months to complete due to the amount of visits I had to make with Oleg Tumasov. My focus of this unit was to create a profile for Oleg and his studio to show what an interesting person he is. I chose to do my project on him since I have known him for a while now and wanted to get to know him better through this process. Plus he deserves the attention to be brought onto him because he is indeed a one of a kind person. This was a completely new experience for me and I learned a lot from this unit. It forced me to go interact with the real world and I had a job to do for each class in Freestyle!
Click on image to view my projects!
Explorations
The purpose of the Explorations project was to focus on something that excites us as a creative Freestyle student. The reason why this project was opened up to us is because it would allow us to go deeper into a topic we wanted to focus on more during the school year or to learn something new that we never got to experience through Freestyle classes before. We could decide on which class would help us the most throughout the unit and then could go to that teacher for more help to create this project.
Something that has always interested me is the work involved in creating cartoons, such as animation. Though, this is a grand topic to focus on so I decided to narrow it down to the core structure of it. Something that is very important to start off with for a story is its development on characters. Some background as to why I decided to go in this direction is because it has interested me for years now. Freestyle has finally given me the opportunity to work with equipment and programs that can allow me to express my passion with this and so many other interests. Junior year has definitely been an adventure with Freestyle.
Click on image to view my projects!
Reflections
The Reflections unit was to focus deeply on who we truly are. This all ties back to the projects’ main question: "Who Am I?" Even though I have a good idea of who I want to be and where I am going in life, I never truly understood what makes me, well, me! How do other people view me? How does society label me? What do I first think of when I look in the mirror? For the Reflections unit at Freestyle, I had to really dive into my interests, personal thoughts, and personality to create these final projects. In English, we focused on reading articles and novels about first impressions, thin-sliced judgements, and what identity truly represents. We focused on both personal identity and other people's experiences with any sort of discrimination, invisibility, or microaggressions. In Design, we were assigned to take photographs of everyday objects that make up our life before narrowing that down to specific objects in our diptych shots with something that links to us personally. In Digital Media, I finally pieced this all together into this website.
Click on image to view my projects!
Narrative 2
Even though I already did a narrative unit in junior year, the second narrative unit in senior year is a bit different. In the narrative two unit, I still focused around one story that I wrote out and let different projects branch out from there. Tough, there are still some new things you can find on there! Some of those things include my dialogue driven short story, a trailer for that story, a designed book jacket cover for that same story, and some other projects that helped me learn a lot of different techniques to use for this unit’s central focus: creative freedom and how to express that professionally.
My first year at Freestyle as a junior, I had to create a website much like this one of where I could link all my last year projects to. You can find my Conceptual, Narrative 1, Documentary, and Explorations projects there if you go check this website out.
