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Hello!

Salutations! For those of y’all who don’t know me my name is Izzy, and I am a soon to be graduate from both Freestyle Academy, and Mountain View High School. I’m also very excited to be enrolled into San Diego State University in the fall to study Sociology as well as hopefully minoring in Zoology! I’m hoping to also on the side continue my love for art and writing, and maybe even use it to help the people I work with in the future (trying to incorporate art therapy when talking to kids about things they having experienced in foster care if I were to become a social worker for example). My goal career wise is to just try to help take care of people’s mental health, and make sure that they are in a physically and mentally safe environment.

Before Senior year, I had never really done animation before since I was in Film first year. So learning animation this year was an entirely new, exciting, challenging experience. The most fun and easy part for me at least was character design. The most challenging, was my Zenith project.

Project 1: 3D Animation Models

When it came to Senior year animation, we focused the entire year on learning the art of 3D animating. After we learned the basics of how to use each of the main three softwares for 3D sculpting (Maya, Zbrush, and Substance Painter) we then were able to start planning the designs of our own personal character model to create as well as animate with. Although I drew up a few different designs, for the purpose of showing my personality, as well as the one that was simple yet challenging (trying to make the hair in Maya was not fun), I chose my character design for Ember.

From this, I then sculpted through the different softwares a 3D model which is seen animated below.

Below are some additional model designs if you are interested:)

For the character modeling portion of learning 3D, I preferred it more for a couple of reasons. One is that I am not great with tech, so animating something using coding within a software and not being able to draw out the motions you want your character to do was difficult for me and not as enjoyable as when I did 2D animation for my Zenith (although 2D takes a lot more time). The other reason I really enjoyed the designing of the characters is because there was more creative freedom in the planning and practicing of sculpting than the actual 3D animation portion. Which is basically the same reason as before, that animating using the computer rather than drawing out the frames you wanted felt more constricting to me. But overall with 3D I really valued the experience and practice of it. It is rather complex, and the more complicated it gets, the more time consuming it is to figure out the coding and set up to create your animation which is not as much my cup of tea as actual drawing is. 3D animating is a fantastic thing to learn how to do, and I truly appreciated and learned so much about how to use 3 completely new softwares for me which I really loved. All in all I say 3D Designing as well as the animation process overall was a success:)

Project 2: Zenith Project

The more challenging portion of animation this year was when we were given less than 5 weeks to plan and create our big final project of our Freestyle elective classes. For me, I basically chose to challenge myself to create 5 super simple 2D animations and 25 drawings in the span of 20 days. The most difficult part about this project was time, as well as the fact that I had to teach myself how to 2D animate from scratch since I had never been taught before. Scroll down to listen to my more breakdown of the project, the final slideshow, as well as my reflection.

For my Zenith project I planned to create 30 art pieces including learning how to do 2D animation. Since I was a Film student in my first year of freestyle, I never learned how to do 2D. Besides my sloppily made experimental. Originally my plan was 10 animations and 20 drawings. However I very quickly realized that I could not do that. So I instead did 5 animations and 25 drawings

For the general theme of everything I drew, I wanted to focus on what I was feeling and experiencing each day for a month. This included how my mental health was, my dynamics with friends, general thoughts and feelings each day. To do this and keep everything organized, I first wrote everything down in my writer’s notebook everyday for the 30 days. At the end of each day I would try to come up with a drawing or animation idea based on my experiences for that day.

The drawing part was pretty simple. I either drew simple doodles on notebook paper, or painted a few of them when I had a little more time. At one point I even did drawings on earrings which was a tad annoying. 

The learning 2D animation portion was a little bit trickier, to stay on schedule with the project deadlines I had to try to learn 2D animating in the span of about a week or so which also included me beginning a couple of my animations for the final project. I spent most of that first week trying to research how to use OpenToonz, the software I wanted to try out for animating, as well as watching videos on the basics of 2D animating.

With me needing to learn a lot of new things in a short amount of time, not everything came out to my expectations. I was hoping to have enough time to do more detailed or longer animations. Unfortunately that did not work out, but with the time I had and the amount of content I made, I am pretty proud of this project overall. It helped me stabilize my mental health, which has always benefited from art my whole life. As well as helped me to slowly break myself out of a year long artist block I have been stuck in.

In total:

Freestyle has taught me a lot of things over the years. And I am honestly incredibly grateful for it. Despite the pandemic, I was able to learn how to use so many new things, and create bonds with people I had honestly never met before. Through all of my classes at Freestyle I was able to push my creativity beyond just poems and doodles, and turn them into 3D artworks, films, lyrical essays, and a lot more. Last May I lost one of my closest friends to suicide, and having Freestyle as an art based school helped me to process my pain and grief into artwork. Art has honestly always been my mode of personal therapy, and it was an amazing experience to be able to use that therapy in school too. I have grown up a lot in the last two years (at least I would like to think) both as a person, and as a student. With my elective classes, and Digital Media, I learned a lot of patience with the technology struggles and trying to not let mistakes or errors make me give up. And with English, I was able to open myself up more through writing, and channel my feelings and emotions into stories and essays which have helped myself, and others find closure in different ways. I am proud of how far I have come in the last two years, as well as high school overall. And I am very excited to see what is next, and how things will change.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GEeNuPYsLS84Xem97A5Mp7yXayhPdsJ0xKA_Jx6cDsY/edit?usp=sharing

Thank you for your time.