Welcome to the final unit of the year: Explorations! In our final unit, we are challenged to use all the skills and techniques we have learned in the past two years throughtout all of our classes. For this unit, English and Design worked together on the Blink unit, based off of the book of the same title by Malcolm Gladwell. The projects we created in those classes were meant to be reactions rather than well thought-out reflections.

The last two years at Freestyle have been the highlight of my highschool years. Freestyle has introduced me to a new community of collaboration and cooperation where we can express ourselves in new ways. I much prefer Freestyle's project-based learning to the regular homework and testing of high school classes. I hope schools like Freestyle can spread and inspire a new generation of artists with something to say.

Blink was a unit which combined English and Design, and involved meditation, fine art, quickwrites, and our amplified artwork. In total we made 4 pieces of artwork using colored pencils, acrylic paints, watercolor and oil pastels, and collages. Each art piece was based off of a prompt given to us after 20 minutes of meditation. In the end, I chose the "Edge" prompt, and used my acrylic painting as the basis for the final piece. Using Photoshop I added text, lens flares, water to the top and bottom, and incorporated a photo I took of ripples into the blue background.

For the Humor unit in Design, I created the Freestyle Daily newspaper, a satirical publication based off of the Onion.

Artist Statement:

The Freestyle Daily newspaper relies heavily on satire and sarcasm to put a humorous spin on pressing real world issues like Yo-Mama jokes and Vietnamese restaurant menus (Just kidding). The Freestyle Daily was inspired by The Onion: America’s Finest News Source, however, features more school appropriate stories and was written to appeal to a wider audience. Several of the stories from the headlines are based on ongoing controversies like raising the minimum wage and college acceptance rates, but with a rewritten to seem like good news. All aspects of the Freestyle Daily were thought out carefully, like the weather forecast in the top right with a “modest weather advisory in effect” or the intentionally misspelled “Appertizers” in the article about spelling and grammar errors. With clever writing, a heavily photoshopped main image, and several graphics sprinkled into the mix, the Freestyle Daily was designed to deliver.

Creating the Freestyle was half English and half Design, at least for me. Creating headlines and writing the articles took just as long as designing the actual newspaper, which was made using Adobe Illustrator for the layout and graphics, and Adobe Photoshop for the main image. I used Illustrator because of its advanced typography editing capabilities, as well as vector-based graphics (rather than pixels), which comes in handy when designing a piece that is nearly entirely text and, you guessed it, graphics. The photo which accompanies the main headline was modified in photoshop, and just like the headline, was twisted 180 degrees. The original photo showed the protesters demanding a $15 minimum wage in front of a real Taco Bell, but after I was finished with it, they would “gladly volunteer” because they “love this job” at “Mediocre Mexican.” Photoshopping over the original signs was easy since all the signs were red, but coming up with new ones was just as hard as writing the article headlines.

In English we created a humor presentation which incorporated our group's design peices as well as our own original humor. Austin Sarinas and I worked together on our Mox News broadcast which incorporated a Google Drive presentation to enhance the story. Below is the video of our humor presentation in English.

Over the spring break, I participated in Mountain View High School's anual Iwata Exchange. Every even year (2012, 2014, 2016...) MVHS sends 15 students to Japan to visit Iwata Minami High School, our sister school. On the odd years (2011, 2013...), 15 students from Iwata Minami High School come to visit us. Over the 10 days I spent in Japan, I had an amazing opportunity to photograph the beautiful sights Japan has to offer. I selected 14 of the photos I took on the trip to display in a unique photogallery which you can access by clicking the image above. I would like to thank Mr. Florendo for helping me on this photogallery and throughout my two yerars in Web/Audio. I would also like to thank Daniel Wilson for helping me put together multiple websites during his first year at Freestyle, including this website and the photogallery.