Hi! My name is Logan Nilotruong, and I’m a first year senior taking the Film elective. My dream is to be a professional screenwriter and cinematographer. Despite the fact that I’m leaving with only half the time most other students got, I feel like this was the most impactful school year of my life. I learned a ton of technical skills such as how to use a camera, how to handle film pre-production, as well as navigate the many, many, many Adobe apps. But beyond that, I learned what it’s like to collaborate with others, to communicate, to make art together. Freestyle has genuinely been one of the funnest and fulfilling courses I’ve ever taken, and I hope being a student there has put me on the path to be in even better places. This coming school year, I’d be attending the University of California, San Diego, as a Cinematic Arts major.
A little backstory, my childhood dream career was to be a novelist, but I stopped pursuing it since I realized it wasn’t very practical. After years on the STEM, engineering track, I realized that I still wanted to be a writer. At the end of my Junior year, I decided to try screenwriting, which is why I became a film student at Freestyle. Anyways, I’ve tried to write short stories before, but never had anything so large and planned out as Worlds Apart. It’s also the only narrative treatment that I’ve ever shared before.
Here’s the link to my World Building process doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Uv76nCoSN349FKbdsB9mruiQ-l9TDhm7oOpZNM79_AM/edit?tab=t.0
This is my Film Reel, featuring “They Way Things Work,” “Ping Pong,” “Track Hawk,” and “Office Offense.” I also included two Digital Media projects, my Colored Mandala: Series Shot, and Motion Graphic: Rho Aias, as well as “Parrot Party,” which was an After Effects practice assignment. Despite not technically being films, I really liked how they turned out and wanted to showcase them. Although, if anybody asks, I’ll just say they’re supposed to be animated films.
And Zenith Project:
At the end of my Junior year, I hadn’t even held a DSLR before, hadn’t sat down and tried to write a narrative, hadn’t considered that I could have any future in art. But it’s been a year. A year of learning Adobe Illustrator, Premiere Pro, After Effects. A year of introspective essays, of scripts, of narratives I would never have attempted to create before. This was the year I found the passion I’d been lacking for 16 years prior, made a new dream for myself. And Freestyle gave me the time, experience, and skills to make that dream a real possibility.