Welcome to my Explorations Website. During this unit I learned a lot about myself and the way my brain thought,in an artistic way. Explorations at Freestyle was our last project, so thye made it relatively calm. We would meditate and explore our minds, and thoughts. We were tought about our "Blink" Brains our our first pretenses towards people. In Web Audio we were told to explore the internet until yhou found something you liked and then try and replicate the concept. I liked the thought of an opening animation or moving pieces.

In WebAudio, we also learned about responsive web design, meaning that the website will scale depending on the platform being used to view it. If you're on a phone or a tablet, for example, you're seeing either the phone or tablet version of my website.

This was our last Freestyle project ever. I am thankful for the opportunities Freestyle has given me and so appy that I will be able to use what I learned here for the future.

In our English class we read the novel Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. The entire book teaches the reader about their "Blink Brain" which essentially is just your uncoincious thoughts or you specific pretenses or prejudices towards someone, usually based off their appearance or their very first impression. We then practiced these techniques in ten-minute free writes, where we were given a topic and told to write whatever came to our mind about that topic.

My humor type was a commencement speech. I researched several speeches, ranging from very blunt surface level material to very cutting ironic humor. I found that for the humor unit it was best to use a more blunt, upfront type of humor. I also learned that calling out specific instances that everyone knew and everyone found funny was the best way to form a connection with an audience. Every speaker also opened up with making fun of themselves in someway or another, or just acting slightly awkward and making themselves seem much more at the level of the audience. I also noticed that even if they were sort of nervous they were able to keep the audience interested and laughing by telling small anecdotes or leaving time to just ramble and try and make up a joke or story. I found that that even though the speech was humorous, they were about to wrap up everything nicely and concisely at the end of the speech. They also seemed to bring up rival schools or organizations pretty often, which seemed to raise audience interest. Mine is a simplistic comparison of Freestyle and the traditional high school experience of either Mountain View or Los Altos.

I kept a very basic design because we were on a time crunch. I kept simplistic ideas for what the two different situations were. I mainly used the shape tools in Adobe’s Illustrator. On one side I had a kid under a traditional high school graduation banner; he had a sad face and he was saying that he never really got to know that many people, which, from my experience talking to friends at traditional high school, has been the case more often than not. On the other side was a kid under the Freestyle graduation banner, he looked much happier and also said that Freestyle had altered his life positively and he had made most of his friends in Freestyle. This project was reasonably easy to create because it didn’t require immensely deep thought or any color scheme.

I enjoyed the Humor unit because I like to think I am the funny guy when I want to be so it wasd finally a unit I felt comfortable with. My performance of my speech is below, if you would like to view it, you can simply click the video link. Hope you enjoy it!

For the Mini Project unit we were instructed to find something we wanted to explore with or practice more. I chose to use Adobe's After Effetcs because I was intrigued with all the possibilites you have when using the program. For My mini-project I decided I wanted to keep working with Adobe's After Effects. I decided the best way to end my time at Freestyle was to try and highight Freestyle in the best way I though I could. I chose to try and encompass the ideas that truly brought me to Freestyle all into one video. I then thiught that a commercial would work best for my idea. I kept it short so Mr. Flo could possibly use it for future recruiting of kids to Freestyle. I created the commercial in After Effects by making one very large background image with ervything on it, that way I could easily just rotate and fly the cameras to whatever I wanted to show. I usually find that easier than animating things on and off scrren, which I usually find gets very cluttered. I then thought of a catchy slogan that I thought embodied Freestyle as a whole. "Let your imagination ru wild",Even though it may sound cliche and cheesy, I felt that it did ,in all truth, capture truly what Freestyle is all about. Huge amounts of crdit to my partner, Bella Graziani, who not only came up with the ides to do a commerical put also was the one who had the programs to do that work.

You can find the video below if you click on the video box. I hope you enjoy it.