My name is Nicola Colace, and from 2024 to 2026, I attended Freestyle Academy as an animation student during my Junior and Senior years of high school. I love math and science, but my main focus in life is art. As someone very passionate about creativity and the art of illustration, I have ambitions of becoming a professional concept artist.
Core Values
My core values in life are hard work, dependability, resilience, empathy, and imagination. I strongly value putting your best effort into whatever you can, because that’s how you build essential skills to set yourself up for success in the future. Being dependable is, to me, a very important part of what makes someone a worthwhile friend, colleague, or even classmate, and is essential for building trust and strong relationships. Resilience is also something I value highly because without it, you can’t recover from your worst lows in life. Whether it’s severe illness, rejection, failure, or loss, resilience is how you keep moving forward and find the strength to thrive. Empathy is also important to me because it’s how humans connect with one another. It ties society together through the shared human experience, making it a key aspect of understanding the world around you. And imagination is what makes me an artist! It’s how I channel my ideas into tangible work, find inspiration, and cultivate meaningful visual storytelling.
Hobbies
In my free time, I love to create art of various forms including digital illustration, traditional illustration, animation, and sculpture. I also love listening to music and seeking out new songs and artists across a wide variety of genres. To unwind, I enjoy playing creative, open-ended video games like Minecraft and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Another of my favorite laid-back activities is watching TV shows with my family and friends, which I often grow very invested into. I’m brimming with show recommendations to share with my loved ones!
Student Expectations
When I was a Freestyle student, my expectations of myself were that I would take every opportunity possible to get the most out of each lesson and project. Though it would cost me a lot of extra time, energy, and effort, I was determined to make sure that I graduated having taken away as many valuable lessons and knowledge from Freestyle as I could, knowing that the program would teach me skills that I would find invaluable throughout my artistic career. As a result of my efforts, combined with the program’s unique curriculum, I grew very much both technically and artistically at Freestyle. Almost every project challenged me to try something that I had never done before, whether it was hosting interviews for a research paper, making experimental music with MIDI instruments in Pro Tools, or digitally sculpting a custom 3D character model.
What Freestyle Meant to Me
What I valued most about being a Freestyle student was having so many more creative opportunities and resources than were available at my high school. I would never have been able to practice or learn so much about animation without Freestyle, because I simply didn’t have enough free time outside of school to dedicate to it. Enrolling in Freestyle’s Animation elective meant that there was time built into my day dedicated to improving those skills and building my experience, not to mention learning advanced 3D modeling programs in Senior year. Digital Media offered so many important and unique experiences as well, teaching me to use professional-grade tools that I never would have otherwise been able to learn at such a young age. Through learning how to use Pro Tools, the Adobe Suite, and high-end physical equipment to create high-quality video and audio productions, advanced photography, and more, my horizons as an artist expanded vastly—both technically and creatively. I also truly value the connections I was able to make at Freestyle, especially because of how challenging it was for me to find and connect with other artists at my main high school. Freestyle was an extremely conducive environment for making friends; the small size of the student body virtually guaranteed that our class would to get to know each other, which made it far less intimidating to approach or engage with my classmates. And of course, in a program full of creatives, it was very easy to connect with others over artistic interests. At the very beginning of my time at Freestyle, there were already people willing to chat with me and hang out, which had never been the case for me in any other high school class. I’m extremely grateful for the friends I made there, and I will never forget the wonderful experiences that Freestyle gave me.
Core Values Video
Artist Statement
For my Core Values video, I chose music that I felt contributed towards a more casual mood, and that felt closer to an actual song rather than stock music. When selecting animation presets, I tried to make the animation for each word as distinct as possible from one another. If I used the same or similar presets for multiple words, I combined them with other presets to create a more unique animation. I added extra visual interest and made the words pop by using a rainbow of high-saturation text colors atop a very dark red, almost black, background. I chose not to make the background pure black because I wanted the entire video to have color, and I prefer the aesthetic qualities of the subtle red hue.
When it came to the placement and timings of the text and animations, I worked to keep everything clean and on beat. Referencing the waveforms of my background music, I lined up the starts of my animation and voiceover with major peaks in the music. After watching through each segment of the video, I fine-tuned the alignment of the animations so that the text would come on screen at the right moment. I also shifted the timing of my voiceover so that it flowed along with the beat of the music properly. When choosing the final positions of my text, I kept each word mostly horizontal rather than vertical for ease of readability, spread them out so that the video wouldn’t appear cramped, and added rotation to increase visual interest and lead the viewer’s eye around the screen.
Final Reflection on My Freestyle Experience
The best thing Freestyle gave me was a small, close-knit community in which I could comfortably connect with other people and be creative. My main high school is too big and overwhelming, and alternative/artsy people are a minority in the student body. I felt very isolated in all of my classes there. Freestyle provided a space that cut out the noise and placed me next to people I could relate to and connect with, which allowed me to make friends for the first time since I started high school. At Freestyle, not only could I emotionally decompress and work on fun projects, but I could also get comfortable enough with my classmates that I could engage and chat with them while we worked. This made class at Freestyle a much more positive environment for me than any of my regular high school classes. Freestyle (especially Animation) has broadened my horizons as an artist, most notably by giving me access to professional-grade software that I otherwise would have been too hesitant to explore or invest in myself. Being introduced to these programs in a guided setting really helped to demystify them for me, which strongly enables my growth as an artist. In particular, I’m referring to Maya, ZBrush, Pro Tools, and programs in the Adobe Suite like Illustrator, After Effects, and Premiere Pro. I was able to discover that I really enjoy 3D sculpting because the programs and hardware required to run them were already provided to me, and I was given straightforward instruction on how to use them. I don’t have a powerful enough PC to run Maya or ZBrush at home, and even if I did, I would have been too intimidated to figure out the programs by myself. Because of Freestyle’s technical and instructional resources, I now feel empowered to pursue 3D art, which will be an incredibly useful skill to have as a concept art major when I go to art school.
Portfolio
Below are what I believe to be the 3 best projects that I completed during my time at Freestyle.
2D LipSync Animation
My 2D animated Lip Sync Project from Junior year holds a special place in my heart because of the extra time I took to make it as clean as possible, in addition to my determination to use a specific, much-longer-than-needed segment of my chosen audio. I feel that the final product ended up being very cute and funny, and it brings a smile to my face when I watch it!
3D Character Model
My favorite Animation project in all of Senior year was the 3D Character Model, and I’m extremely proud of what I produced. Reflecting on the process of adapting my character design into three dimensions makes me realize just how much I learned about 3D sculpting during this project. Through multiple stages of sculpting in Maya and ZBrush, I strengthened my ability to model organic shapes and textures, such as the character’s hair and the folds in her clothing. Then, I learned how to color my model in Adobe Substance 3D Painter, using masks, blending modes, and a variety of digital materials to mimic the colors and textures of my design. For example, Substance 3D Painter has a skin texture in its materials library, which I modified and applied to my model’s head and hands using a painted layer mask. The final model is a product of thoughtful, meticulous work, aiming to create as clean and visually appealing of a character model as possible, and I believe the effort shows! I feel her proportions and features look quite realistic, and the sculpting of the model shows a significant level of artistic skill. Overall, this project was a big success!
Multi-Layer Art Project
On a similar note, my Multi-Layer Art Project is the piece I am most proud of from Digital Media, across both Junior and Senior years. I poured an immense amount of time and effort into this project, and I believe the final result reflects that. When creating my Illustrator file, I was determined to get each shape as perfect as I could. I would spend an entire class period focusing on a single layer, so that the final cut would match my intended design as closely as possible. Much of my dedication came from the fact that this project would ultimately result in a physical product, meaning that any mistakes or sloppiness would be left on the piece forever. As a highly detail-oriented person, I refused to let my project have any element of looking “off” or messy. While this approach naturally stretched out the time I spent on this project beyond reasonable limits, I’m still very glad that I took the time to get everything right.
