Showcase

Introductory Note

Hello, my name is Simone Clements Leedeman and I am a Design student at Freestyle Academy. Throughout my two years in Freestyle, I have worked on improving my skills in music, photography, and writing. Outside of Freestyle, I love listening and creating music and working with dogs.

For my Senior Showcase, I will be sharing my Junior Documentary and Senior Zenith books, and original music pieces I have created. These pieces are a reflection of my best work from my time in Freestyle, and my overall passion for the work I have done in each of my classes. My documentary book is on a K9 training organization in Santa Cruz, and was my first real experience with conducting interviews, taking photos in multiple settings, and writing an extensive paper using many different sources. My most recent project was the Zenith book that I created in collaboration with my sister, and my role was mainly focused on writing and the techniques used in creating children’s books, taking photos of different subjects that would be incorporated into the book, and creating separate products to market the book.

These books, along with the music pieces I created in Freestyle, are a reflection of my passion for design and music, and I would like feedback focused on the layout and visual content of the books, as well as music composition and sound in my pieces. For each of my books, did you feel as though the writing was able to flow easily with little to no choppiness, and the visual elements correlated well with the subject? Is there anything specific in my pieces of music that could be improved, specifically in composition and sound design?

Next year, I plan to continue studying music and working to improve my skills at Foothill College. I am excited to meet and work with new people who have the same passions as me. Outside of school in the future, I hope to attend the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) conference again soon, as I have attended once this year and it was an incredible opportunity to learn and network.

You can reach me at sleedeman@yahoo.com

Junior Documentary

The Junior Documentary unit was by far one of the most rewarding projects I have ever completed during my time in Freestyle Academy. The reason why it was so rewarding was because of the amount of work that was put into every aspect of the project from my English, Design, and Digital Media classes. The focus of the Documentary project is to answer the question: “How do you creatively and truthfully portray a significant person, group, place, idea or issue in the community?”. In my English class, we answered this question when creating the center of this project, the Documentary book. In my Design class, we worked with Adobe Indesign to design the layout of the book. In my Digital Media class, I learned how to use Adobe After Effects to produce a commercial created for the book. Though at some points it was challenging to complete each part of this project in each of my classes, I enjoyed every aspect produced throughout this section.

The center of the Documentary Unit was the Documentary book. This book is the product of many hours of hard work, whether through writing or designing, taking photos or conducting and transcribing interviews. This project allowed me to step out of my comfort zone, and I am so proud of each part of this project.

To view my Junior Documentary book titled “The Other End of The Leash”, click this link.

This is a screenshot of the Adobe InDesign interface as I was in the process of creating the book.

Through the many factors in producing the book, I enjoyed learning more about the company and watching these incredible dogs train. The overall goal in creating this book was to not only educate the reader on the Mar-Ken International K9 Training Center, but also some of the current challenges these dogs and their handlers have to face. I also enjoyed being in control of each part of the book: the layout, font, color scheme, graphics, photos, etc. Being in control of these allowed me to have more freedom in creating the final product. A valuable skill that I was able to take away from this project was the ability to conduct interviews and reach out and communicate with people. This project truly allowed me to step out of my comfort zone, and I am incredibly proud of the final product I have created.

Freedom Production

In my Digital Media class early in my Senior year, we were given the freedom to create a video showcasing any skill we learned in any of our classes in Freestyle. For this project, I collaborated with my sister to create a piece of music using Garageband and ROLI Instruments, as well as an animated cover using Adobe Photoshop and Animate. I am extremely content with this video because not only does it showcase our final piece, it also provides the viewer with an inside look of the process of how the piece of music and animation were made.

Senior Zenith

The most recent and by far most rewarding project I have created in my time in Freestyle Academy was my Zenith Project. The Zenith Project is the product of the combined passions and skills from both myself and my sister, and what we have learned throughout our time in Freestyle, mixed together to create our final, most successful project.

Overall, this project was an incredibly large undertaking and includes many different parts that unfortunately, could not be explained in-depth in a concise way. Overall, our Zenith project included 4 separate parts: our goal for the end of the project was to create a “bundle” to go along with the children’s book we decided to create, including bandanas, an activity booklet, and dog tags.

The final hand painted bandanas I created using a logo I designed and integrated into each of the products in the project bundle.

The final dog tags after they were laser engraved with the same logo as the other products.

The final project bundle minus the physical copy of the book, created as marketing products included with the book.

Children’s Book

In order to create the main portion of this project, which was a children’s book on dogs, we had to do the proper research, storyboarding, and then eventually begin the tedious process of painting the pages.

Below are the final storyboards we created that we used for our book.

Below are extra storyboards of specific pages with more detail in the backgrounds, solidifying our ideas for what we wanted to include in the illustrations.

After creating the storyboard, we began the process of painting the pages using Adobe Photoshop. The process of creating the illustrations of this book was very tedious, but in the end very rewarding. Isabella worked to create the illustrations in this book, and overall created 60 pages using Adobe Photoshop and an array of brushes and other tools. Some of these pages and backgrounds

We are extremely proud to be able to say that we wrote and illustrated this entire book. The book includes many factors that set our children’s book apart from others, including: 5 dogs in real life are featured in the book as characters in the book, as well as tips for young children on how to read dog body language and how to approach a dog, and how to act around a service dog. We hope to soon get this book published, as we want to make it available for people to purchase in the future.

The final book, titled “Rogue’s Great Big Adventure!” can be reached by clicking the graphic below.

In the end, this project taught both my sister and myself many valuable skills in both the challenges and factors that were successful:

Challenges we faced:

• Taking on such an immense project in such a little amount of time was stressful and overwhelming more times than not.
• Including outside sources and relying on them to provide photos and other materials was a challenge, as contacting people brought along the fear of not receiving a response, and making many backup plans.

Lessons Learned:

• Don’t be afraid to reach out to anyone! Communicating and contacting people was crucial throughout this entire project.
• If you “bite off more than you can chew” don’t be intimidated by the amount you have to do. Try to map it out and make an extremely detailed schedule to keep you on track. If you still need help after that, reach out!
• Stress can only help so much. At some point, it does more harm than good.