Interview

This is August. At the time of writing, he’s currently a senior at Middle College, an alternative education program run by Foothill College. Initially, we were tasked with reaching out to someone as detached from us as possible, but as a friend of mine, I believed that August had an interesting story to share surrounding his unique educational journey.

Our interview was recorded in late January, and is about half an hour long. In it, I asked August about everything he knew surrounding his time at Middle College– how he got there, what the experience is like, and even what his plans are for further education after his final year of high school. Below is the official transcript of our interview.

Creating the Article

If there’s one word I can choose to describe the drafting process for this article it would be “Sisyphean” for how much of an uphill battle it felt.

The entire 6-page draft (including citations) took around 3 months of on-and-off work and editing. However, despite the very mentally taxing task that this was, I believe that I managed to make a piece of literature that I’m proud of. My article follows the general progression of August’s interview– starting with his struggles with school and his mental health, learning about and applying to Middle College, and finally a retrospective on his two years there. The fully edited article is linked below.

Research

Knowing that August was an attendee of Middle College, I sought out on a research journey to learn all there was to know about similar programs around America. This included research into why programs like Middle College are becoming more prevalent and necessary, why there is a downward trend in student satisfaction at high schools, and greater macroscopic topics like national funding shortfalls and the systemic inequality baked into how American public schools are funded.

I won’t sugarcoat it– doing research on this topic was TOUGH. Not only are Middle College-like programs very few and far between, but many sources covering educational research and systematic inequality are either profit-seeking or politically motivated, making unbiased and “clean” sources quite hard to come by.

Creating the article didn’t end at the final draft, however. In Digital Media, I learned how to use Adobe InDesign to create an elegant magazine article that would potentially be printed into a real, tangible magazine (totally not foreshadowing). For my article, I used a simple grayscale color scheme and tried to avoid hard edges in the shape language; both design choices add to the idea that August’s story is somewhat of a bleak flow or journey that my article would take the reader down. Additionally, I created a paper airplane clipart in Adobe Illustrator to fill up the negative space on the title page.

I personally fell in love with InDesign. While it’s not as capable as Adobe Illustrator for pure design purposes, it is absolutely perfect for making printed spreads quickly and efficiently. Unlike most other Adobe software, in my opinion it’s actually not too hard to pick up and use. As a testament to how much I like InDesign, I’ve already started using it for projects in my non-Freestyle classes. Anyways, the full design is readable at the link below, or in Freestyle’s 2024 Documentary Magazine!

A Remedy for Neglected Minds (Animated Version)

Following the creating of my profile magazine article, I was required to create a minimum 90-second animation over a portion of the audio from my interview with August. I chose to animate the portion where he spoke about his experience in a psych ward.

For my animation, I chose to stick with the grayscale theme that I was using because I felt like it appropriately conveyed the feelings of bleakness and emptiness that August had described to me. Additionally, I tried to use a sketch/scribble visual style, because I wanted my animation to look somewhat abstract and ethereal; many people have never been in a psych ward before, thus they inherently carry an air of mystery around them.

My animation took around 6 weeks to finish and is just under a minute and 40 seconds long– I hand animated over 340 separate frames. I think my biggest takeaway from this process is that Photoshop absolutely sucks to animate in. If I had the time, I would have definitely attempted to learn Adobe Animate before attempting such an ambitious project. You can view the full animation on slide 3 of the image carousel to the right.