Freestyle is a creative arts and media program that blends many topics into 3 main classes:
- an elective (Animation in my case),
- Language Arts, and
- Digital Media.
I have really loved the program at Freestyle. I have made many new friends and learned so many different things: from animation to story writing and photography. One of my favorite aspects is how much encouragement is given to personal projects.
Animation class has required a lot of work. I typically spend about 4 hours of work at home for each hour of class. I have been learning both traditional animation (keyframes, rotoscope, stop motion, paper) and newer techniques (augmented reality, lip syncing, and motion tweening).
The Language Arts material was designed to integrate with the projects in Animation and Digital Media. We did research in Language Arts for the Exploration Project which was primarily focused on our elective.
In digital media we learned photography, use of multiple Adobe products, development using sound editing tools, and web site creat2ion. For me, these skills allow a world of new possibilities for projects. I really love this.
Narrative Reflection
For the narrative project I further developed my creative written storytelling ability. In the animation portion, I leaned how to tell a story with visuals rather than with words,while in Language Arts, I improved my use of descriptive terms to tell the story. Previously, I made the characters narrate what was happening. My biggest challenge was learning to balance direct characterization and indirect.