Intro

" I found it didn't get any better than that "
~Heather Owen

For the Documentary project at Freestyle Academy, we were asked to explore and find interesting ways to express the untold stories of our community. After much brainstorming with my family, I landed on NCAA athletics at Stanford. I grew up going to Stanford sporting events and watching NCAA athletics, yet I knew a little bit about the organization and wanted to learn more. So, I wanted to help educate people on what the NCAA is and provide an insight into what the organization is. But as I was gathering my research and conducting my interviews, I became enthralled in the stories of administrators within the organization. In addition to educating people on the NCAA, I wanted to tell the stories of those involved in the NCAA.

Here's a screenshot of my Adobe After Effects session that I used to create my Intro Video

One of the challenges of this project was walking away from my work. Among the various aspects of the project, it was challenging to be able to move on and say, “Okay, this part is done.” The biggest life lesson that this production taught me was that my hard work truly pays off. If you put the work in, anything can be achieved. And while that sounds like a poster in a 5th-grade classroom, I truly believe it now. And this is a lesson that I believe can be applied to all aspects of my life, whether it is my own dreams or my school work. Out of all the aspects of this project, I am most proud of my website because it was the most rewarding. Coding and putting together all the pieces of the whole project into one digital location was quite the challenge. But it was worth it as I looked at the finished product in my browser.

Book

For my book, I took much inspiration from the NCAA logo itself. The first step I took in the production of my book was to create a color scheme. For this, I developed a monochromatic color scheme of light blue, similar to the logo. After the color scheme, I went through my large stash of photos that I had complied and sorted through them, only keeping the ones that I deemed usable for this project and book. I then edited these photos. With the photos and color scheme done, I started to work on the book itself. I have always enjoyed and admired clean and simple design on any sort of visual art. So that is what I wanted to achieve in my own book. To help set this tone, the first part of the book I created was the table of contents. This helped set the tone and similar template for the rest of the book design to follow. My book can be viewed by clicking on the image to the left.

The process of producing the book was very overwhelming at first. The hardest part was knowing where to start and how to start. But I just had to take a step back, take a deep breath, and get to work. The first part I tackled was the table of contents, which is the part of the book I am most proud of. It was hard to create and I am very pleased with the way it turned out.

A part of the book that I really struggled on was the cover design. It was one of the last things I created and I had no idea of what I wanted it to be. But after playing around in Illustrator, I came up with the final cover. I took an Adobe Photoshop file of a photo of the Stanford campus that I took and placed it into Adobe Illustrator. From there, I applied a “low fidelity photo” effect on it. This is what gives it the “hand-drawn” look. In the end, I am quite satisfied on the final book product that I produced.

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Sometimes you're on top of the world and sometimes it's on top of you
~Kaylee Johnson

Here's a screenshot of my Adobe InDesign session that I used to create my Intro Video

Gallery

Heather Owen

Senior Athletics Director

Intro

Book

Gallery

Bios