Hello everyone!

I’m Darius Matulich, a student at Mountain View High School and attending Freestyle Academy. In Freestyle, I am taking Animation, English, and Digital Media class.

I’m very passionate about my digital creations. There is something fun about experimenting and trying new things with my work. For example, in Adobe After Effects, I sometimes explore all the effect options to create something interesting looking. Furthermore, I love creating videogames. The blend of digital art, music, programming, and game design are the perfect mix of what I would like to do later in life.

One way that Freestyle helped me explore myself was through the Core Values Project. Using suspenseful songs (I love genres that make you feel something), I wanted to emphasize my core values of inspiration, fun, respect, privacy, self-expression, friendship, empathy, gratitude, and creativity. Each one has a unique reason on why they represent “me”, so using the technical skills learned in Freestyle Academy, I tried to make the color, font, and even animation showcase how this applies to me. There are a few core values I would like to highlight. My first core value is inspiration, which I intentionally made glow-y as a reference to the “lightbulb moment” that I have sometimes. I especially wanted to put this core value in this video because of how the entire rest of the video plays out. When making this project, I didn’t want some text to just stay in one place, as I felt like that didn’t represent me in the slightest. So, inspired by AngelR’s Core Value video from 2025, I decided to take a 3D approach. Some of the text effects are inspired from their video as well. The last core value, “creativity” , is saved for the end as the most important one. I deliberately made it the biggest and most colorful, but more importantly, I used a different font for each letter of that word. These fonts are actually taken from the other core values, representing how my creativity is partly built off of all of my other values in the video.

While the core values and the animations that went into them may seem a bit same-y at times, there are several differences between them. Some of the most notable differences, in my opinion, are for the values such as fun and privacy. For example, since fun is, well, “fun”, I made it dance around. Privacy, on the other hand, is done in a vertical orientation (referencing those typically Hollywood tropes of random characters sliding vertically down the screen when someone is “hacking”), and the characters “glitch” into view to represent the more digital-focused aspect of it that really matters to me. Even though I’m just highlighting only a few of my core values, all of them had a unique thought process to best determine how it should look. I will admit though, I’m not the greatest at text animation, and I have a lot to improve on to make my stylistic choices more evident. But, nonetheless, I’m pretty proud of the choice of colors, fonts, and animations I put into making my video stand out.

I joined Freestyle Academy because I wanted to let my creative side grow and shape me — most of my classes at my regular High School are just about following set procedures and going through the motions, and I wanted to break free from that cycle. Freestyle has taught me how to grow, not just as a creative, but as a person. I’m forever grateful for the skills this academy has taught me.

“Perfect is the enemy of good.”

– Voltaire