Welcome to my home page! From here you can access my Junior and Senior year project websites from Freestyle Academy.

Freestyle is a school that helps students develop their artistic and technical skills in a project-based setting. In English, Design, and WebAudio, the work that I do is all related to the work from my other classes. In Web, I combine my written work from English and my graphics from Design and put them on my websites.

Being in Freestyle has given me an opportunity to learn valuable skills related to website production, graphic design, audio engineering, and much more. Its project-based curriculum means that the assignments for each class are interconnected, which adds meaning to the work that students do and gives us incentive to try hard and put effort into our classes. Freestyle's unique approach to learning encourages artistic students who are looking for a change from the usual academic curriculum to expand their skill sets and enjoy what they do.

The self-portrait unit at Freestyle is meant to help students answer the question "Who am I?" through the pieces I've created. My Self-Portrait represents a part of me because it's dark and fairly simple. I associate darkness with comfort because it reminds me of staying warm inside on a rainy day, and I enjoy simplicity because I feel like a fairly straightforward person.

On my Self-Portrait website, you can see the different graphics I've created in WebAudio, English and Design using Photoshop and Illustrator, examples of my photography and writing skills, a list of web gems (interesting websites) that I want to share with others, pictures of my family and friends, and podcasts that accompany assignments from English. My website itself was created using Dreamweaver, and I used Photoshop to create the graphics for the buttons, background, and header.

This is the first multi-page website that I ever created. I learned all about creating and putting up websites, adding pictures, sound, and videos, formatting pages, using templates as a base for multiple pages, and navigating multiple applications that we use during this process.

The Narrative unit was all about being able to tell a story in different ways. We got a chance to experiment with many different formats for our short stories. We first wrote stories in English, then turned them into both a screenplay and a graphic novel. In Design we used Storyboard Quick 6 to create a storyboard from our short stories, and we learned 3-point lighting to produce a character portrait depicting a character in one particular moment of the story. We created an animatic using the scans of our graphic novels in WebAudio, then used the animatic as a basis for our animation. Our Narrative websites are also designed to incorporate images and themes from our short stories.

This project allowed us to develop skills related to storytelling through different mediums. We learned how to use Flash for animations, how to write a compelling and satisfying story arc and how to adapt it into a visually intriguing comic, and how to use props, lighting, and a background to create a desired mood in a portrait. I loved this unit--I was moderately satisfied with my original story, and I was very excited to learn how to use Flash and to animate it. I think I’ve learned some incredibly valuable skills in every class from the whole unit. It’s been rewarding to see the results of all the effort that I put into each assignment, and I’m proud of the work I’ve done this unit.        

This unit is based off of a core concept statement that I randomly drew in English class. My concept statement is "the desire to rebel coming from impatience" which seemed like it was going to be a challenge for me but ended up inspiring some very interesting ideas.

Overall, this unit gave me a chance to explore mediums that I had never considered before. I was nervous about using this randomly-selected concept for the whole unit, but it turned out to be very useful and it really helped inspire me. I'm glad we got to finish the year by meditating and being as creative as we could be. There's a lot we can learn from ourselves when we don't set boundaries on that creativity!

The music video project involved combining the skills of film and web/audio students to write, mix, film, and build a real music video. It was an incredibly fun and creative unit, and I hope you explore the website below so you can experience its majestic products.

Click the picture to go to the site:

The narrative 2 unit involved writing a dialogue-based story in English, creating a book cover in Design, and an animation in Web. For more information, visit the site by clicking the image below.

The portfolio unit was a reflection on growth and improvements in a specific area over the past two years. To see the final product, click on the image below.