Exploration:
In the Explorations project, we were all tasked with improving upon a particular skill of our choice. We were to come up with something that would be useful in our field at Freestyle (Film, Animation, or Design) and learn that skill more in depth so that we would be able to instruct and help others on it as well.
We were told that our idea had to help us improve on one or more of the “21st Century Skills”, as so to make us better equipped in the world. Out of the 8 skills that we had to choose to improve on, I feel my 2 were:
Self Direction – the ability to set goals related to learning, plan for the achievement of those goals, independently manage time and effort, and independently assess the quality of learning and any products that result from the learning experience.
And Visual Literacy – the ability to interpret, use, appreciate, and create images and video using both conventional and 21st century media in ways that advance thinking, decision making, communication, and learning.
My main reason for focusing on these 2 is that they seem the most important to me, and, while I don’t know about others, these seem like they are the most important in my current high school life.
Visual Literacy is an obvious choice right off the bat. It is basically the idea that the entirety of Freestyle is founded upon, the knowledge that modern problems require modern solutions. More than two thirds of our classes here at freestyle focus on teaching us to express ourselves in the modern day. Whether it be having to ask Mr. Flo to repeat himself for a fourth time because you didn’t understand any of the techie words that just came out of his mouth, seeing Mr. Greco really get into his explanation of the most recent book, or sitting through Mr. T reviewing how “masterfully done” a movie was while going through it frame by frame, everyone at Freestyle truly cares about their passion. The teachers make it impossible NOT to learn, and to enjoy it. No matter what has happened, every shoot for film that doesn’t work out, every interview for English that cancels last second, every fight with your camera because EVERYTHING IS GREEN, everything teaches us and makes us better. thinking like that, it’s no surprise that my Explorations project uses Visual Literacy, everything at Freestyle does, and that’s part of why we love it so much.
My reason for the next skill of Self Direction isn’t some mandatory thing at Freestyle that you can’t ignore even if you wanted to like Visual Literacy, instead, it’s more personal. I openly admit that I am not the best student, not even close. I’ve always struggled in school and have always flown by the seat of my pants, because I never figured out how to plan. Many a nights were there where I created out a 4 page essay out of nothing because I’d decided that all of my previous “plans” were utter garbage. But in Freestyle, that’s begin to change, whether it be from growing up and maturity (Which I doubt, I’ll never grow up) or being pushed by the teachers, or any number of other reasons. Something about this environment seems to bring out the best in people. I figured that this is the kind of skill that I need to learn, that flying by the seat of your pants is acceptable when your only other option is falling. I tried to give myself a project that forced to to plan, to set goals, to make a functioning team out of me, myself, and I. Looking back at my project, I can honestly say that I’m proud of my work, and that doesn’t happen very often.
Process:
I started out by planning out what I wanted to explore. What aspect of filming really stood out to me and interested me? How easy was this topic, you need to set realistic expectations? I decided to do every little kids dream, and create a fight scene. This wasn’t really much of a decision, I simply decided to focus on the most important part of any film, the climax. Every single movie’s climax is a fight scene, whether it be literal or metaphorical, fought with fists or with words, fought for revenge or survival. I just decided to take it in the more literal sense. When I began planning this out, I didn’t follow my own advice and thought to big. I had created a 7 page script, equal to about 10-15 minutes of film, meaning probably 10 hours of filming, and had planned for 5 actors. After