The Profile unit was a documentary-styled project where we spent some time learning from and writing about valued and respected members of our communities. During this project, we integrated ourselves into the life of an adult from our community that does something interesting or important. In english, we interviewed our subjects and close family or friends, telling the stories of our subjects along with a researchable issue or topic that our subject was involved in. We then took these stories and wrote magazine articles, integrating the research with our profile star. We then took these articles into design, where we created a magazine to accompany and present them. These magazines were designed to show our star's personality and work with interesting and dynamic graphics. We also took dramatic profile shots, practicing our camera work through ineresting portraits. In web, we designed these websites to hold all the stuff we did! Yay! We also created commercials for our profile stars, working with moving text and starting our after-effects work.

My Profile star was Leslie McClellan, an elementary school teacher and union representative. Ms. McClellan has been a long standing source of inspiration to me, as she has always been very dependable and passionate when it came to her work. She's put in long hours of hard work to do her best to ensure that her students learn and enjoy school. She is also a union representative for the teachers at her school, Theuerkauf Elementary. She works with the other teachers in the district and state, all of whom are trying to create a better life for students and their educators. They talk about issues ranging from the ten-year policy's district effects to legislation that affects teachers nationally.

Over the course of this project, I came to understand some of the problems with education in our community and, at a larger level, with education in America. Defunding has become an issue that has rapidly extended into even affluent areas like ours. This project has also taught me a lot about the value of fighting for what you believe in, Ms. McClellan has been an inspiration for me. I have also learned how to integrate my own voice in a piece of writing without stifiling or supressing the voice of another through this project. In design, I learned how to create a comprehensive design that really shows someone else and their personality while still keeps a little bit of my artistic style, which I think has been and will continue to be valuable to me in the future. In web, learning how to use a new program that is as big as AfterEffects is has been pretty scary for me, but it's also helped to build my confidence with technology and continues to help my understanding of technology and how to use it to create meaningful things.

My profile commercial was supposed to be a cute, artsy representation of Ms. McClellan. Though she is a passionate fighter, I also wanted to show her caring and motherly side, so I used handwritten fonts and a soft, pastel color scheme that matched my magazine. I think it's very important to show different facets of people, so I'm very happy with the sweeter commercial style that I am going with. I had a really hard time with AfterEffects, so I know that my commercial definitely has room for improvement, but I think I came a long way in a relatively short amount of time. At first, every time I opened the program, I just got overwhelmed and felt like I was never going to understand, but I think that I have some basic level of confidence now, which is really nice. I still think that my technical skills need a lot of work, but I'll continue to improve in the future, so look forward to that! I have included some screenshots of the inerfaces I worked with in AfterEffects, which was the tool we used to animagte our commercials:

The magazine project consisted of us taking our articles from english class and creating comprehesive designs that followed the principles of c.r.a.p. and introduced our subject without even having to read the article (although we did work hard on those too). A huge focus for this project was how to incorporate the elements of art and the principles of design into our work to create visually interesting designs that made sense. Most of the work we did was in InDesign, where we created our books last year, but we also worked in Illustrator and Photoshop to edit our pictures and created accents.

For my magazine, I wanted to stick with my concept of showing the sweeter, more motherly side of Ms. McClellan. To keep this theme I chose a soft, sweet color scheme and the same font from my commercial. I also added little design elements, like the pink polka dots around the side of the page, and the school-themed backround objects in an artsy brush. To create the backround elements, I used illustrator to trace out some objects I associate with school then changed the brush style and arranged everything to be a little more visually pleasing. I like the way it turned out overall, I think I succeeded in bringing out Ms. McClellan's caring and nuturing side through the design.

This project definitely helped me with my design skills more than I had expected it to. I learned a lot about graphic design and detail work. Focusing on the details is very important in design, and while I know mine could have been a lot better, I still believe that I've come a long way from where I started. Though I already knew the principles of design, I think that actually using them in this project has really improved my skills and understanding. I wasted a lot of time with trial and error for this project, but I think that in the end it worked out ok for me. My InDesign skills got way better this time around too. I think that just exploring a program for a little while on your own once you learn the basics is a really good way to familiarize yourself, so that was fun. All in all, I liked this project much more than the documentary from last year, which was a pleasant surprise.

A small photogallery of my profile subject and process...

For this project, we were assigned to interview 3 different people: our profile star and 2 close friends, family members, or coworkers that could comment on our star. We asked about how our star was involved in their own personal activities and how they affected the community as a whole. These interviews were the basis of the project, they were meant to allow us to get to the heart of our subject and get personal stories to integrate into our research. For my subjects, I interviewed Ms. McClellan, her daugther Loretta, and her daugther Katy. I chose her daugthers because I was able to get a lot of information on her work and what she did for education, but I felt like I was lacking a little bit of that personal touch and I wanted to include some material on Ms. McClellan as a parent and how that had integrated itself into her work. This desire to show Ms. McClellan as a parent stemed from a comment she made during my first interview with her, where she told me the best decision she had ever made was choosing to be a parent and how it had helped her understand teaching better.

My star, Leslie McClellan, was the subject of this entire project, and a passionate teacher at Theuerkauf Elementary.