Welcome to my Documentary Home page! The purpose of the Documentary project is to find an intruiging location in our community and attempt to reveal the untold story that lies within. We had to do research on our location (mine being the Rengstorff House of Mountain View, CA), and also conduct several interviews along the way.

Like all projects at Freestyle, we start in English class. In English, we were asked to write a lengthy research paper. I always have to work hard to meet the deadlines in any of my classes, but the deadlines in English were especially difficult to meet for this unit. Some weeks, we had up to two chapters for our book due in one week. Next in Design class, we created the layout and design elements for our book using a new application called InDesign. As it is another Adobe application, it was fairly easy to figure out the just of the application. The most challenging parts came when I had to try to remember "how to center this body of text" or "how do I change the object style on this image", etc. Of course we also utlized Photoshop to enhance/edit our photographs before placing them in our book in InDesign. Lastly, in Web/Audio, we created this website to collectively display all our work. This website includes my book, audio slideshow and paper.

In addition to creating the website in Web/Audio, we also played around with an application that was introduced to us a while back called Pro Tools. As shown in the image on the right, Pro Tools is an application that allows the user to create music and edit audio clips. Specifically for this project, I mentioned earlier we had to conduct several interviews. We imported the audio from our interviews into Pro Tools and edited the audio to make it more clear, loud, etc. I also included some background music for this website. As the Rengstorff House is surrounded by nature, what would be more fitting than a nature soundtrack? Let the ambiance of nature transport you to the R-House! Furthermore, if you hover over my buttons at the top, you will hear a brief sound effect that I've set up. When you click on any of the buttons, you'll hear a different sound. They're subtle, so be sure to catch them!

As I mentioned above, this was a challenging project! I had to quickly acquire the mindset of a journalist and the photography/layout skills of a graphic design artist. Before beginning this project, I didn't have a clue as to how I was going to be able to juggle all the different components of this project. Now, as a Documentary Unit "veteran", all my hard work clearly paid off. This was the most stressful and grueling, yet rewarding project I've created thus far at the Freestyle Academy. Please feel free to poke around my website to view my work.