Tara Popovic´

Hello and welcome to my website! I am a student at Freestyle Academy of Communication Arts and Technology, a digital arts program. During my two years at Freestyle, I have been able to take classes in design, film, digital media, and English. Through the experience of these classes, I have been able to make a portfolio of projects that I am very proud of.

I have learned so much not only about Adobe programs but also about creativity, exploration, risk-taking, independence, self-discovery, critical thought, and problem-solving. Before I became a Freestyle student, I had only known the standardized experience of Silicon Valley Public schools. I thought that creativity was limited to fine artists, but have learned in my time at Freestyle that art comes in unlimited forms and shapes, and that creativity is a process and not a product.

This lesson has been invaluable because I am an artistic and creative person. Growing up with my flamboyant mother, I came not only to appreciate but to adore color and the things it can do, the ways it can be manipulated to convey messages. Browsing the aisles of Trader Joe’s I would spend time discussing color, font, and package design with my mother. To me, self-expression and awareness are essential parts of life and the tools that we learn and projects we engage in at Freestyle give us a way to touch on these things in a unique and inspiring way. I was able to write personally meaningful poetry, explore narrative writing, learn to storyboard, and learn the basics of photography.

Of all the projects we did at Freestyle, the junior-year research/documentary book was both the most rewarding project and the one that embodies my Freestyle experience the most. The project was utterly interdisciplinary as I had to do research and writing in my English class with the help of transcripts from interviews I conducted for the documentary short film I produced in my film class. On top of that, I designed graphic elements in Adobe Illustrator and took photos to edit in Adobe Photoshop that were related to my documentary subject. I integrated the graphic elements, photos, and research paper into my book in Adobe InDesign, where I designed layout with fonts and text/photo/graphic element placement. When received the book in hardcover a few weeks later, I felt so rewarded for the endless hours I spent after school and into the night working on the project.

This experience of being able to fuse so many disciplines and media types into one large and wholesome project of a published book embodies why I love Freestyle. The opportunity to have such an experience as this one is something that I wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere else. Thank you Freestyle!

 

Reflection

June 3, 2019

Looking back over my two years there, my time at Freestyle can really be categorized into 3 experiences: creative growth, academic growth, and personal growth. Together the lessons I have learned in all these categories have made my Freestyle experience unforgettable and invaluable.

Creativity

I have never been a creative person in the way that most Freestyle students and artistic types are – someone who is good at drawing and painting – so I was worried both before joining and while at Freestyle that I wasn’t creative enough. What I discovered was that I simply was a different kind of creative. Learning this lesson helped me develop my creativity outside of its comfort zone even more, even bleeding a little between the lines of my own creativity and the more typical fine art creativity. After going through Freestyle, I not only feel comfortable calling my writing an art, but I also feel comfortable using other more traditional artistic mediums such as paint, digital illustration, and photography.

Academics

Freestyle may be an art school, but I have actually grown as much academically as I have artistically. Not only did I learn about different forms of writing in Mr. Greco’s academic English class, but I also grew in how I interacted academically with my art assignments in both Film junior year and Design senior year. This ranges from the content of the work to the management of my time.

Personal

Finally, the category in which I grew the most is my self. From time management and knowing what I do and don’t like to do in my work, to making friends and expanding my sense of self, I have learned so much. I learned that I will work so much harder than I expect when I am doing something I love. I learned that the something I love is writing lyrical essays, analyzing “In the Lake of the Woods” by Tim O’Brien, figuring out what exact combination of colors makes me happy, having freedom to decide what exactly I do in my projects, and browsing through fonts on dafont.com. What I learned, is that I love Freestyle, truly, and with all my heart.

Thank you so much Freestyle Academy

Thank you Mr. Greco, Ms. P, Mr. Flo, Mr. T, Ms. A, Mr. Pierce