Last summer was hard. I wasn’t doing a lot of productive stuff and that just made me realize I was lonely. I did a few freelance projects, including an illustration for the Office of Sustainability and another thing for the Business Alliance of Greater Gainesville. In the fall I did a bunch of film projects. I got really involved with Upstart’s Film Slam thing. Every two weeks I made another short film. I made it to the finals.
Most of the shorts were really bad, but a few were great.
I made my first documentary film Everybody in their Underwear. That was a really exciting experience for me. I entered it in the ART Film Festival and won first place in the Documentary Short category. Going to the actual film festival was pretty weird (I thought there would be zero people there but there were about seven) but my brother was there to support me.
I worked on a few different web projects around this time. I reworked the design for Newsies. Newsies 2.0 was much more professional looking. Eventually I did websites for an honors society and a summer camp.
For a while I’d considered web design one of my weak points but over the past year I’ve started to feel a little more confident. I’m learning how to be confident with just designing to solve problems rather than designing to ornament or style something.
Christmas break was good. I was looking forward to the coming semester pretty heavily but the semester didn’t fulfill its promises entirely. It was still good though.
One of the highlights of spring was getting to go to Miami with a few people that I barely knew to try to make a documentary thing. That was an incredible weekend and I’m so thankful for it.
I spent a lot of spring obsessed with getting this one internship. It got to the point where I knew quite a bit about everyone who worked at this small company based on their individual online presences. They crept into my dreams, voices and all.
This is without ever having any contact with them at all.
I spent a lot of time getting a portfolio together and fine-tuning and worrying and freaking out.
Eventually I didn’t even apply.
The semester ended quickly and out of nowhere I was invited to help out with online stuff for the Alligator. I had my summer job.
Working on a redesign for the website of UF’s independent student newspaper has been a great experience. It’s given me a chance to really collaborate with other people on a high level and I’m loving it. I’m hoping we can pull everything together for a successful launch of the redesign.
This has been a weird year for me personally. I don’t like to talk about this kind of thing, but this year has been one of the first where I’m not obsessed romantically with someone completely out of reach. I haven’t really been interested in anyone. Just kind of blank this year.
Weird.
This year I did get to meet a lot of interesting people. Now I want to meet more of them.
I drew a portrait every day for one-hundred days. I remembered how fun and relaxing it is to draw and it seems like, at least to me, I quickly became better. My hand and eye became more confident.
Again this year I was on Dance Marathon Tech Team. I was a lot healthier this year and able to bring a lot more to the table. I did my second (maybe third) biggish (at least for me) motion graphics project and made about thirty short motion identity loops for the entertainers. I'm still very pleased with how these turned out. I also took a ton of photos at the 32-hour Dance Marathon and had a much higher quality-to-crap ratio than last year. Also, this year, I shot in manual and was able to much better post-process my photos to get higher quality images.
Awesome.
This year I’ve grown as a person, I think. It’s been a new experience living entirely alone. No roommate, no dorm, no family. Just me above the laundry room at Arbor Lofts.
I think I’ve always had a ton of independence but maybe it just gave me more? I don’t know.
That was year twenty. Plus or minus a lot that I’m forgetting now.
Now I’m twenty-one and that means I can adopt a child and run for mayor. If I’m going to get any of that done, I’ve got to get going.
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