[ Diving Board ]
- Max Sugarman - What year is it?
- Freya Spivak-Teather - Anthropology of Jewelry
- Mateo Muñoz - Medley: Cyanotype Clothing Line
- F. Schlessinger - The Amazing Website of Total Awesomeness
- Sage Bowling - Resplendent
- Mina Halloran - Marching
- Renai Gutierrez - Isla Luna: The Demos
- Marley Manalo - Limitless Magazine
- Jaylene Li - Best Served Cold
- Sophie Lewis - Turn Turtle
- Delilah Roller - What I Learned Between Lines of Poetry
- Vivian Nguyen - Threadbare
- Ember Ximm - Wisdom Teeth
- Lena Toner - Alice Underground
- Nana Alatorre-Gonzalez - Mujer Madura
- Quinn Wang - Fourth to Last Train Home
- Sofia Mankevich - Bittersweet for No Reason
- Tabitha Chitwood - Webcomic Exploration: Hellishly Guided
- Zoe Vernier - Brain Food: The Appeteasers
Welcome to Electric Pool, a collection of 19 original projects created by our spring cohort! We’ve been waiting for you, so step up to the edge of the pool, survey the cool blue water, wave to the sleeping lifeguard and dive headfirst into the electric waters.
Max Sugarman - What Year is it?
In the visual art department at SOTA, self-portraits are inevitable. From freshman to junior year, there’s at least one self-portrait assignment per year. But in senior year, there are no structured assignments – everyone just works on whatever their AP Art portfolio is. After half a semester of this new independence in visual, I realized that I actually missed being forced to paint myself! And by now, I didn’t want to end my three-year streak of creating at least one self-portrait every school year. By painting a self-portrait this cycle, from observation using a mirror, just like my teacher always harps on about, I am finally completing this collection of paintings, and saying goodbye to my high school experience and the visual department.
Freya Spivak-Teather - Anthropology of Jewelry
Inspired by the eclectic jewelry collection of my great aunt, I began to see jewelry as more than just decoration, but as something that carries memory, identity, and culture. This project grew out of that curiosity. I researched jewelry across a range of cultures and historical periods, presenting my findings in a booklet featuring drawings of selected pieces from each era. I was especially interested in how different styles of jewelry reflect the cultural contexts they emerge from, and what they reveal about the people who wore them.
Mateo Muñoz - Medley: A Cyanotype Clothing Line
This project is the love child of my interest in film photography, printmaking, and fashion. I started by shooting and developing my own film, creating images that I could then carry into the next stage of the process. I felt this would an atypical way to showcase my photography while incorporating my love for printmaking, so I landed on cyanotype.
Once I realized I could print on cloth and essentially make a clothing line, I was set. This is a compilation of clothes I thrifted, found in my closet, or received from friends. Each piece moves through multiple stages, from image-making to printing to final form, and every item is uniquely its own, a one of a kind, created by me.
F. Schlessinger - The Amazing Website of Total Awesomeness
Young webmaster F Schlessinger has launched a brand new website that is already taking over the internet. But this new site, is also an expansion of a greater Fabrianic webaverse. Like all previous endeavors, it was made out of love for the personal weirdness the many custom websites one can find on the indie web (and an overzealous assumption that coding wasn’t that hard).
If you’re not familiar with the term ‘indie web,’ it refers to a broad, global community of creative people who are disillusioned with the current corporate state of the internet and long for an older, weirder, and more personal online experience. Many such sites are hosted on platforms like Neocities, a modern adaptation of GeoCities, a now-defunct hosting service from the late ’90s.
With lots of help from the Wave’s very own Jacob Thompson, the brand new official site of F Schless has finally arrived! This site includes an alien-themed home page, a dissection of a gallery, a page all about Fabian and his inspirations, and commission information. The site is a work in progress with plenty of fun tidbits yet to come! Jump into a world of Fabianic wonder with the new site of F Schless!: https://fschless.neocities.org!
Sage Bowling - Resplendent
Resplendent is a short film about the close relationship between two sisters, as seen through a series of nostalgic clips. After the older sister leaves for college, the younger one reflects on their ritual of collecting and releasing fireflies. I’m calling the film Resplendent because it’s often used describe an extraordinary light, something with a unique appearance, or bright look, which captures the essence of fireflies perfectly. It also touches symbolically upon the relationship between the two sisters. Stay tuned for the final film, which will be posted here on 5/20!
Mina Halloran - Marching
Marching is part of my AP art portfolio at SOTA, where I’ve been observing and reflecting on the constant change that shapes environments and their inhabitants. My print focuses on the inherent drive for continuation and movement in nature, especially when it comes to migration, when animals instinctively know where to go to find food and warmth.
I experimented with ghost printing (printing my block multiple times with the same ink application) to capture that forward momentum through the fading images of migrating buffalo. As my print developed, I let go of my original plan in many ways,, which ended up reflecting my theme perfectly. I just kept marching.
Renai Gutierrez - Isla Luna: The Demos
Isla Luna is a rom-com musical told through the lens of a cult story. Our main character, Cassie is a deeply insecure girl who feels as if the only way to make real friends is to move somewhere new and start over, this time obscuring the parts of herself that she sees as undesirable.
The perfect opportunity arises when she moves in with her retired father in a small town on an island off the West Coast. Soon after arriving, she realizes that island life is not all it is cracked up to be. The residents are eccentric, strange, and, most of all, extremely religious. Not long after arriving, Cassie falls head over heels for Lyra (a resident), fumbling to maintain her cool façade.
As time goes on, Cassie comes closer to uncovering a dark secret about the town’s church and the people who have gone missing, all while figuring out what friendship and romance mean to her.
To tell this story, I wrote demos of various musical numbers for the first act, scored sheet music, and, for some pieces, recorded versions of what they could sound like in a cast recording. Together, these pieces begin to shape the sonic and emotional world of Isla Luna, where romance and unease exist side by side as something darker begins to unfold.
Marley Manalo - Limitless Magazine
Welcome to the First Edition of Limitless, the magazine where fashion intertwines with everything: politics, everyday life, and most importantly self-expression. Here at Limitless, we embrace the energy that comes off of every person when they put on a piece that makes them feel confident and complete. This is for all the people who are curious to find out how fashion affects the people in the industry and how it affects society as a whole. I decided to name the magazine “Limitless” based on the feeling I get when I think about fashion and feeling. In my eyes, the two are inseparable.
Jaylene Li - Best Served Cold
Sophie Lewis - Turn Turtle
This oil painting began with a photo I found in an old family album last year, one I have been looking for an excuse to turn into a painting ever since. Creating this piece coincided with a chaotic season of school and life, which felt true to the experience of my cousin. She was captured in a photo many years ago trying very hard to hold onto a turtle savior. Both fun and slightly disorienting to look at, this is a realistic rendering of a core summer memory where both feelings exist at once.
Delilah Roller - What I Learned Between Lines of Poetry
This thesis collection is a poetic rendering of how I have changed over the past four years, as both an artist and a person. In curating this work, I focused on poems that reflect my personal, societal, and political experiences, and the ways they have intertwined to shape my growth, acceptance, and joy. I have arranged the pieces to trace this journey, beginning with intimate, personal moments, moving into my responses to broader events, and concluding with how I have come to accept these difficult truths and cultivate love for myself and the world around me.
Vivian Nguyen - Threadbare
The idea for Threadbare was born out of the Senior Prom stress I observed in the people around me. My friends agonized over finding the perfect dress, sending option after option in search of something that felt worthy of the night. I knew I wanted to create a film about relationship dynamics, and last-minute thrifting for a prom dress felt like the perfect setting to explore how material desire can shift behavior and quietly alter friendships.
Thrifting for the perfect piece of event clothing can be tedious and elusive. You can search through racks for hours without finding anything, and the pieces you do like are often damaged or do not fit quite right. So when something finally stands out, it can feel disproportionately important, as if you are entitled to its ownership. My final film with be posted here on 5/20!
In Threadbare, I wanted to explore how jealousy can surface within female friendships, often in subtle and unexpected ways. The film captures the moment when someone begins to realize that a person they trust may not be who they thought they were, revealing how something as simple as a prom dress can expose the fragility within seemingly stable relationships.
Ember Ximm - Wisdom Teeth
This pair of handmade zines honors San Francisco, the spaces I pass through, the movements I’ve joined, and the feelings I have growing up in the middle of it all. Wisdom Teeth reflects a unique jumble of nostalgia, change, and learning that has joined me on my journey. I tend to spend a long time on project, but for this one, I chose to let go of perfectionism, explore, and have fun!
Lena Toner - Alice Underground
HOW ALICE ESCAPED THE UNDERGROUND, AND HOW SHE SAVED IT ALONG THE WAY, OR SIMPLY: ALICE UNDERGROUND
Alice Underground is a game built around my own interpretation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. My focus was primarily on character design concept art and constructed collaged backgrounds from scanned images I warped, layered, and digitally reassembled them to create a world that feels both familiar and distorted.
When I began my capstone course this year, I jumped at the opportunity to finally commit to a project I have wanted to take seriously for a long time. I have included both my initial designs for Alice and the final version I chose, shaped by feedback from the community at Sunset Media Wave. This project feels like a foundation, and I plan to continue expanding and refining it well into the future.
Nana Alatorre-Gonzalez - Mujer Madura
A short story about quiet cruelty and the dangers of neglecting one’s dreams and desires, MUJER MADURA follows the life of an aging woman who desperately seeks comfort in the memories of a life that has passed her by. Though she regrets lost time and choices she did not fully consider, her daughters offer a fragile sense of solace within her otherwise joyless life. It is not until her husband arrives home on her 63rd birthday that her carefully maintained sense of peace begins to unravel, leaving her teenage daughter to decide the fate of her mother’s legacy.
Quinn Wang - Fourth to Last Train Home
It’s my last year in San Francisco before heading to college, so I wanted to pay tribute to public transit as it’s been such an influential part of my life growing up here. How many hours have I spent riding the 43 and the 38? If you guess the right number, I will mail you one of my prints.
As I carved these layers, I wove in familiar figures from the train, like the guy hauling what looks like a whole house’s worth of furniture and the girl applying falsies, the parrot in the foreground, alongside small details that are specific to the one and only San Francisco Municipal Railway.
Sofia Mankevich - Bittersweet for No Reason
This short film, based on my poem Falling For No Reason is about losing control with friends as our laughter takes us to another place entirely. I wrote it in the summer of 2025, the summer that we hung out pretty much every day and night. After knowing my friends for years, I am able to feel confident about truly letting loose, to fully be me, and that’s when every single thing somehow becomes funny.
Throughout the summer, there were countless moments during the days, and especially during the nights, when we would all fall to the ground, unable to breathe from our uncontrollable laughter. This laughter is so good, it made our abdomen ache and our brains hurt, an experience I might only get once.
My second video is about the demands on teenagers in every aspect of our lives. We are all stressed, all anxious, and all worried about the present as well as the future. We also feel highs so drastically, and get so emotional about what we love and what comforts us. We are living in the best and the worst times of our lives; navigating it is the most challenging thing. What’s crazy is that we can’t wait for this time to be over, but we also never want it to end. It’s bittersweet.
Tabitha Chitwood - Webcomic Exploration: Hellishly Guided
Webcomics present stories in a colorful, creative, fantastical manner- especially since you read them on your phone. The concept of the webcomic provides aspiring comic creators with an accessible digital medium and a formula for success, allowing anyone-anywhere- to share their story. As an avid supernatural & romance writer, I wanted to portray a snippet of my short story in an art form new to me. :In a world where human’s decisions depend on two supernatural beings on their shoulders, guiding angel Angie, alongside devil dev, fight for control of their human host- stephen. My comic follows the first chapter of their story, a serious- yet comedic- fantasy story critiquing the concept of lifelong fulfilment.
Zoe Vernier - Brain Food: The Appeteasers
Greetings all! This is Zoetropia! Just a few months ago, I decided to move on from filming psychedelic grocery stores to focus my research on the individuality of food. Call me insane, but food politics is an extremely underrated topic. The idea came to me naturally, as I was simply cooking up a large batch of stew. All of the sudden, I started to wonder about the ingredient’s back stories. I started to wonder about the thoughts food had. I started to wonder about their emotions, and how they felt networking in a big pot of social stew. I wanted to ask them questions.
Conducting interviews with these various subjects was not an easy task, as it was difficult to understand the complex politics of modern food society. During my interviews, I found some strange consistencies that I thought could translate nicely as a published magazine, and what better place is there to do this than at Sunset Media Wave? So after gathering my research, I connected these concepts to some of the real-world visual systems we use today. I hope you find these obscure articles delicious enough to try.
Over the cycle, I’ve gathered enough ingredients to complete 2 whole articles, no preservatives added. I expect to continue releasing articles throughout the year, so stay tuned for more free samples of my upcoming magazine, Brain Food! (Expected to release 2026 at a grocery store near you!)
P.S. Please only take these stories with a grain of salt (both literally and metaphorically speaking)
P.P.S. Next time, I’ll try to stop using so many food puns, promise. Enjoy!
An excerpt from my article Seedy Society:
The fruit industry can be very competitive. It can be especially difficult to compare yourself to others when there are so many fruits with similar skills, physical features, and perspectives. Hear the story of Gala, an apple who has been peeled by experience.
Hear Gala’s perspective as it shares its experience as a young representative of the fruit industry and the harsh realities that come with it. “I felt so fragile.” Gala describes how industry standards began to deprive the young fruit of its self-image. “As soon as I was admitted, the inspectors noticed a small bruise just above my skin’s surface.” “They just kept peeling and cutting, trying to make me perfectly symmetrical. It was exhausting to keep seeing them.” Gala eventually quit the industry at the ripe age of six days.
Even today, stories like Gala’s remind us not to strive solely for perfection, highlighting the importance of valuing and respecting the natural beauty of fruits.
