Author Archives: M. Marshall

Weekly Summary #6: Six Again

M. Marshall 2.23

This is funny for anyone who has been paying attention to my blog for at least the past week and a half, which might just be me. Last week, I got my numbers mixed up and thought it was week 6, so I titled my weekly summary that. Since then, I have corrected my error and now we have posts 1-6, instead of 1-4, 6, and 6. I had an overwhelming amount of work this week, so I had to ask to get an extension, which is why this is a few days late. But I was really glad to be able to put in the full amount of effort instead of something that sucked that was in on time. Here’s what I did this week (I think you can sing it to the last 3 Twelve Days of Christmas):

Three Video Assignments:

Character Movie Trailer

TikTok of my pet

Get Ready With Me!

The real challenge I ran into was uploading the TikTok because it contained copyrighted content, but I managed to figure it out.

Two Daily Creates:

I love my bike very much, I think about bringing it to campus but I would probably want to keep it in my room which would get annoying. Maybe I can figure out how to do a poll and see what readers think.

and One Set of Goals Revisited:

Revisiting Goals

I really think I should be commended for keeping with the rhyming scheme of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

I had wanted to try option A, but I didn’t really know what my character would talk about to Dr. Oblivion, so I decided against it. That’s my week!

Get Ready With Me!

M. Marshall 2.23

This is me getting ready for the day. I really enjoy doing videos and voice overs so if we have more video assignments in the future this is definitely the kind of thing I’ll do.

Side note: still struggling with the thumbnail thing. Definitely need to keep working on that.

TikTok of my pet

M. Marshall 2.23

This is a TikTok my girlfriend and I made with my cat. It is slightly related to the character because, again, she is based on my cat. I will not lie, she was not a big fan of this one. Here it is:

Honestly, making this video was not that hard. Getting it into my website however, was. Click here for a link if you’ve struggled with the same thing! The music is copyrighted so it can’t go onto Youtube or Soundcloud unfortunately.

Revisiting Goals

M. Marshall 2.23

Let’s go back to a time that was a little simpler, week one. It was much less clear as to what any courses for this semester would be about and taking seventeen credits didn’t seem like such a bad idea at the time. I have had some highs and lows in this course, getting to experiment with video editing and creating my own website has been both fun and challenging.

Goals!

I gave myself a bunch of small goals, so let’s see how I’m doing.

→It is true that I have become (slightly) more digitally adept. Perhaps not significantly, but I have a way better handle on the WordPress aspect of this. I was even taught how to embed links into a screenshot so that the daily creates wouldn’t look so ugly!

Before:

Weekly Summary #3: Getting the hang of it

After:

Weekly Summary #5: Fifth Time is the Charm?

As ridiculously small as this seems, this was a big win for me. I value sleekness in a website and so I was very frustrated by the way it looked. Now, it’s beautiful!

→ “Ideally, by the time this is finished I will have a whole blog that looks like nothing I could have ever imagined being able to create before starting this class, maybe that I can show off to friends.” Honestly, I think I am well on my way there right now. I like to show my girlfriend the website sometimes, so I think that counts! Obviously this is still a work in progress, so I don’t feel that it’s anything to write home about just yet. But, I think it will be.

If I was going to show anyone any post, it would probably be this one:

Guess the song

Mostly because it’s hilarious (to me).

→”Maybe a goal would be to have the little widgets leading to a real link/page that isn’t just my main page?” Honestly, not quite there yet. I think I’d need another stop by the DKC before I could say I can do this. But, that’s okay! We are not even halfway through the semester, not everything has to be ready.

→”I can feel a reflection on this post coming at the end of the semester” Try just a few weeks from now!

→”Maybe to be able to somehow incorporate my cat, Daisy into this blog?” I checked and I’ve only mentioned her 2-3 times, the goals post being one of them. To my credit: I based my character off of her, so there is a few more posts than just that related to her. Let’s fix that with this post!

Here she is enjoying the outdoor air a little while ago. I don’t take her outside anymore because the avian flu is becoming more problematic for house cats and I am overprotective.

Something else I’m proud of, one of my favorite daily creates:

My next (short-term-ish) goal is to have some new features on the website the next time goals are being re-evaluated!

Weekly Summary #6: Sixth Time is the Charm?

M. Marshall 2.14

Happy Valentine’s day everyone! I am looking forward to my Valentine’s day plans with my girlfriend, I hope you all are getting to enjoy your Valentine’s day with your partner, friends, and/or family.

One thing I love (but am not good at) is video editing. In high school, there were a few days where I filmed “vlogs” and sent them to my friends. It was pretty ridiculous but I enjoyed it and everyone was entertained, so I was excited to get back into iMovie.

This is my video essay, definitely not the highest quality but I did my best!

If you’d like to read what I wrote about it, visit the blog post for it!

Bees Video Essay

Here are my daily creates for the week!

Day 1:

The prompt was this:

I emailed Professor Bond and he showed me how to make the embedding a little less ugly, so hopefully if you click on the picture(s) it will lead you to the post(s)!

Day 2:

Hopefully anyone that has seen Kim Possible will find my response entertaining.

That’s it for the week! I hope everyone has enjoyed their week, I felt much less overwhelmed this time around. Again, have a happy Valentine’s Day!

Bees Video Essay

M. Marshall 2.14

As everyone else has, I watched something and created a video essay on a scene from it. I watched “Hated in the Nation” from Black Mirror.

Of course, this is not a reflection on the full episode, but it definitely freaked me out a lot.

After I watched the episode I considered what scene to analyze, and I chose the one where Karin and Blue talk to the woman who sent the cake to Jo Powers. I really appreciated the level of foreshadowing that this scene gave. It was interesting to see them talk about the “death to” hashtag. Looking back and knowing she was one of the people responsible for her death, yet she was so defensive and frustrated. It was a strong reminder of the cognitive dissonance people experience between real life and their online actions.

I am hoping that as we experiment more with video assignments I will get better at this. I hope one day I will look back on this and cringe at my lack of video editing skills. I had hoped to screen record the video, but Netflix is very sneaky with blacking out the screen, so I ultimately recorded it on my phone. If I did another video essay in the future I would probably try to invest more time in figuring that out.

This one was pretty simple, I recorded the video on my phone and recorded a voice over on my laptop. I was somewhat nervous to do this so I had to do a couple takes with a general script. I still stumbled on my words some but nobody is perfect so I hope anyone reading this or watching the video essay enjoys it well enough. Here it is:

Bees Video Essay

M. Marshall 2.14

As everyone else has, I watched something and created a video essay on a scene from it. I watched “Hated in the Nation” from Black Mirror.

Of course, this is not a reflection on the full episode, but it definitely freaked me out a lot.

After I watched the episode I considered what scene to analyze, and I chose the one where Karin and Blue talk to the woman who sent the cake to Jo Powers. I really appreciated the level of foreshadowing that this scene gave. It was interesting to see them talk about the “death to” hashtag. Looking back and knowing she was one of the people responsible for her death, yet she was so defensive and frustrated. It was a strong reminder of the cognitive dissonance people experience between real life and their online actions.

I am hoping that as we experiment more with video assignments I will get better at this. I hope one day I will look back on this and cringe at my lack of video editing skills. I had hoped to screen record the video, but Netflix is very sneaky with blacking out the screen, so I ultimately recorded it on my phone. If I did another video essay in the future I would probably try to invest more time in figuring that out.

This one was pretty simple, I recorded the video on my phone and recorded a voice over on my laptop. I was somewhat nervous to do this so I had to do a couple takes with a general script. I still stumbled on my words some but nobody is perfect so I hope anyone reading this or watching the video essay enjoys it well enough. Here it is:

Weekly Summery #4: Audio!

M. Marshall 2.7

I have definitely enjoyed getting to learn about and experiment with audio. I had never done anything like this before so it was very cool to learn about. I particularly liked Audacity, it seemed like a great place for people trying things out and I look forward to continuing to try it. Here’s what the week looked like!

I started with the daily creates for this week.

Post #1
Post #2
Post #3

Honestly, I hate how the posts look embedded into the page, I may need to go to the DKC again just to figure this out. It is so ugly it makes me unreasonably frustrated and I’ve tried everything I can figure out. This is just a learning curve, but still frustrating.

I tuned into the DS106 radio on Tuesday which I enjoyed a lot!

Live Listening Session!

I created a radio bumper, which was cool, but I am interested in how I can do better.

Radio Bumper

I considered ideas for a radio show with my character.

Radio Show Ideas

I listened to Moon Graffiti by the Truth Podcast. A line that was super eerie to me was, “How many people do you think they’ll bury by the time they’re through?”

Moon Graffiti

Then I worked on the audio assignments!

I did assignment 2820 from the audio assignment bank. A news report on the Nigerian prince email scam.

Breaking News!

Then assignment 2724, where I created a short song (really a blip).

Chrome Music Lab

My sound effects story was of a racer running across the finish line.

Sound Effects Story

I’ve really been enjoying this class. I’ve definitely struggled to connect my posts to the TechNoir theme of the class and my character, but I think as time goes on I will get better at it.

Moon Graffiti

M. Marshall 2.7

Listening to Moon Graffiti was a very cool experience. It is interesting to think about a timeline where the mission to land on the Moon failed and to contemplate how worthwhile it is to go to the Moon. Last semester I took Writing About the Moon with Dr. Scanlon, and we talked a lot about the history of the Moon landing. Pretty much as soon as Apollo 11 landed back on Earth, pink slips of paper to fire employees were being handed out because the project was over and they could no longer expend the resources necessary to fund NASA. I wonder if Apollo 11 had failed if they would have continued to push for it, or if they would have just given up. The radio-sound of the podcast makes it feel like a real historical audio of something that happened.