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Last But Not Least – Last Weekly Summary

This week was busy! My group fell a little behind schedule, which at the beginning of the week felt fine, but towards the end, I could feel myself playing catch up.

Monday, we were supposed to film our confessionals and the fight scene but Masie had a last minute emergency, so she couldn’t come to film anymore. The rest of us still met up to record our confessionals, and we decided we would meet again on Wednesday to film the fight scene. Stuff happens, so everyone was very understanding, but this set us behind two days. We were done filming the fight scene by 4:00 on Wednesday, and we split up who edited what scene. This meant we had until Friday morning to edit the individual scenes so Martina could put together all the scenes in the afternoon. Tuesday to Wednesday night I spent editing the SupremeSkillShare commercial, which ended up taking longer than I thought, but I finished it and was glad to have it off my plate. Thursday I spent editing the fight scene and the phone call scene. The phone scene took me a while because something that I struggle with in this class is finding the right volume for speaking and music. I want the speaker’s voice to stand out but I don’t want the music to sound too distant. The fight scene also took me a while, but it is a longer, more complex scene, so that made sense to me. Martina worked on compiling the clips today and we’ve been sending a draft of the project back and forth to make sure there are no errors.

This week has been busy and stressful, but I have had so much fun working on this project. My group members are creative and hard working, which made the process so easy. Meeting up with them was also really fun, and I am happy to say I made some great friends along the way. I love how this project came out! You can watch the video and read more about it here.

The Reality of TechNoir

For the final project, I decided to work in a group with Kristen, Macie, Martina, and Olivia. and to showcase the knowledge we’re taking away from this class, we decided to make a complex video incorporating audio production and design. Our project centers around our course characters in a reality tv show. The Real Housewives of Cyber Manhattan shows 5 past and present wives of rich businessmen in a technoir world. The 5 women are friends but for every good moment they have, there’s a big fight to go along with it. Our project’s episode centers around Veronica Malone. Her husband’s stock crashed and they’re losing their money. She confides this secret into her friends but the story gets leaked. Who leaked it is what everyone is trying to figure out.

I had more fun with this project than I’ve had with any other project in college. I am so proud of my group’s work and how the project turned out. We all worked together to brainstorm the idea and script, but separately edited the clips. The clips I edited were the fight scene, the phone call scene, and the SupremeSkillShare commercial. The SupremeSkillShare helps build the world around the real housewives. We didn’t have the money or the time to make our live action scenes look like they take place in a technoir world, so we relied on lines in the script and outside commercials. SupremeSkillShare is the result of advancement and laziness. If everyone can gain any skill, hobbies and talents become meaningless which mirrors technoir’s advanced technology coupled with a decaying future. I mixed audio from a voiceover and music to engage listeners and make the commercial sound more lively. I also added a lot of flashy animations to keep viewers interested in the commercial. The phone scene was a challenge because the dialogue isn’t as interesting and it looked weird to make cuts. I tried to make the scene as visually interesting as possible by adding bright colors and cyber designs. Another problem I ran into was that the audio from the two clips would overlap because we didn’t record them together. As a solution, I had to freeze frame certain moment of the scene for the audio to align. My favorite clip to edit was the fight scene. It was a long process of editing, adding sound effects, and visuals, but I am very proud of the scene and I learned a lot. I wanted to replicate the classic reality tv fights from Vanderpump Rules and Dance Moms, so one thing I was really focused on were the sound effects. The music was hard to find but I eventually landed on a song called ‘This is Not IDM’ because it has a dramatic tone but the song has tech themes. I also used sound effects such as an orchestral stab and a bowed cymbal to emphasize tension and dramatic moments in the scene. One thing that I learned how to do for the scene was keyframe animation. I wanted to add a symbol over Olivia’s mouth to bleep out her cursing but in order to get the image to stay on her face. Adding keyframes to her mouth keeps the symbol following her mouth. Keyframes are always something that intimidated me, but they ended up being really easy. All in all, I feel like I did a good job of incorporating what I learned from this class into the project, and I am very proud of the work I did.

My goals for this course were picking up new skills, enhancing the skills I already had, and bettering myself as a CDS student. I am very proud of myself because I believe that I have achieved all those goals. The Daily Creates taught me that art does not have to be perfect in every aspect. This lesson helped me in the final project with smaller details. For example, the old me would have added a lot of detail to the sign that covered Veronica’s mouth for the bleep, but those are time-consuming, unimportant details that would waste time. I also learned how to tell stories through audio, when before I only knew how to convey them visually. I have bettered myself in so many ways through practice. When I started this class, I knew how to use Adobe Premiere Pro but I basically only knew how to put clips together. I now know how to use keyframes, how to add transitions, to flip a video, and so much more; I even piece together the videos better than I used to. Lastly, I have definetly bettered myself as a CDS student. Taking Intro to Digital Studies taught me the basics of the major, but all my projects were surface level. For this project, I poured so much of my time and energy into it until I was thrilled with it. I think that my newfound love for digital storytelling will take me far in this major and I am excited to see how I will continue to better myself for my second half of college.

Here is our final project, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

The video is a little blurry due to technical difficulties. This is a place holder until the connection issues get sorted out.

#4life

Roadblocks and Reality Shows

The final project is due this Friday, making this the last progress report before the finished product. It has been another busy week for our group. This week we finished filming everything! (YAY!) We were supposed to all meet on Monday to finish the rest of filming but Macie had an emergency and could no longer meet. To remedy this, the rest of us met up and filmed our confessionals, and Martina and Macie planned to meet on Tuesday to make up Sapphria Mae’s confessionals and we all met on Wednesday to film the big fight scene. This took a lot of planning because it’s finals season so we’re all busy, and Macie and Martina are seniors so they’re extra busy. When Macie and Martina went to film Sapphria’s confessional, the green screen from the HCC green screen room was gone. But we bounced back! Martina and Macie were so great because they were able to make time again on Wednesday to film the confessional. The rest of filming went pretty smoothly. The climax of our project is a fight scene, and the only hitch was that there was a scene we had to do in one take, and I stuttered on my line. I’m hoping I will be able to fix the flub in editing because I think the scene will come out really great without it.

Additionally, some of us are making commercials and bumpers to go in between the scenes. For the commercials, we agreed to reuse the ones from our podcast project with small tweaks to make them fit a new medium. I had been procrastinating my commercial but I finally got to work on it today. The commercial came out good, but the process ended up being difficult. I liked the idea of an animated commercial, but I can’t draw static pictures, much less moving ones. I thought Canva would be the fix because of it’s moving elements but it ended up being a hot mess. You can’t import sound on Canva so I would make my clip, export it, put it in Premiere Pro and adjust the timing. If anything needed fixing, I’d have to re-export the clip and add it in again. Thankfully it’s done, and you can view it below.

The rest of this project has been really enjoyable. My group mates and I were joking that Martina and Macie need to stay an extra semester and we have to join a film class. I am beyond excited to see the finished project. We split up the editing so everyone edits a scene and then Martina will put it all together. It’s a fast turnaround but we’re getting it done!

We’re Cooking!

It’s been a busy week for our group. We started the week on Sunday with a zoom meeting to outline what our episode would look like. We discussed the plot of our episode, what scenes we would record, and where we could film them. It was a long meeting with lots of brainstorming. One specific aspect that went into brainstorming was what was realistic for our characters. For example, Veronica is sarcastic so we wanted her to be the main character. However, some characters’ personalities were tweaked to make the reality show work. My character Krissy, is described as a sweet farm girl, but in the reality show she’s now a rich girl with country roots, and I don’t know how many people would describe her as sweet. What is the creative process if not making changes? We met again on Tuesday to script the scenes. It took us a second to spark some ideas, but once we got the creative juices rolling, we were on a roll. We ended up getting the whole project scripted in an hour. We tried to think about what characters would be the most entertaining to watch interact. We decided that Sapphira is the therapist friend, so she can foil Krissy’s temper. We all agreed that Tuesday was our most productive meeting yet. Wednesday, we met up and recorded the beginning scenes of the project. We met in Ball Hall and used the library common room as our set. We also recorded the same scene a couple times to get multiple angles. We set a time to record next week as well as filming some scenes on our own. Overall it was a successful week!

The Real Trailer!

For our group’s final project, we decided to do a tv show that centers around our course characters. We were inspired by shows like Vanderpump Rules and The Real Housewives of Orange County. Not only is our show inspired by those TV series, but we wanted our trailer to parody those TV shows as well.

We met on Monday in the HCC filming studio. We set up in front of the green sccreen and took a lot of videos of us doing different poses. We took individual shots and group shots to get a variety of clips into the trailer. We also recorded lines to add over the trailer just like they do in the classic reality tv trailers

Martina used Premiere Pro to edit the trailer, and just sent it back today. I think it came out so good and I am really impressed with her videography skills. She just learned how to use green screen for this project. I think she deserves extra credit for that.

Here is the final product!

On the 12th Week of DS106, My True Love Gave to Me – Week 12 Summary

This week was great. The work was easy and the Daily Creates were fun

Daily Creates

This week, I did Wednesday’s, Thursday’s, and Friday’s Daily Creates.

For Wednesday, the prompt was to use the Secret Agent Name Generator. The name I got was Agent Copper Nightmare. I then looked on Canva to find a design that matched the name. Because of the word ‘copper’, I wanted to find someone with a hair color that was as close to copper as possible. I also wanted the character to be evil because of the word ‘midnight’. I ended up landing on this design. I incorporated the dark clouds in the background for an eery effect

For Thursday’s Daily Create, the prompt was to use an overheard quote as an epigraph. The quote I overheard was “It’s all fun and games when you’ve placed all the boxes, and it’s not working because you misplaced one comma.” I was inspired by the lyrics from the song Take a Break from Hamilton:

In a letter I received from you two weeks ago
I noticed a comma in the middle of a phrase
It changed the meaning, did you intend this?
One stroke and you’ve consumed my waking days
It says

“My dearest, Angelica”
With a comma after dearest
You’ve written
“My dearest, Angelica”

The original conversation was about coding, but I took some artistic liberties to have the poem match the theme of the previous lyrics. Here it is:

“It’s all fun and games when you’ve placed all the boxes, and it’s not working because you misplaced one comma.”

You misplaced the comma

It changed the meaning

One wrong stroke

transformed the message

Spell check didn’t catch it

Was it really a mistake?

The last Daily Create was my favorite of the week. The prompt was to show your pet for National Pet day. I love my pets more than anything and I will take any chance to show them off! Here they are:

I procrastinated doing the Daily Creates this week but I got lucky and ended up with good prompts!

Final Trailer

The assignment for this week was to make a trailer for our final project. My group’s theme for the project is a reality show with our course characters. We met up in the HCC studio to record the trailer on Monday. We stayed for about 45 minutes and took a lot of different shots. Martina edited it and sent it over today and it came out so good!

This week was great and seeing the finished trailer was the perfect way to end the week!

11:11 – Week 11 Summary

I can’t believe we’re on week 11, that is unreal.

Daily Creates

For this week’s Daily Creates, I did Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday’s. For Tuesday, I struggled to make art with a question mark. The vague Daily Creates are either the best or worst for me. Some prompts, I love the freedom to do what I like, but for others’, I have no idea where to start. I ended up deciding to do a word cloud in the shape of a question mark. I was surprised to see no one else had done this yet. I used synonyms of the word “question” and then questions such as “who, what, when, where, why?” I put those words in a word cloud generator and messed around with the colors until I got a result I liked. Here it is!

For Thursday, the prompt was to make a story out of undecipherable text. The leaves on the book reminded me of a beanstalk, so I thought maybe the text was the original storytelling of Jack & the Beanstalk. While unlikely, it’s definetly not impossible because the story of Cinderella dates all the way back to the Tang Dynasty (my source in case you don’t believe me.) To make this piece, I used canva and found a graphic of someone climbing. I added the graphic and a few sentences from the story. Here is my daily create!

For Friday’s Daily Create, the prompt was to point out some irony. I had some trouble thinking of an example but then I remembered one of my favorite childhood movies: Tinkerbell and the Great Fairy Rescue. In the movie, there’s a storm which means the fairies can’t fly so they have to walk everywhere to find Tinkerbell. At one point in the movie, there is a shallow mud stream that the fairies have to cross, but the garden fairy hates mud. She owns up to the irony of it, and the line was so quotable that it started trending on TikTok. Here is the video.

Commenting

The first thing I commented on was Carson Frank’s Daily Create about the unreadable text. Carson’s DC was that the book invented the traffic cone. I said, “What a brilliant invention! Great for directing traffic, and great for people to steal when they’re drunk. It makes me wonder what they were using that cone for.” My comment was playfully sarcastic, which I’m not sure if it reads that way, but it’s a funny idea to think traffic cones have been around since before traffic. I then commented on Liv’s Door Daily Create. She said that behind her door was an infinite doorway, and she made it a gif. I was really impressed because the gif came out great! I said, “Ooo! I’m impressed with this gif! It came out so well! But the idea of infinite doorways is anxiety inducing 😵‍💫” The gif looked really good, and I was really impressed with Liv’s skill. Next, I commented on Cinder’s unreadable text DC, theirs was my favorite from the week. They found an illustration that looked like men in a pool and said it was the first pool party, which was very creative. The thing that makes me laugh, is that the men are naked and the water is green. I commented, “Hahaha I love this idea and the added speech bubbles make it even funnier. But there’s one aspect that I can’t overlook… if that’s a pool, why is the water green? What are they doing in there?” I am very curious to know if that crossed Cinder’s mind when they made that Daily Create. The last think I commented on was Ryee’s question mark daily create. They used Procreate and played around with the the different brushes to create a question mark. I commented, “I like the chaoticness of this brush! I love Procreate, it’s so much fun to doodle on!” Last I checked, procreate is only available on the apple store, which stinks because I don’t have an iPad and I would love to have the app on my laptop.

This week was very chill which was amazing because I was swamped with 100 other things this week. I’m really looking forward to next week and filming my trailer with my group.

The Fearless Housewives of Cyber Manhattan – Progress Update 1

My group from the podcast, which consists of Liv, Kristen, Macie, and Martina, decided to also work as a group for the final project. We got on a zoom call on Friday and started to brainstorm. We decided that our final project would be a tv show style video. Originally, we thought we were going to do something like The View. We were even brainstorming topics to talk about on our version of The View, until the idea of reality tv came up. We were all really excited about that idea and eventually evolved from The View into The Real Housewives.

Our idea for the show is that we are all wives, exes, widows of big corporate villains in the TechNoir world and the show follows our lives. For purposes of drama, our characters won’t be as chummy as they were in the podcast. We don’t have a plotline for our show yet either, we need to brainstorm more. We have been thinking of catchphrases for when we make our trailer. The catchphrases will help highlight our characters’ personalities to draw in viewers.

Days of Radio and Reviews

The radio show I chose to listen to was Days of Crime and Roses. I thought they did a great job and it was such a fun listen. I think doing a crime podcast in a TechNoir world is a really interesting idea. It helped establish the world that they are in without explicitly telling us. I also like the idea that even as our world continues to evolve and technology advances, one thing stays true: people love True Crime Podcasts. My favorite part of the podcast was their theme song that played throughout the episode, it was very silly and it had a catchy tune. They did a great job on the whole project!

Listening to my podcast was fun. My group members and I worked hard on it and it came out really good. My favorite part of our show was our intro and the ads, but I also think the whole show was strong. I like that our show had a mix of scripting and improvising, I think it made our show seem more natural.

10/10 Week! – Week 10 Summary

This week was chill. From Daily Creates to the Radio Show, I was able to check everything off my to-do list, with time to spare!

Daily Creates

This week, I got an early start on the Daily Creates. I did Sunday’s and Monday’s and both were easy and fun.

Sunday’s Daily Create was to create the 4th law of robots. To make my response for this, I had to research what the first 3 robot laws were. The understanding I was getting of the rules was that they are there to protect the human and the robots. I felt like they covered the bases with that so I tried to add a comedic twist. I said “a robot may not imitate humans (hence the “I am not a robot” question)” I also took inspiration from Sarah Honeychurch’s response to this prompt which was “A robot must enhance human creativity, and not seek to replicate it.” I loved this response because there are very few things I hate more than AI art. Not only is it bad for the environment, but it looks ugly. Hopefully my rule will prevent AI art because AI uses examples of real art to train itself.

Monday’s prompt was to make digital dust. Normally I try not to spend more than 15 minutes on a Daily Create, but I’m willing to bend this rule when I’m really enjoying the prompt. I found the digital dust to be really fun. The first 10 minutes were me playing around with the website and determining how to use it. I spent probably about another 10 or 15 minutes making the prompt. I kept messing around with it until I felt like I had gotten a cool outcome. Here is my result, I think it looks best when you go to view and change the color to Velocity Direction.

Comments

This week was tough to find things to comment on, however I was still able to get 5 comments done. The first comment I left was on Sunday and it was under Sarah Honeychurch’s Daily Create. As I mentioned earlier, I really liked her response and I wanted to let her know. I said “Best answer. No topping this one.” I stand by my comment because, as I mentioned before, I hate AI art. I think there are pros and cons to AI usage in any other context, but I really struggle to find a good thing about AI art. Moving on to a happier note, the next thing I commented on was DS106’s Radio Logo. I said “I really like this logo. The neon effect looks good, especially against the cloudy night sky; it makes the visual pop! I also think the neon effect adds to the TechNoir aesthetic.” I thought their logo came out very nice and I loved the contrast of the design to the background! Next, I commented on Rylie’s Riveting Region’s Week 1 Radio Progress. I was interested to see how other groups were doing in their process and I was happy to see Rylie say it was going well, I commented, “I really like this progress report and I love your title for it. Very silly.” The title was “Is This Thing On? Oh, It’s Not Yet?” and I thought that was very funny. After that, I commented on Live it Up With Liv’s Week 2 Radio Progress. I already had an idea of how her progress was going since I’m in her group but I wanted to read her blog too. She gave all her group members shoutouts for being the best, so I commented, “You’re the best too! I feel so lucky to have gotten such great groupmates! It made this project so much easier.” Our process has not been an easy one but we’ve been kind to each other throughout it and it has made for such a positive experience. Lastly, I commented on Cinder’s Daily Create for Hidden Faces. They talked about the hidden faces in wall outlets so I commented “When I was little, I came up with stories on why the sockets were sad. I remembered wondering why the creators didn’t make them smile.” Additionally some outlets also have a little slit on the left “eye” and I always thought that looked like an eyelash.

Radio Show

The process of our Radio Show this week was tough. The majority of the process was smooth. We met on Monday to work on scripting the show. We all collaborated on the beginning, end, and outline of the show, but each person individually crafted a question to ask and an answer from their character. Personally, this week, I worked on adjusting the background music in my advertisement based on some constructive criticism I received. I think it sounds better now, and hopefully others will agree, you can view it here.

I also created the outro for the show which I pulled from the ending of our intro. I’ve seen other podcasts do this, most notably TMG studios with Cody Ko’s laugh before they took it out. You can view the Fearless Femmes outro here.

We recorded on Wednesday but about an hour after we left the podcast studio, we found out our file was corrupted so we had to rerecord it on Thursday. The rerecording went well, the only thing that’s a bummer is I feel our first version was more authentic. That being said, I am happy with our finished product, and I am very thankful that my group members and I worked so well together. You can read more about our trials and triumphs here and listen to our podcast here!

Other than the very unfortunate accident with the corrupted files, this week was easy. I’m glad my group was able to recover quickly enough so that the rerecording didn’t put a damper on the rest of the week. This assignment worked out better than I thought it would. I enjoyed the little aspects of creating the show, and I enjoyed getting to know the people in my group. Hopefully next week will be just as good.