Category Archives: ds106

Today in death race news…

Jim suggested the idea of doing a news report on an event from a tech-noir film, which sounded fun to me so I ran with it. I watched Death Race 2000 recently so I decided to work with that, even if it strays pretty far from noir. As Wikipedia describes it “Set in a dystopian American society in the year 2000, the film centers on the murderous Transcontinental Road Race, in which participants score points by striking and killing pedestrians.” There is an incident in the film where a motley group of rebels make an attack on the race, and the government and media place the blame on the French Air Force. That seemed newsworthy. For material to work with, I though I would use the crash scene and the Presidential speech about it. I fed some of the details to ChatGPT and told it to make a news article out of it. Serviceable, but not enough. I had the bright idea to ask Needs More Boom to rewrite the scene in its inimitable style, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the output. I had ChatGPT rewrite that as a news article, then fed the articles and the speech to Notebook LM and had it generate one of its goofy podcasts. I added a Dr. Oblivion introduction to that, along with some open source background music for news.

That gave me a bunch of stuff to work with. I made a new subdomain on my site and installed another WordPress, and looked for free news themes, settling on FreeNews. I added all my stuff as posts, then looked through the documentation for clues on how to set it up. Fortunately it wasn’t very difficult. I just had to put categories on the posts and customize the theme options for the main banner article and the sidebar categories.

It’s still pretty lame, since real news sites have much more content, and I didn’t even try to tweak the design other than the header image. But it at least looks news-ish. I should probably apologize for the creepy clown, if I may use that adjective. Needs More Boom came up with that little addition, and the Notebook LM people were quite taken with it, so I chose to appease the evil tech spirits.

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!

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!

Week Six ds106 top picks

We had seventeen posts picked for the best of week six, and they’re all winners. I especially like the variety of tools and approaches to video that people used. I hope everyone looks them over, because you can get a lot of ideas about what you can accomplish from reading about what other people did.

All those non-voters though…

Krissy Meets Dr. Oblivion
This post was incredible! The amount of time and work put into it to tell the story through Sims must’ve been a lot
Krissy Meets Dr. Oblivion
Using the sims is so smart and it was funny, but you could still appreciate the work they put into it.
Krissy Meets Dr. Oblivion
I thought it was very well made and it was so creative that she used the Sims in order to bring her character to life.
Lyric Snippet
I thought the logic behind the certain design choices was well conceived and the final product was very indicative of what it was set out to represent.
Lyric Snippet
I really like the song
Midnight in February
The writeup was so captivating and really allowed me to feel the same vibes from the video!
Midnight in February
Very grounding post
Zer0 Capcut Edit
I thought the edit was very well made, and it was cool they did a photoshoot with the character!
Tips for your character
The use of Ai in this post is so cool. The character made is so detailed
Tips for your characters
This AI Avatar of Finn Callaway is so cool!! I also liked learning more about the character as well.
Become a Pinterest Plant Parent
This was so cute! It makes me want to start getting some plants to take care of them!
Become a Pinterest Plant Parent
This post was very detailed and interesting to watch as someone who also owns a lot of plants!
How to cosplay tuna star awesome
Tiktok video assignment Cute puppers
I am Me very cool post
Wake Up!
The idea of talking to your past self is sweet. They did a good job with this assignment.
Back to 2021
I loved this post because it felt raw, real, and vulnerable. Recording yourself and posting it for everyone to see can be scary for some but I feel like he knocked it out the park. I haven’t been brave enough yet to record myself and post it but I aspire to be brave like him one day and do this! Also – I loved hearing what he’d say to himself at 16. A lot of those things I would say to myself too.
I Love TikTok
She has a very cute dog and I like her reasons for loving tiktok. Her explanation sounded educated and it made me giggle, a double-edged sword.
See top 10 movies
feels like a warm conversation
Where Would Sapphiria Go?
Video editing skills are looking great!
Revisiting My Goals
I liked reading about their goals and how they accomplished them. Also, from reading this post it made me think about other goals that I’d maybe like to accomplish in this class that I didn’t think about originally. By reading this post I can definitely see that they’ve done a great job so far this semester 🙂
Do the Walk of Life
Fits VERY well and sounds great
Video Assignments
I just loved the creativity of the interpretation for the 16 year old me assignment! I loved the vibes as well 🙂

 

 

How I made the news

Since Jim came up with the news assignment idea, I thought I’d try to mimic a newscast. I Googled “free news background animation” and “free news background music” to find suitable content. Then I recorded myself with a green screen (blue also works in iMovie. Some other programs give more options).
For the graphics, I needed PNG files with transparent backgrounds. I used Dafont for the type and took screenshots, then opened them in Photopea and made a white copy of the text in a new layer and hid the background layer to get the transparency, then exported as PNG. I probably shroud have made a chyron for the bottom of the screen. I’m not sure if iMovie will let me do that many layers, but I could take my exported video and bring it back into iMovie for the overlay.

 

Hated in the nation, loved in the class

It’s not really surprising that so many video essays made the Best Of list, given the week’s assignment load. Even so, they are great efforts, demonstrating the fun that can be had through the close reading of media. You can see all the essays here. It’s worth the time.

Bees

Phenomenal job on this video essay! I aspire to do this well with an assignment like this one day! The analysis was beautifully captured in the video.

Good job Martina!

I thought that this video essay was a good example of what the other information videos and readings had gone over. She did a good job of explaining different angles and shots

Looking into Cyberpunk Edgerunners

looks super cool

Very nice, informative, and organized post

Calling Myself a Clip Champ This Week

Captivating title and a great vibe and writing style

they tried their best

Liv Kern #tdc4779

Seeing Mount Rushmore underwater, made me laugh. I think it’s such a creative and silly idea. Something about it just makes me smile.

I thought this daily create was very creative and loved the idea

Daily Creates

I think the original poem turned out really good. I have a hard time with that kind of stuff so I thought it was pretty cool to see someone be able to come up with that

I love poetry

Weekly Summary #6: Sixth Time is the Charm?

Good to see someone moving forward and learning to do new things.

Daily Create

I loved how for the Daily Create banana story she made her’s with a Kim Possible show reference!

Daily Create: January 13, 2025

I thought that this daily create was really good and it made me chuckle

Audio story

It was simple but all the sounds affects helped to easily understand the what was going on

Hated in the Nation Video Essay

I enjoyed this watching this video essay! Very well executed and great analysis.

Holding a “Black Mirror” to the World

I always look forward to this person’s post, I thin their posts are always good and this video essay was no exception!

Video Essay

I think that this was a really good start and I enjoyed watching it

Radio Bumper

This was really well made, but my favorite part was the use of radio static sounds in it

Daily Create 2/9

What a fun daily create! I will now consider this one of my latest musical discoveries! 🙂 Thanks for sharing!

Daily Create: 2/13/25

I thought the idea of impractical jokes was really funny and was a good explanation for the curious bananas

 

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: