Category Archives: Final Project

Week 14: Final Project

M. Marshall 4.28

It is crazy to know that the semester is in its last week. I will probably never forget this class and some of the things that it’s taught me. I think going into it I did not have accurate expectations for what the course would be, but that’s a good thing. Over the semester, I’ve really honed in on my digital drawing skills, which was extremely beneficial for my final project that I animated. Even looking at the difference between my first daily creates artwork and more recent artwork I think there’s been a major shift in my understanding of and abilities at this skill.

I don’t even want to show it, it’s so bad!

I get really caught up on the fact that my work isn’t perfect or that I could’ve done better if I had just done something another way, and I think that is great for growth, but in this reflection I really want to appreciate how I’ve grown. I learned a lot about shading and color theory. My growth in understanding color theory is well represented by the Adelson’s Checker Shadow Illusion. If you can believe it, squares A and B are the same color

I can’t believe it either, don’t worry. That aside, the reason is our perception that there is shadow over a “white” tile is because our brains are filling in information. I cannot prove to you that what I am telling you is true, but I’ve used an eye dropper tool, and it is definitely the same. The best way to know is to check for yourself, but here’s the best way I have to show you. I drew a line right over, did not stop. It’s freaky.

Another thing I honed in on was my story telling skills and creating a world and thinking about nuances within that world. Toward the beginning I relied on things like other TV shows I had seen and couldn’t really go far beyond what I had come up with.

I honestly feel much better equipped in my creativity and storytelling. Over a relatively short period of time I was able to let myself be free to create ideas, even if I cringed a little bit.

I also worked on my video editing skills, which was really fun to learn about. I think I should create a vlog YouTube channel. I am honestly very proud of myself for some of the stuff I’ve made. I did some photo editing, and I really tried to challenge myself, but it was mostly just to be funny, here are some examples!

Video editing

Character Movie Trailer

Get Ready With Me!

Photo editing:

Propaganda

And last, but certainly not least, work on my character:

My character

Trading card

I worked really hard to have my character be consistent but also ever improving, hopefully, the viewers will feel that she is!

Let’s talk about my work timeline:

Week one:

I drew a lot to see what kind of thing I was aiming for and how it would look, the preliminary sketches definitely look very different from the end result. I focused on watching animation videos (which had really interesting techniques that ended up being too complicated for my level of knowledge). I would watch my cat as I drew to see how she looked at different angles. I wrote down the story and I spent a lot of time drawing out what I wanted the background to look like, where characters would move, all of that. I considered the story aspect a lot and the moving parts of how to make people committed to a character in a (very) short film. Toward the end of the week, I started on animating.

Progress update!

Week two:

This is the bulk time that I spent animating, I had scenes, lines, beginning drawings, just not a finished project. I became best friends with the layers section because it allowed me to move things around more easily, I could erase writing but not the speech bubbles behind it, I could use the lasso tool to move a character but not everything behind it. I probably spent around 20-25 hours animating it. It was no joke. It ended up only being about 2 minutes long, but I hope you can see the effort I put in to the quality of the drawings. For things like crying, took a slide, copied it, edited it a smidge, copied that, edited that a smidge more, until I was able to show a character crying. The scene that took the most work was definitely the laboratory scene.

Originally, I wanted it to have audio, but my voice does not work very well to be a guy, and I think that the meaningful thing here is that people can relate to the characters, and I thought that my voice would pull people out of the scene. I tried to add music, but I really struggled with the copyrighting policies of YouTube and finding music that I liked, so unfortunately I ultimately had to scrap that.

Previous knowledge of my storyline is definitely beneficial to understand the plot. In the radio show, the ending was more depressing. I think that this would have been more long and drawn out and show more characters, but by the end I was running very low on time, unfortunately we cannot win ’em all. I was thinking a lot about how I wanted to show the intersection of humanity and technology. In the story, the animals gain human like cognition from the combination of artificial intelligence and the animals’ pre-existing sentience. In this, the government is mostly able to stop emotions in animals because it restricts the parts of the brain creating them, like the amygdala. In the end, that combination of artificial intelligence and sentience is able to save D41SY because she recognizes her owner and the love that she has for him overrides government interference. I really feel proud of this project because it really wouldn’t be me if the end of the story wasn’t something about how love perseveres and real love can’t be broken by technology and the government.

Thank you for tuning in to my creative process! I hope you enjoyed!

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

Final Project

Wow the last project. This is actually very crazy the semester went by so quickly. I want to start with a reflection of the semester. At the beginning of the semester I mentioned that I wanted to learn new tools to implement for after I graduate. I definitely achieved this goal! I got to play around with audacity, adobe, and get even more familiar with Canva. These are all great tools that i’m happy to have experience with especially being a Communication and Digital studies major.

This class has really broadened my creativity. I enjoyed the daily creates and the different array of audio, visual, and written assignments I completed this semester. These assignments pushed me to be creative with implementing my class character Krysta while also adding in my personality and assignment requirements.

For the final project myself, Martina, Coni, Macie, and Olivia all worked really hard at creating our own tech noir version of the hit series “The Real Housewives”. I loved working with these ladies, it was truly so easy and fun to work work them.

Last week was primarily brainstorming the project, creating bumpers, and putting together the trailer. This week was all focused on the final cut of the show. We started filming on last week on Wednesday, we decided to film 4 different short scenes Wednesday. These short scenes in the film are a lot of the house and bedroom scenes.

With it being the final week of classes it was hard to find time to film scenes, but we got it all figured out. We filmed all of our confessionals in the show this week on Monday. We got them all knocked out within an hour. I filmed my portion of a phone call scene with Coni Monday as well.

My favorite scene that we filmed was the fight scene. This was really the main portion of the show so we spent the most time on this scene. It was thankfully nice outside, but it was definitely very hot as well. We made sure to stay hydrated throughout the afternoon. If you watch the show you can see some were more hydrated than others…

The fight. scene was tedious but so fun to film. This was also the last scene we filmed as a group. The rest of the scenes were done by ourselves and edited ourselves. I edited the Pinot Grigio commercial on Canva. I now have Canva pro which has really helped me implement some fun graphics. The commercial was primarily just Canva and I recorded and edited my voice over on audacity. I used Freesound for the background music, which I found through other reading other classmates radio shows and seeing how they created their bumpers.

The hardest part of the assignment was actually the uploading process. We had aproblem with the video being extremely blurry. Other than that the project went fairly smoothly.

Overall this was such a fun project and class to take I will definitely be recommending it to other Comm majors. I still have so much to learn and prefect, but this class provided me with a great starting base with working with audio and video editing apps. I loved seeing how everyone’s websites, bumpers, and final projects looked. Everyone is so creative in this class it truly blows my mind.

Here is our finished project

Real Housewives of Cyber Manhattan

Thank you everyone for reading my blogs and watching my work.

Sincerely, Kristen

The Present Future: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (and final summary)

This is just a screenshot of the title page! Access the game with the link down below!

For my final project, I went with the first prompt from Dr. Oblivion which was to create an interactive multimedia narrative essentially of the dangers of the AI takeover. I have always loved a good story and I love creating and telling them, so I thought getting to do something more writing and narrative based would be a good way to hone my skills that I’ve gotten to develop over this semester especially with projects such as reordering the songs of Dear Evan Hansen to change the course of its story, discussing the way that color plays a role in storytelling in The Corpse Bride, or even using a simple song lyric to create a more nuanced backstory for my course character.

As evidenced through my own character creation and the elements of design, writing, and aesthetic of my whole website and assignment choices, I’m very drawn to macabre and horror-based storytelling and with the prompt asking us to discuss implications of such an AI revolution, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to create a horror story. A bit of background for this: I am very against the big boom of AI, I avoid using it at every possible cost (which has created an ethical dilemma in this class, but I’ve cut my losses) due to the environmental damage it causes, the way that work is stolen from countless artists, the job displacement it creates, etc; I think it’s an ethical nightmare and not one where I believe the pros could outweigh the cons. Therefore, a perfect basis for horror in my own personal views. I also thought very heavily about how the world is what we make it and how all of the horrors around us that we face today came from the decision of someone somewhere, maybe even ourselves which is where I got the idea for a choose-your-own-adventure. In my own love for horror, my personal favorite style is surrealism; I was incredibly inspired by aesthetics like that of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and games like “Samsara Room” and “Cube Escape” by Rusty Lake. With all of the pieces put together, I created the basis of my interactive multimedia narrative: a surrealist horror choose-your-own-adventure set in a future ruled by an AI governance where you are the master of your own fate; or so the governance would like you to believe (EXTRA LINK TO PROJECT!!!)

I decided to use Prezi to create this! I know it’s normally a presentation software, but because the viewer can click the planet subtopics and be brought to any point in the presentation without a necessary chronology, I thought it would be perfect for this! The player can click the subtopic with their choice for that part of that story and follow the timeline of choices for those particular aspects.

In the process of creating this, I knew a few things: 1. with it being a narrative, I wanted this to be a very writing heavy project and 2. I have unfortunately had an insane amount of pre-finals week finals that have been due all throughout the month of April therefore making my time limited and prioritization key. That being said, this did not end up as multimedia as I had hoped or intended due to a lack of time as a whole and certain resources with the program I used (i.e I wanted to create and embed an audio for each new slide to play in the background, but I didn’t have time to do all of that and Prezi will not let me incorporate audio without a pro account).

The bulk of my time was spent writing the story and creating all the various endings (there are 4 main endings that are used with a few times, but with their own explanations and plotline and 1 unique ending that is exclusive to a specific story line; can you find the secret one-of-a-kind end?), and this took me quite a long time to write out and then put together especially on top of all of my other miscellaneous class projects and big presentations. In Canva, I put together a background design to showcase the connection of humanity to the digital world, but to also symbolise the reach that the virtual aspects of life have.

When creating the aesthetics of the presentation, I used a font that I thought felt futuristic yet also still legible to read text groupings in and I used layered circular subtopic aesthetics for each of the choices and made them translucent rather than their typical opaque to create a nuance, almost glitchy or laggy vibe that also felt very cyberpunk/tech inspired in my mind. I incorporated some images of Rorsachs in one of the storylines to create a visual element of uncertainty, but ran out of time to create more designs despite having worked on this project for 2+ weeks. I also spent about 3 days of that trying to sort out my audio situation as I hadn’t realized until the writing and aesthetics were complete that Prezi won’t let me embed audio that automatically accompanies the presentation without a pro account. So, I tried to troubleshoot for a while and then ended up just embedding a Youtube video of ambient horror music to really create a surreal and unsettling ambience that, to me, is one of the most important parts of surrealist horror. Sound, as we talked about in our audio weeks, can play such a pivotal role in the way our brains perceive elements of a story. The player can open the video in a separate tab and have the music playing in the background as they go through each part of the story.

This was a really long, arduous process and I do wish I was able to do more with it, but a lot of really intricate planning went into perfecting the narrative aspect and the storytelling which is really what this is all about. In the end, I incorporated elements of writing, design, and audio to create my surreal horror interactive experience and I’m really quite happy with the way the story came out and the way the mechanics function. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to create something like this without this class teaching me to think outside of the box when it comes to the various ways to tell stories digitally!

Welcome to “The Ambassador”

Drum roll please- our game is done! Rebecca (of Rebecca’s Radient Realm) and I created a game for our final project, hosted on Twine. We incorperated multiple sounds and designs, as well as a tech-noir themed script. I implore you to go over to Rebecca’s Radient Realm to play our final project!

We did some brainstorming during casual conversation throughout the week, and then sat down on Thursday to get all of our “must have” ideas on paper. I’ve attached a photo of our Google Document here! Once we got working in Twine, some of our ideas moved around and we realized that the story progressed much faster than we thought that it would.

Moving into Twine, I worked on the script while Rebecca figured out how to import audio and images. I first mapped every decision out, as well as how everything would intersect with each other. After that, I just started writing, and everything came together. I’ve attached a very zoomed out image (no spoilers!) of most of our game.

What I learned and how I used it:

  1. Creative Writing: this is probably one of the biggest things that I learned in this class, and certainly what I showed off during this project. I’ve always enjoyed analytical writing and feel like I’m good at that, but having to write creatively and as my course character was a struggle for me at the beginning of this semester. Wanting to do that for my final project was something that I didn’t expect, and I doubly didn’t expect to really, really like how it was turning out! I found myself getting excited for the end of the story, and having a lot of fun putting in easter eggs and references to other ds106 things. I can confidently say that I feel like I’ve improved, and I think the story execution is strong (if you don’t feel like it is, please don’t tell me!).
  2. Integration of Multimedia Design: While I wasn’t in charge of the audio design for this project, I have gotten better at conceptualizing the use of multiple media formats in projects. With the combination of video and audio projects that I’ve completed this semester, I’m much more able to work in those formats. I’m also more able to make space for them in other projects, which leads to a fuller, more interesting final result.
  3. Time and Self Management: Not visually present, my ability to manage my time when it comes to an asynchronous workload has improved. I got much better at estimating how long things would take me, and finding time in my day to work on them.
  4. Planning (to a point): I’m not much of a planner when it comes to creative projects. I don’t like to rough draft, and I don’t like to storyboard. This project forced me to do that, at least a little bit, and I think it turned out better because of it. I’m really trying to get better about drafting, but the instant gratification is just so appealing!
  5. Domain of One’s Own/Website Organization: Does this count as a skill involved in the project? DOOO was my sworn mortal enemy coming in to this semester, and I think that we now just mutually dislike each other instead of full-blown hate. I find this website difficult and not very intuitive, but I’ve grown used to the interface. Making this blog post now is a breeze!

Project update

M. Marshall 4.24

I am really excited to show this! I have learned about the pains of animating, but I really appreciate a free place to do it (I will update the name of the app in the morning lol) that has good (enough) drawing tools. I drew out backgrounds for the scenes and each scene has a short drawn out animation (I will provide three examples from the beginning because there are quite a few) to show what the idea is.

For example, the drawing above, you can see the living room sketch and the cat walking sketch.

For this one, you can see the D41SY and her owner watching tv (I’m working on animating steam from the mug)

And other cute things! It definitely has been and will be quite a lot of work, but I feel good.

I have been wondering if I could more effectively convey this with music, but there’s too much to convey without words, so I’ve been considering how to go about it… Only time will tell!

I have really focused on creating a design simple enough to redraw, but complex enough to look nice. I think it’s gonna look good.

It is late and I am sick, so I will update tomorrow with my weekly summary, my final project, and my final project discussion post!

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!

Final Project in the midst of chaos

This week I worked with Rylie and we continued to brainstorm our project. For a refresher see our trailer here.

We have decided to host this interactive media on twine. My hope is to play around with it more and seeing if we can incorporate sound into the game. I think that this would be essential to creating a audio environment that would immerse the user.

Though this game does not revolve around our characters, we are going to add our characters into the story as side characters, or character that the users interact with once or twice in their adventure.

We have also discussed splitting the game into three chapters. The first chapter is the beginning of the story, in which we introduce the character that the user plays and the conflict with some minor choices. the second chapter is is the bulk of the conflict in which the user will make choices that go against the main conflict of the story. The third chapter is the epilogue that will conclude the story into an ending, good or not.

I am a little nervous about writing the different narratives and keeping them consistent with the story. With the way that the story just branches out because of the different choices that can be made Im nervous about having loose ends. But I think that this will end up being very fun!

The Brain is Storming

This week, I worked with Rebecca to come up with the storyboard and plot points for our game (refresher: AI governmental ambassador goes haywire, and its your job to fix it (or not)). We have decided to host it on Twine, and that it won’t revolve around our characters. However, our characters will be involved in the story as background characters or delivering messages to the player. The player also won’t be required to interact as their character, though that could certainly be interesting! We’ve decided to divide the game into chapters, with each section focusing on a different conflict. Chapter I is the beginning, Chapter II will have the bulk of the AI conflict, and Chapter III will be the epilogue. With Twine’s choose-your-own -adventure format, the way that these three sections interact with each other could change drastically depending on how the player chooses to interpret the prompts. We are going to finish the game next week! While I think it will be time consuming to create different narratives that all interact with each other and come back to the same conflict will be time consuming, I don’t anticipate the actual writing to be much of a setback.

And, unlike always, no Daily Creates to share this week!

Final Project Progress Report

I’ve fully planned out how I want my interactive multimedia narrative to play out and I’m starting to put all the pieces together!

I’m using Prezi to create a click-through choose your own adventure-like software as with the planet topic function on Prezi, you can click them to take you exactly the way you want to go; it felt like a simple yet effective way to accomplish what I’m trying to do.

As mentioned previously, I want to do an interactive narrative that is constructed by the player as they make choices throughout to see how the way they conduct their “life” will be impacted by the ever-growing power of AI in this dystopian world. I was heavily influenced by surrealist/horror game lore like Cube Escape, Samsara Room, and even the FNAF lore to a degree. There are multiple endings depending on what choices you choose. There will be mix of text, images, audio, and design throughout to really immerse yourself in the experience and to keep you on your toes as this is meant to illicit feelings of unease and confusion, much like how it feels to know how the powers of AI can expand and make us unsure of the future ahead.