Category Archives: Final Project

Progress update!

M. Marshall 4.17

A huge part of this class is talking about what you did and how you did it and why you did it and how it worked out. One thing I am more challenged by than talented at is communication. Part of the holistic liberal arts education that Mary Washington appeals to is why I came, and also, no employer is going to hire someone who says “I’m a hard worker and I am qualified for the job, but I cannot communicate for the life of me.” So as I work to explain my thought process more, bear with me.
For my final project, I’m telling my character’s story. I want the story to shine through because D41SY is based on my own pet, who is very beloved to me. I also want the story to into three categories: I want it to matter, I want it to make sense, and I want it to make the viewer feel something. My bonus category would be that I want a really good rainy scene because I love the rain.
I think one problem many story tellers run into is that they feel a personal connection to their character, they care about that character, and they don’t realize that other people don’t have that. I want there to be moments that show the importance of her character in the plot, and to feel happiness when she feels happiness, so that the audience will feel sadness when she does too. I want to design her to be aesthetically pleasing, because people are naturally attracted to things that look nice. I also think people will enjoy a good swish-y tail, maybe that becomes more rigid when she becomes a cyborg and then swish-y again when she is returned to her owner? She also needs a goal; I think saving the other animals and reuniting them. I want the story to have a happy ending.
One issue: I don’t want to base a character on me, I’m not a writer, so I’m not going to say I know everything about the process. I do know that self-inserts are often difficult because everyone wants to be liked, so it’s harder to show nuance. I think I’m going to make D41SY’s owner a guy to create a stronger sense of separation in my head between myself, the owner, my cat, and D41SY. Any self inserts will be much more akin to Stan Lee from Marvel, preferably.

What have I done so far? I’m so glad you asked.
First, I considered my strengths:
When I was 12 I was really intro drawing
Then I considered my weaknesses:
When I was 12 I was really into drawing

Jokes aside, I know that I would be most proud of myself creating an animation, so that’s what I’ve set out to do.
I have an iPad and an Apple Pencil, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to utilize that. I’ve downloaded an app called FlipStudio and started sketching. Of course, while not terrible, I perhaps overestimated my drawing skills

Although disappointing, knowing my weaknesses is an important part of the process. The eyes look like human eyes. No good way around it, the drawings are a little stiff and while there is artwork that is very simple that I find to be fantastic, my own is simple in all the wrong places.
I looked into YouTube, because it has everything, and looked for how to animate cats and found this:

It’s not the art style I’m going for, but I was really impressed at how much good information this short video conveyed.

Back to the drawing board (get it, because I’m focusing on drawing again? Okay.)

One of the things I really clicked with was viewing the animal as multiple parts of a whole, rather than one part. Which I believe is conveyed well in the highlighted colors and parts of the cat that are highlighted.

Most importantly, it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be a reflection of my effort in this course.

I hope anyone reading enjoyed my post, and I’ll be back tomorrow for a weekly summary!

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!

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.