Author Archives: Altan

Watching Movies With the Stereo On

This was the first of three video assignments I did this week and the only one not incorporating my character. I have watched many movies and tv shows with music on in the background so this felt right up my alley. I used the alien taking the asteroid scene from Asteroid City and Vertigo by Khalid in the background. Let me know what you think!

Week Five Summary

This week, the main assignment was to make a video essay using a scene from an AI-related movie. I was able to do that despite lack of experience and some initial struggles. You can read more about my experience here!

We also had to reflect on our goals from earlier in the year, which can be found here. I am definitely not a creative person, but my main goal was working on that by doing the course assignments, and I think I have achieved that so far.

Two daily creates were required this week, which can be found on my Mastodon. My creates are here and here. These assignments are a great way for me to improve my creativity by doing small things each day. I enjoy completing the daily creates and especially seeing what everyone else does for the challenges as well.

Revisiting Goals

My main goal from this course was to improve my creativity when completing assignments. I feel like I have definitely grown in this area throughout the first couple weeks. I will continue to work on being more creative, but I think the weekly assignments are pushing me out of my comfort zone and making me try things I never would have otherwise.

Video Essay

This week, we had to make a video essay going over a movie scene. I am not a big movie fan, so this was challenging for me, but after watching the videos provided in the weekly assignments, I was able to get some more insight. I decided to use a scene from Spiderman: Homecoming since it is a movie I have seen before.

I watched the scene a few times and wrote down my analysis of it and what stood out to me. I learned more about how to analyze a movie scene, which I was able to apply in this video essay. Doing this assignment helped me realize there are so many aspects of movies and film making that go unnoticed.

Week Four Summary

The first assignment this week was to listen to Moon Graffiti and reflect on the use of sounds throughout this story. You can read my thoughts here. I loved the use of audio in this story and really was not something I had noticed played such an important role, especially in podcasts. Definitely a worthwhile listen to learn more about the importance of audio.

The next assignment was to create a radio bumper for DS106 radio, which can be found in this article. I have never done something like this, so I had to navigate through some obstacles and stumble my way through Audacity to create a product I was proud of.

We also had to reflect on a DS106 radio listening session from this week, which I wrote about here. My primary takeaway is that people pick up on different sounds within the same story and get meaning from it that others might not.

Making a sound effect story was the trickiest assignment for me this week, and you can listen to mine here. Again, it involved a lot of stumbling through Audacity until I figured out how to make it do what I wanted with the sounds I found and the story I wanted to tell. I think I told a pretty mundane story, but it was a challenge for me, which I enjoyed!

I also completed three other audio assignments which can be found here, here, and here. They all were pretty straightforward, but if it were possible to have negative experience with sound editing, that is where I would be coming into this week. I somehow managed to complete them and have a much better understanding of how to use Audacity thanks to all these exercises.

Once again, I completed three daily creates this week which can be found on Mastodon here, here, and here. I always enjoy working through these and looking at other replies to see how everyone interpreted each assignment.

I also came up with a few rough radio show ideas, which are still not fully fleshed out. I am definitely getting closer to figuring out which direction I want to go with the radio show, specifically that I want to include an AI component in the show itself.

A big lesson from this week for me is that everyone interprets assignments, sounds, and stories differently. That is what makes everyone unique and allows stories to give different meanings to different people. Knowing an audience is important in many areas of life, but that does not necessarily mean everyone will interpret something the same way, which is awesome (and scary) to think about.

Radio Show Ideas

For a radio show revolving around our characters and AI, I came up with a few ideas.

The first one is to connect with a few other students and introduce our characters and hypothesize about how they might interact. We could then give AI a description of our characters and ask it how it thinks they would interact!

Another idea is to ask AI to give us a few settings for us to decide how our characters would act if placed in those specific settings alone or with the other characters too.

I am not too sure, but I like the idea of having AI give us something to think about in regards to our characters.

Poetry Reading

I chose “Fear and Fridays” by Zach Bryan as my poem. I always love listening to poems written by musicians since it is an extension of their art and shows their talent without hiding behind music. Johnny Cash and Zach Bryan are some of my favorites, so here is my reading of the poem and a “story” or lesson I think everyone can get out of it.