Author Archives: M. Marshall

Propaganda

M. Marshall 2.28

I have to start this by saying that I am a liberal. I hate Donald Trump, I cannot stand the Republican party, and I vote blue in every election. I try not to get overly political in this class because I know it can make people uncomfortable (although, isn’t being uncomfortable how we learn? I digress) and that isn’t the purpose of this class. If you disagree with me, you disagree with me, and that is none of my business. However, propaganda could not be described as anything but political, so that is the direction I am going. After any assassination attempt in any country, there will be a lot of controversy and discussion about political violence. To be clear: I do not believe that attempting to shoot anyone will address the problems going on in a country, but most likely martyrize the individual at the center of the controversy. Also, gun violence is wrong. With those things in mind, since this happened, I have seen the image of Trump, his bloody ear, and his fist pumped into the air more times than I can count, some might call it heroic, some might call it idiotic for remaining in the line of fire, I call it propaganda. He was almost shot for his cause makes Trump supporters dig in their heels further into the dirt. These images enforce the idea that he is patriotic and will fight for his country. The other week, at the mall, I saw a picture of this event put onto a poster, perhaps to serve as a reminder of his strength and commitment to the country. I think it is a perfect example of propaganda, which is why I created this right-wing propaganda.

For the record, no, he won’t. Even if he would, no, I don’t.

Reporting from the scene!

M. Marshall 2.28

For this project I chose the first video, Police Station Shootout from The Terminator (1984). This scene was definitely pretty intense, but a good representation of film noir. I was very lucky this week because I had an important presentation for another class and decided to do a free trial for a month of Canva. This website is great for creating presentations, flyers, papers, anything you might need for free; however, it is really great when you’re paying for it (or on the free trial). Because of that, I was able to create this beautiful newspaper!

I am struggling to upload files onto WordPress, so working on that is definitely a future goal, for now, enjoy my screenshot.

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!

Get Ready With Me!

M. Marshall 2.23

This is me getting ready for the day. I really enjoy doing videos and voice overs so if we have more video assignments in the future this is definitely the kind of thing I’ll do.

Side note: still struggling with the thumbnail thing. Definitely need to keep working on that.

TikTok of my pet

M. Marshall 2.23

This is a TikTok my girlfriend and I made with my cat. It is slightly related to the character because, again, she is based on my cat. I will not lie, she was not a big fan of this one. Here it is:

Honestly, making this video was not that hard. Getting it into my website however, was. Click here for a link if you’ve struggled with the same thing! The music is copyrighted so it can’t go onto Youtube or Soundcloud unfortunately.

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!

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: