Author Archives: Rebecca’s Radiant Realm

Meet Evelyn (Lynn) Calico

Evelyn (Lynn) Calico is a 26 year old woman who is currently living in New York after she moved out of her parents house in Helen, Montana. She is currently a journalist for the New York Times and she is a hard worker. She is short and beautiful. She wears heals to work, has a strong posture, and a stern voice to gain respect in her field. She has green-blue eyes and longer hair than she knows what to do with, so her hair is always in a neat bun.

If there is anything she has learned from her parents its how to be a work-a-holic. She is almost always on the job and all within in her own volition. Her favorites stories are the crime column. She doesn’t want to be a detective but she enjoys the puzzle, mystery, and thrill that the stories give her.

She doesn’t have many friends because she doesn’t get out much but she does enjoy her free time almost as much as she enjoys working. Her nights off look like a nice book and a glass of wine. She enjoys any Agatha Christie books and she also enjoys hate watching some really bad reality TV. She likes living expensive so her favorite food is a rare ribeye steak at the fanciest restaurant you know.

Even in her independent life she misses her family so much. She has an out of sight, out of mind mentality but her favorite possession is a framed photo of her family that sits on her bedroom vanity.

“As women achieve power, the barriers will fall.” Her motto and goal.

The sound of the story

This assignment is called Pictures are Larger than Words. I had a tough time at the start for many reasons. I had forgotten how to screen record first and foremost but I also had no idea what scene I was looking to do. I knew I wanted to do something in Tech Noir so I looked to the TechNoir/Cyberpunk Films/TV list given at the start of the class and browsed through to see if anything caught my eye as interesting. I thought about doing another Black Mirror episode but the scenes I were thinking of were already without dialogue and were just with sound to tell the story along with the visual aide. So instead I went with Tron: Legacy.

At first, because I had chosen an action scene I thought I wanted to add some action music to the background but the film already had a killer soundtrack and I dont think that I could do better or tell a good story with something different but in the same genre of music. So I went with a eerie background noise and let the scene tell itself. Using a mix of a low rumble and a sci-fi machine noise I was able to create a background noise that is not close to the noise already used AND could even tell a different story depending on how the video and/or the sound makes the audience feel. With the more eerie approach I think that the kind of suspense that the scene gives you is now different than the suspense it used to be.

Click on the image for the video

I used iMovie for Apple to create this video and uploaded it (unlisted) on my personal youtube. I first searched for a scene from Tron: Legacy on Youtube and found one that caught my eye. I watched the video with sound and started to think about the type of music or background I wanted to use to replace the audio in the video. In iMovie I used the free audio they had available and I used the sound files “Drone Dark Suspense 02” and “Strange Machine 02”. These two files mixed together give me the type of eerie vibe I was going for. I didnt want static noise so I have the “Strange Machine” to give some sort of variation in the background noise and then “Drone Dark Suspense” was used to get a low humming noise that is used in a lot of horror movies to give a suspenseful feel.

What do you think the story is saying now?

WANTED: Have you seen this dog?

This assignment is the one assignment not related to this courses theme, and its about one of my dogs!

This is the assignment Spread the Word and its all about sharing our furry friends. I have so many photos of my dogs (literally so many) but I love this one photo I have of my oldest dog caught in the act of tearing apart one of her toys. This toy is no longer with us (RIP) and we know exactly why…

Straight from my camera roll onto the digital canvas this project took form. I used Procreate for Apple and created and edited my own wanted poster for Nano and her murderous actions.

So spread the word…she is a danger to the dog toy society.

We are not far…

I wanted to start this streak of assignments with a design assignment because as of right now the creative design part of my brain is a bit easier to connect to and it is something I have the right tools for at the moment. The destination poser caught my eye and I thought it would be a great way to incorporate our course’s theme to.

This is the Destination Poster. This poster is about how our society is changing to revolve around our technology, specifically the technology that we hold in our hands. The way that people use their phones in their daily life and how it consumes them is something that I see everyday and to a certain point indulge in. While I try to stay present in life it is tough with the society we live where everything is so digital and it hard to navigate through life without technology. Watching the development of technology, how we use it, and its rapid development I don’t see how “technology taking over the world” isn’t that far away. If we aren’t already there that is.

I started the process of creating this poster by simply googling “tech noir city” and looking at the images that come up and gaining ideas through that. I noticed a lot of bright colors, and lots and lots of robots. According to wikipedia Tech Noir represents “technology as a destructive and dystopian force that threatens every aspect of our reality” and seeing the collection of robots reminded me about the phones we carry in our pockets and how the overuse of them can make humans robots, which threatens our society from being the community it once was to being a technology driven world.

The editing program I used was Procreate for Apple. I googled images of people in a city looking at their phones and imported that onto my canvas. I then google images of robots in a city and imported that onto my canvas but mirrored. I made use of the empty space in the first image (the top image) and imported my text. I didn’t want to specify a place because at this point its basically the whole world so I opted to just make a commentary on where we are now, technology wise, compared to the dystopia we see in the movies that are shown to be bad.

Daily Create 1/20/25

My contribution to todays daily create was more difficult than I expected it to be. It was my first post and I found myself freezing in what to create because I was scared to get the wrong answer. After some minutes I came to terms with the fact that there are no right answers so I decided to make a little cartoon that shows a coincidence that we know all to well.

That classic moment when you show up to a function wearing the same thing as your friend! Someone oughta change, and its not you.

Weekly Summary #1

As I wrap up my ds106 assignments for this week I feel accomplished. When I first got the canvas page and went to the courses main page on ds106.ai I was very overwhelmed and lost. I no idea how to navigate the website and I didnt know what I was getting myself into.

Once the website was updated with this weeks assignment and I had the time to sit down and actually read what needed to be done I still felt overwhelmed but understood what I needed to do and I was able to set aside time in the week to get them done.

I split my work into two days. The first day was just to set up the accounts I needed to and get familiar with them. I stopped on step 7 of the assignment so that I could get all the deliverables out in one sitting. Im not sure how that flow would work going forward, since this was the first week and there is just a lot of set up but I will continue to take things one step at a time to avoid feeling overwhelmed.

I enjoyed the assignments of this week and I really liked how they are sort of personalized. there are requirements but you can chose how you meet those requirements and I appreciate that. The assignments completed this week were the Film Review and the ds106 goals. I feel good about how these assignments went and it makes me excited for the assignments that are to come.

ds106 goals

My goals for this class is to learn more about digital media and learn how to be more proficient with technology. For example, Im still learning how to use WordPress and this blog post is still taking me a while to set up because I have no idea how to use this program, but I’m learning! My goal is also to stay on top of the weekly assignments and to not fall behind.