Author Archives: Rylie’s Riveting Region

Extra, Extra!

For this assignment, I decided to primarily focus on the shootout scene from The Terminator, while also including some references to the nightclub fight. I used a newspaper template on Canva in order to format everything, and then typed directly into the document. I changed several of the fonts to make it more newspaper-esque, as it seemed like the template was initially meant to be used as an announcement and not a legitimate newspaper. I included photos of TechNoir and the Terminator, as well. The picture of the Terminator took some time to find, as I wanted a photo that looked like it could have been sourced from a security camera or something similar. I included the actual LAPD phone number, as well as some other small details that I researched. I enjoyed making this, especially having to write as though I was a reporter! I think the fake quotes I included were a lot of fun, too.

In 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…. Action!

After re-establishing my goals for this class, I almost immediately disregarded some of them by leaving a majority of my work until the end of the week. Oh well! That’s why they’re goals and not habits.

I spent most of this week in Microsoft ClipChamp. I know there are more powerful tools out there, and I would love to become familiar with Adobe Premire, but I wasn’t doing anything intense enough to warrant another free trial of Adobe. ClipChamp served me well, though! I particularly enjoyed continuing to build out my course character through thinking about her high school experience. I also toasted her new house, which was another assignment I did several weeks ago. I got to talk about my favorite thing in the world- plants! Thank you, Assignment Bank.

The Daily Creates for this week sort of slipped my mind, which is why the class has been subjected to my Scottish accent.

Bethany in School

I opted to further engage with my course character by unearthing a video that she made during high school. Based on the information in my introduction post, Bethany would have been in school around 2012.

After deciding the perfect early-2010s track to play, I downloaded it using a YouTube to mp3 converter. I used the same converter to download a couple of videos of 2012 high schoolers, which I included in the final video. All of the images came from Pinterest, which I sourced primarily from a search asking for “2012 high school.” Bethany was a pretty mainstream, normal girl, so all of these pictures and videos may seem average but are perfectly her!

Everything was compiled using Microsoft ClipChamp

To Bethany!

For this assignment, I decided to portray one of Bethany’s friends giving her a toast at her housewarming party. I fell curse to an echo-ey room, but it makes it feel like it really is an empty room! The assignment didn’t go into depth about how long the toast should be, so mine ended up being quite short. I recorded everything in ClipChamp and trimmed the beginning and end. I played around with adding crowd noises, but I felt like I couldn’t get it to properly layer with the audio from my video, so I left those out.

Become a Pinterest Plant Parent

For this video assignment, I decided to talk about the thing I can’t stop talking about: plants! All of the information included in this video is from my own experience becoming a plant parent this year. I included some pictures of my plants as a character witness.

To create this video, I used Microsoft ClipChamp and recorded everything directly in the software. Ideally, I would have been in a room that is not quite so echo-ey, but I didn’t have the ability to do that this week!

Have I Been Doing What I Set Out to Do?

I think the biggest thing that I neglected to mention when writing about my goals at the beginning of the semester was time management and being able to parse out work throughout the week. I think this caught up to me quite quickly, but it’s been tough for me to get in to a flow and find a good work schedule. Looking to the rest of the semester, I hope to set aside dedicated “ds106 time” where I’ll actually work through the week instead of doing everything on Thursday and Friday. I think some of this shows in my Weekly Summaries, which I alway feel end up rushed and not the best representation of my work.

Going along with this, I’m also going to work to better organize the work for the week, as I feel like I have a tendency to let some things slip between the cracks. For the last few weeks I’ve gone through and pre-made all the posts for each assignment and properly tagged them before actually starting on the work, which has been helpful.

Looking at my actual goals, I do think that I’ve learned how to tell stories in different ways. I’ve really never used photography or audio before, and we’ve worked with both of those. The tech noir theme has been difficult on occasion, as I feel like its hard to engage with without being stereotypical or basic. However, I’ve enjoyed the character building and creative writing involved and this again fits with my previous goal of wanting to engage with new storytelling methods.

So to summarize:

  1. Set specific work times and WORK.
  2. Organize the week and engage with material in different ways.
  3. Continue to be creative and try new things!

Calling Myself a Clip Champ This Week

This week was all about the video essay, which I felt went rather smoothly! I utilized OBS, ClipChamp, and Audacity to create my final product, which was uploaded to YouTube and embedded in my blog.

Besides that, I worked on only two daily creates. I really liked a lot of the prompts this week, but had a hard time engaging with them. I find myself enjoying TDCs that involve actually making something like an image or an audio file, but several of the TDCs this week seemed to involve just writing. Perhaps my issue is that I’m “not being creative enough” and just taking the prompts at face value, but who can say.

Honestly, I think the most difficult part of this week was the snow days. I wasn’t motivated to work on this class when I “wasn’t in school,” even though that’s pretty much the whole point of taking an online class. I think I ended up stressing myself out about the video essay timeline and having enough time to work on it, which I shouldn’t have been stressed about. The only other time I’ve made a video essay it took me at least a week and a half and involved much more extensive editing, and that likely contributed to this stress.

Holding a “Black Mirror” to the World

I decided to watch the episode of Black Mirror that was linked on our weekly ds106 page for the video essay assignment, and I enjoyed both the episode and the process! I thought the premise of the episode was really interesting, particularly the integration of social media within the plot.

To make the video essay, I first wrote my script and decided which scenes I wanted to use. I then utlized OBS to record my screen while playing Netflix in order to capture the episode. I did record the episode audio, too, but didn’t end up using it. I recorded myself in Audacity, and brought everything together using ClipChamp. I cut up the clips I had recorded earlier and pieced them together. I added some background music from FreeSounds and lowered the volume of it so that it would play under the audio of me speaking. I discovered that ClipChamp has an auto-caption feature, so I used that to quickly add closed-captions to my video. The captions required minimal editing, so I exported and saved the video.

I had some trouble getting the video onto my blog, initially. The file was too large to upload directly to WordPress, so I instead published the video to YouTube with an unlisted link and included that instead.

Overall, I think making a video essay was enjoyable but not something that I would do on my own time. I watch a lot of video essays already, and I think I have a standard for them that I don’t feel like I necessarily met. While I’m sure I could get there eventually, it doesn’t feel like a skill I’m presently going to work on.

TDC 2/9 – 2/14

February 9, 2025 – Musical Discoveries

February 13, 2025 – Mystery Bananas

“Who else loves bananas? Monkeys. I think it’s only reasonable to assume that there is a rogue band of primates living in the shrubbery of Beeston that one heroic citizen is trying to catch! Perhaps the monkeys are just smart enough to know that if they go for the bananas, they’ll certainly be sent back to whatever zoo they escaped from.”