Category Archives: Assignment Bank

Not Cracking Any Jokes

Crack an egg Make it rain

I was excited to start this assignment because I think studying propaganda is very interesting. I struggled to come up with an theme at first, I was overwhelmed with ideas, it felt like there were too many options. I eventually settled on the price of eggs, because it’s a point of frustration for me and a lot of Americans. On February 13th, apnews.com published an article “US egg prices hit a record high of $4.95 and are likely to keep climbing” These are crazy prices when eggs are a necessity for most people, and it seems like some politicians aren’t willing to do anything about it.

To make this poster, I used Canva. A big thing I wanted to incorporate into this piece were elements such as colors, shapes, and general themes you would normally see in American propaganda. A lot of American propaganda that I saw when I was looking for examples was very patriotic, but I think this is a low point for America’s economy, so I wanted to use the patriotism in an ironic way. The pan and dollars falling were already on Canva so I added them to the poster. To get the egg, I googled an image of an egg being cracked, uploaded it to Canva and erased all the parts so only the egg shell was left. I then put all the pieces together and I think it came out nicely. For the text, I wanted to have something short and catchy to act as a slogan of sorts.

I’m really happy with how this poster came out, I think the ironic patriotism perfectly compliments the distaste many Americans have for the high egg prices. To make you giggle, here is the tweet that inspired me to make my poster about egg prices.

Back in my day there was so much toilet paper and eggs, that we would throw them at the houses of our enemies

What’s Black and White and Read All Over?

For the Newspaper assignment I chose to do the TechNoir shooting scene, and I included some other easter eggs for Terminator fans.

For this project I chose to use the Bar shooting scene because it had a more diverse group of people to talk about, so I thought it would give me more interesting perspectives. When I started the assignment, I thought I wouldn’t have much to write about but as I was doing it, I had to keep resizing the newspaper because I was running out of space. There was so much more to talk about than I expected, I wanted to include a brief overview of the event, an eye witness report, a statement from the owner of the club, commentary, and more. There was simply not enough room. I used a Newspaper template on Canva to evenly space everything out, I also googled the pictures that I used for each story. The articles on the side are supposed to be Easter Eggs to the movie. For example, I put up a missing poster for Sarah Connor and I made the phone number as close to T-800 as I could so the joke is that he submitted the missing persons report. There’s more easter eggs in this newspaper, Terminator related and not, but I don’t want to give them all away. Overall, I really enjoyed this assignment. It was a good way to get creative and it didn’t take too long to complete.

Just sign it!

This is the Signing Words assignment. I chose to do this assignment because I took four years of ASL in high school and love the language and culture. Because of this I was able to finger-spell this phrase without a problem!

It has definitely been a while since I have signed, and it for sure has been a while since I have had to record myself signing. My last year of ASL was online due to COVID. Yikes.

I recorded this short video on my phone and got rid of the sound in iMovie. Do you know what I am finger-spelling?

College Move-In Day!!

This is video assignment 30 Second Memory and I chose to do this with my character Evelyn as we follow her into the memory of college move-in.

College move-in can be so stressful. You have to make sure you have all of your stuff, traffic can be an issue, you have to get all your college supplies and your dorm key, its hot and everyone is upset, and finally you have to say goodbye. Evelyns experience moving in was no different. Her dorm started off small, but the campus was beautiful. Follow her into her memories as she remembers what the first few hours of college move-in was like for her.

To do this assignment I found some clips that I liked of other people moving into college and importing that into iMovie. I added some filters like a cool tone to the airport and plane. And then a warmer tint in the dining hall to give it an “evening” look. I then used the “modern” theme music from iMovie and adjusted the volume accordingly.

Krissy Meets Dr. Oblivion

My scene takes places when Krissy gets to the future and is exploring all the new tech products that the future has. She assumes Dr. Oblivion is similar to an Alexa, but she is mistaken and Dr. O is not afraid to tell her why. I used Sims 4 to help animate my idea and my friend was the voice actor for Krissy. The scene is listed below.

The process to make this video was long. To get Dr. Oblivion’s responses, I tried different lines from Krissy and used trial and error to find the best responses. I wanted to showcase Dr. O’s sarcastic personality but ran into the problem that his responses were just a tad limited. I eventually figured out that if I downloaded multiple audio clips, I could edit them together to get the lines I wanted. Once I had my conversation, I used Sims 4 to animate my scene. I thought this was the best medium because it allowed me to have complete control over the character design, lighting set, camera angle, and anything else. I then used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit everything together. A conflict I kept having was the screen recording of the Sims 4 was formatted as .avi, and Adobe doesn’t support .avi, however, I couldn’t go back and find a different method to record because I invested too much time into filming the Sims scenes (it may not look like it, but it took a lot of precise movements to get the camera where I wanted.) After I tried some different methods that didn’t work, I was able to use clipchamp to export the .avi into .mp4. This left me with a little bit of a blurry video, but it was the best option. My friend helped me out by voicing Krissy so she sent me an audio clip and I plugged it into the video. For Dr. Oblivion’s voice, I tried to generate the lip synced video but it was taking 30 minutes per download, and with editing together everything it would have added hours to a project that had already taken the better part of the day. Once everything else was finished, I uploaded the video to YouTube and the rest is history.

Attack of the Robotic Bees – Black Mirror Video Essay

I love video essays, especially for movies and tv shows. I watch them in my free time a lot and I really enjoyed watching the Tony Zhou videos. When I was making my video essay, I was trying to emulate what I had seen in the videos before. In this video, I talk about the world building in this episode as well as the movement composure and the audio in this scene. I also tried my best to incorporate that “Therefore & But” method in this video although it was a bit of a struggle. I really wanted to talk about those three things, but I had trouble figuring where the “Therefore” and the “But” went and I had issues trying not so say “and then.” When I was making the video, I recorded my script and added it plus the scene into Adobe Premiere Pro. From there, I tried to cut up the scene so that what I was talking about matched what was being shown.

Help Wanted!

The biggest challenge of this assignment was finding a scene I could use in my video. Normally, if I want to use a video from YouTube I screen record the video. However there were essentially no full scenes on YouTube, even this one wasn’t the full scene and it was blurry. I tried to google how to do it, but most answers were talking about using pirating websites. I liked this assignment and I wouldn’t mind doing it again in the future for another class or for a final project, so if anyone has any tips on how to download high quality scenes in full please leave a comment. I need help!

Lunch with Evelyn

This assignment is the All the Relaxation assignment. Truth be told I had an idea for what I wanted to create with my character. I just needed to find an assignment that fit what I wanted to create!

For this much needed relaxing break from work you join Evelyn for lunch. So you sit in a park with a beautiful view and start to take our your lunch to enjoy. Its been a busy day at the office and you both just need some quiet time. Evelyn brings out her lunch and Stephen Kings You Like it Darker book as you both enjoy the sounds of the park and sit in peace. Even if it is only for an hour.

I once again used Audacity and Freesound for this assignment. I knew that I wanted to incorporate my character by doing a day in the life of the sounds around her. So I created just a simple lunch with her. I started with park sounds. I wanted to convey the steps of eating lunch at work. Taking your sandwich out of its ziploc bag, so thats exactly what I did. I found a ziploc bag opening and a soft crunch of food being eaten. I then wanted Lynn to be reading a book since that is something she enjoys doing when she needs a peace of mind so I had a sound of a bag being opened and closed for her to get her book and then flipping through pages to find where she left off. She finds her page with a final flip and starts to read. I then repeat the ziploc bag, the soft crunch, and another page flip and the rest of the park sounds.

I personally feel like these park sounds and the comfort of reading in the company of others is very relaxing. Especially the page turning!

Relax on the Beach

This is the Create a Place assignment. This is a Day on the Beach

In this place you are sitting on the beach listening to the seagulls and waves. There is a slight breeze in the air but you don’t mind. The air smells like salt. The sand is warm on your feet as you stand on the beach looking at the horizon. Eventually you take a calm breath and put on your earbuds and listen to you favorite orchestral track until you fall asleep.

I created this using Audacity and freesound.org. I started with the underlying sound of the beach and added the seagulls next. I wanted to take this assignment one level up rather than just describing a place so I added a relaxed inhale and exhale and found a beautiful orchestral sound to add the end of the story. I had a lot of fun making this and I feel relaxed after hearing it for a while. Im also a lot for comfortable with Audacity.

There’s a Huh in the What? – Guess My Favorite Song

This assignment told me to remove the lyrics from my favorite song for others to guess the song. I love these kinds of games so I wanted to provide! This isn’t my all time favorite song, but I’ve been listening to this artist a lot lately and it’s definetly my favorite from her discography. Here are some hints to guess the song and I’ll put the answer at the end of my blog. Each progressing hint gives the answer away a little more.

  1. This singer is a country artist
  2. She was on Radio Disney
  3. This singer is on tour right now and is coming to DC very soon. This song is on her setlist.
  4. The title of this blog and picture are both hints
  5. The song was featured in my “Soundtrack to Krissy’s Life“
  6. ⛳🍾

To make this song without lyrics, I uploaded the chorus of the song I wanted to Stemify. The app uses AI to seperate the vocals and the different instrumentals so once it worked its magic, I turned the vocals all the way down and from there I uploaded the song to Soundcloud.

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The song is Hole in the Bottle by Kelsea Ballerini

(the emojis from hint #6 are supposed to say “hole in one bottle”)