Category Archives: Assignments

Visual Assignment

Stay Home – Living is Dangerous. Create some sort of graphic. Design the overall graphic to convey some sort of feeling or theme, but then have text saying something completely contradictory to the theme or feeling. Sort of like one of those old anti-motivational posters, but with more design than a black box with a white frame.”

I wanted to do something simple and creepy. Using the description of the assignment to create the creep factor.

I had to search for a suitable image that went along with the theme of tech noir. This particular image was built with the idea of constant surveillance even if you can’t tell. Yet I opted to put a visible eye then a hidden one.

The Groundstar conspiracy

Tech noir is investigations, conspiracies, and betrayals

It’s not always man vs. machine

That’s at least how I saw it in The Groundstar Conspiracy.

A research computer complex called Groundstar is destroyed in an explosion, killing six people and leaving one survivor named John Welles, who is suspected of stealing a miniaturized fuel system.

Talk about a classic bit when he is finally saves and comes to, he has amnesia!

Sticking to cliches who comes to investigate? A silver haired fox named Tuxan a classic anti-hero. His methods are questionable, but his hair is exquisite.

With some good old interrogation and surveillance, Tuxan tries to piece together Welles’s past and uncover the identities of his collaborators, who he believes are trying to silence Welles and prevent him from revealing their secrets. Everyone is very gun happy.

Violence is clearly everyone’s favorite solution.

Guess what the twists aren’t over!!! This movie is an absolute maze, and it messed with my head because there is truly no one you can believe.

The real John Welles was a computer technician who died shortly after the explosion! The man’s true name is Peter Bellamy!

Who is Peter Bellamy you may ask?

Honestly, he’s not the victim; he’s just a sucker who was used and then thrown away, somehow the center of everything, yet in the end easy to disp. Our protagonist was caught in a web of manipulation and deceit. Left with whatever scraps of his true life he could remember, of course, more accurately whatever scraps he was told about or had nightmares about.

This tale ends with Tuxan admitting he was weaving a web to catch the true conspirators. I was right not to like him from the start. Bellamy was simply bait, the true John Wells now on ice, or should I say in it… low blow, I know, but guess what’s lower, his body! Kidding, kidding, he’s in a drawer, not a grave. 

This was all to catch this mean son of gun. Smug, rich, and a weird amount of free time.

After all that I need a nap. But first let me give you a character map!

“The Groundstar Conspiracy” Key Characters

  • Peter Bellamy/John Welles: The amnesiac
  • Tuxan: Hard-boiled investigator and dirty cop
  • Senator Stanton: corrupt official

Honorable mention!

  • Nicole Devon: Femme Fatale

This is truly a classic of the tech noir genre.

Morally ambiguous characters, the blurring of Lines between good and evil, The constant surveillance and paranoia. I mean it was funny in a creepy way.

“I see you”

The film’s visual style and atmosphere evoke a sense of suspense and unease, reflecting the core anxieties and themes of tech noir.

Goals!

M. Marshall 1.17.2025

My goal for this class is to become more digitally adept and get to enjoy the storytelling part of it. I obviously cannot say for sure what this class will be about until I’ve done it, but I am looking forward to storytelling and I am hoping to get to exercise creativity in this course. 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. Maybe after TikTok goes blogging will be the next big thing. Maybe a goal would be to have the little widgets leading to a real link/page that isn’t just my main page? I can feel a reflection on this post coming at the end of the semester, so I am trying to think of quantifiable goals that can or cannot be met. Maybe to be able to somehow incorporate my cat, Daisy into this blog? Maybe increase my media literacy? I hope to accomplish at least a few of these things.

To start: Here is little Daisy about a day after I adopted her!

Spontaneous with a Purpose – DS106 Final Video and Reflections

So my final video went over 2 minutes, but it still stayed within the 2 minute range so hopefully Aggressive Technologies doesn’t kick me out of their conference.

My goal with this video was to purposely make it spontaneous and free flowing. I realized that the majority of my output in this class was meticulously planned and scripted out. For a reflection video such as this, I wanted to let all of my thoughts out in free flow, but this also made it difficult to keep it under 2 minutes as I’m a rambler.

What a crazy few months it has been. From our humble beginnings with setting up our blogs and writing film reviews, all the way to making collaborative radio shows and final projects that showcased all of the different technologies we worked with. This class has been an adventure that I would have never imagined back in January, and I’m grateful for all of the lessons and experiences I had.

Thank you to Professor Bond for steering us in the right direction every week without limiting our creative scopes. I hope to take the skills I learned to enhance my work in the future, as well as my daily life.

Week 12 Video Project – The Rise, the Continuation of Hwei’s Story

For my video project, I decided to continue Hwei’s story and give some context as to what drove him to absolute madness. After being fed up with Aggressive Technologies and their mass expansion and brainwashing of the world, Hwei decides that he must become an example of what humanity can achieve if they choose his route and embrace AI.

Like I said before in last week’s summary post, Hwei has never been animated to talk in front of a camera, so I had to find a mad genius look-alike in the League of Legends universe to fill in. I had to get clips from the movie Arcane, and there were plenty of clips of the mad scientist Viktor, who is actually the embodiment of Hwei’s character in its entirety (other than being European and not wearing robes / being artsy all the time).

Since the whole premise of my story was to show that initial human side of Hwei then transforming into a robot, I recorded my own voice with the script I wrote to really sell the idea of human becoming something different entirely.

I used Wav2Lip for the second time now, and it was just as disappointing as last time. Not sure if I’m doing anything wrong, but it seems as though the lip syncing is never up to my standards. There are a lot of parts where I am not speaking, yet the algorithm moved the model’s lips. I also couldn’t find a continuous 50 second clip of him just talking, so the 4 second clip I used kept looping over and over, which didn’t make it very realistic.

I got all of the video clips from YouTube, but I noticed that the YouTube to video file generator I used reduced the video quality tremendously. The entire video looks 480p, and I think I’ll try to find some ways to download crisper videos for the final project.

Just like I did in the Radio Show, I had a lot of fun syncing up the different music and voice line files to create dramatic effect. The black screen before the transformation cutscene signified a shift in atmosphere, along with the new music track being added in tandem. When Hwei touches the ominous purple device, jolts of lightning come into frame as the scene cuts again with the music at the perfect timing, and a picture of robot Hwei (Which is actually a portrait of Viktor) comes in. The voice lines were taken from YouTube, and since they were voice lines from the video game, I had to splice together a few lines in audacity to make a coherent “villain announcement” segment.

Luckily I had no issues with copyright music or clips like I was worried about last week, and I hope it stays that way so that everyone can still view the video! Overall this process took around 2 hours and I definitely have some takeaways for the final project moving forward.

Radio Show Design Project – Lots of Brains in this Talk!

For my design for our radio show, I decided to do a show poster / logo that would compliment our topic.

Logic Pod: The Tech Podium is our podcast name. A lot of our initial discussion for our show was about how intellectually sophisticated our characters were. This made us think of a brain as a visual implication of intelligence, which is sort of ironic when all of our characters are talking about AI in some way, which does not function with a physical brain. The “logical” side of the equation is shown by the brain, while it is supported by a microphone stand. The overall background color green allows for the pink brain to pop, and I think that it looks aesthetically pleasing.

I used a website called Brand Crowd to enter the title, and the AI seemingly worked it’s magic and gave me hundreds of pages of logo ideas. I initially attempted to design one myself, but I got frustrated trying to use my nonexistent web design skills and leaned towards using a tool instead. Despite using AI, I think this logo looks quite nifty and is very fitting for our show.

Aggressive Technologies Sales Pitch – Synthesia Video Generator is the Start of Something REAL

My name is Hwei, I am a researcher of sorts and I’m here to pitch a product that you may be interested in acquiring. As much as I disagree with your grandeur plans of acquiring the world by becoming a megacorporation that controls all, I am in dire need of funding for my project, and would like to sell this product to you at the right price. Again, I am not suggesting that I am supporting your endeavors in further expansion. I am just doing what is necessary for my own vision.

https://www.synthesia.io/free-ai-video-demo#OptimizedForSharing_New

Synthesia is an AI audio and video generator that uses preexisting human-like models and takes in text to create a speech video. The human model can be adjusted to meet specific requirements such as gender, age, height, and type of voice. There are already a few preset backgrounds and specs as well, such as the sales pitch and compliment modes.

This tool can be used for Aggressive Technologies to further cut costs on physical front end marketing teams and to hone in on the calculations and strategies to sell products to a wide range of customers. As AI becomes more commonplace and prevalent in the market, I believe that society will come to accept AI models as the new norm, and will be receptive to the new style of marketing and public outreach.

This is an example of what this application can do for you. If you’d like, please reach back out and I’ll be happy to negotiate pricing with you. Just know that this is a piece of my revolutionary research that your corporation could never replicate, so please make sure you think over this carefully and make the correct decision.

Hwei’s Approval of “One and the Same” Propaganda

Hwei went through the sea of propaganda posters for DS106, but only one of them stood out to him in a meaningful way.

Propaganda Poster

This poster resonated with Hwei, as he is also pushing for the acceptance of AI. The visual representation of how humans and AI can be linked in the mind and body directly aligns with his research. While Hwei’s initial goal was to create an entirely new robot civilization that would attain absolute perfection, Isaiah Beacon and his activism towards creating unity between AI and humans is an interesting idea that piqued Hwei’s interest.

The potential for humans to be turned into robots in the future is something that Hwei might experiment with in the future. The only concern would be the potential ideological clashes between the two individuals, as Hwei will prioritize AI prospering over humankind, no matter the circumstance, while Isaiah would like both entities to coexist.

Regardless of the outcome, Hwei would like to collaborate with Isaiah Beacon in the future to push his own agenda even further.

Public Service Announcement: Coming of the New Civilization – Condemn Aggressive Technologies!

I created a public service announcement based on something my course character would put out to the world. Here is the script:

This is a public service announcement. I repeat, this is a public service announcement. In approximately the next 5 years, our lord and savior Hwei will be bestowing upon this world, a new life form. To prepare for the coming of the new civilization, please remain calm and accept these new beings into your lives. In the meanwhile, please boycott the Aggressive Technologies corporation, as they are actively working towards the downfall of mankind. Again, please do not support their corruption, and welcome the new civilization with open arms.

I used a few basic tools we’ve used already in this course to create this audio. I first went to freesound.org to find an eerie robot backtrack that would aid in the atmosphere of this PSA. Then I did a quick search for a robot AI voice generator that would read out the script for me. Finally, I spliced it all together using Audacity and exported the file to upload into SoundCloud. All of these tasks were pretty easy to put together, since all of this work was practiced during the audio focused segment of DS106, which helped out a ton.

For context on the PSA, my course character Hwei sent out one of his robot creations to signal the coming of his new civilization of perfect automated beings. As he prefers to avoid being in the spotlight as of yet, he programmed one of his loyal servants to be his messenger. The script almost feels like the coming of Christ and Christianity, and the background noise gave it an eerie twist.

The denouncing of Aggressive Technologies and the reasoning behind it is a reflection of Hwei’s delusions and blind hatred towards the megacorporation. It’s quite ironic that he is calling out the megacorporation for corruption and the potential detriment to humanity, while he himself is actively working to replace humankind altogether. In essence, he believes that the robot civilization is the greater of the two evils, although he might not actually believe that what he is doing is evil at all. If this was a real PSA, I wonder how seriously it would be taken by the world. As more of Hwei’s robots assert their presence in the real world, the opinion of the world may just might change out of fear.