Category Archives: Assignments

A Collection of Moments

Create a video using some of your favorite pictures/videos that you have taken while in school this year! Add a wide variety of pictures from throughout the year. Make sure to add some music to the video before you post it! Here is a link to the assignment: https://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/favorite-moments-in-college/

First things first, I really enjoyed doing this assignment! Lately, I’ve been feeling a little upset about graduating next year and my college experience coming to an end, so this project gave me a chance to appreciate my time at UMW.

It was a bit challenging to include memories because I don’t take many photos, so my options were limited. I also didn’t want to include pictures of myself or others, so I intentionally kept it vague. Because of these limitations, I had to look back as far as my sophomore year. This video collage features a few memories from then until now. I have many more, but these fit my criteria for being included in a video.

I used Canva to create the video by adding each image to its own slide along with a short description. Then, I chose a fun, lighthearted audio track to keep it engaging. After that, I adjusted the frames, timing, and audio.

Overall, this was a really fun assignment! I do wish I had included more personal and playful memories, but I’m happy with how it turned out. Oh, and by the way, my favorite slide is at the end, so I hope you stick around and watch till then!

I Love TikTok

@liv.kern

she has been playing with this for hours

♬ original sound – Jay

As the title very proudly states, I LOVE TikTok. You probably could guess that I was devastated by the potential ban (and did not know what to do in my free time when it was banned for like, a day). But, I enjoy it in the sense that everyone can enjoy it! Any age, any fandom, there is everything for everyone on it. When I saw the video assignment to make a TikTok of your pet to any sound, I immediately wanted to do it. I have four pets, 2 cats (both boys) and 2 dogs (both girls), so I thought I would feature Jolene, the youngest of the bunch. Jolene is still a puppy, so she entertains herself with toys and treats all day. This specific toy is a puzzle/maze that you could hide treats in, and dogs could sniff through and move pieces around in order to get to the treats. When I say that she loves this thing, it is an understatement. She could spend HOURS sifting through the pieces and spinning the wheel in order to find treats. Even if there aren’t any treats, she could still just mindlessly fidget with it all day. One day I decided to take a video of her playing with it, and speeding it up a little just for comedic effect. The music adds to it as I feel this is what plays in her head, 24/7. Overall, I did not really see this as an assignment, more as a fun side quest.

Black Mirror Video Essay

Video Essay Assignment for Week 5

Unfortunately, I cannot for the life of me embed this video, however, here’s an image and a link.

ScreenPal – Black Mirror Essay

I used a clip of the Black Mirror episode “Hated in the Nation“, provided in the ds106 weekly assignment. I screen recorded a scene and cut out disturbing portions from it, instead using a PowerPoint to put images over the video. The thumbnail comes from IMDB’s review of the episode. I recorded and put it together with OpenShot and Audacity, both free programs.

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.

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:

Week Five Weekly Summary

Starting Off the Week

I did not want to do ANY work during the snow days but I persisted. Starting off, I commented on my classmate’s posts, as well as just scrolled through some of their blogs.

Daily Creates

Daily Create #1

For the first daily create of the week, we had to edit a national monument in a different environment. With growing up by the beach, I wanted to put Mount Rushmore under the sea! Sort of an underwater monument or Atlantis type deal.

Daily Create #2

For the last daily create of the week, the prompt was pretty silly. It was to give a backstory on why plates of banana’s are randomly appearing in Britain. A lot of people had a similar thought as me, that monkeys had something to do with it. I thought it would be funny to say it is a underground resistance movement by them to take over. This daily create was definitely unique, and it was fun to think outside the box for this.

Video Essay

Then, we had to make a video essay. I decided to watch the episode of Black Mirror, Hated in the Nation. I go more in depth in my blog post linked above, but overall, I really enjoyed making the video essay, and analyzing the shots themselves and how they impact the story. I used Clip Champ on Microsoft to edit it, and I found the scene on YouTube, which is a little low-quality but it was the only one I could find. I then recorded myself talking on the Voice Memos app on my phone, and inserted it into the clip.

Overall

Overall, I think I handled the work this week pretty well, as there wasn’t as much as the past couple of weeks. Making a video essay was very fun, as I love to watch them on YouTube, so being able to make my own was pretty cool!