Category Archives: Assignments

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!

Zer0 Gets Hit by a Car

Sound Effects Story Assignment for Week 4

This is not canon to the story; I just thought it would be a funny idea. There were a lot of sounds used in this: background traffic, Zer0 walking, robot noises, car honk, car crash, and of course, robot glitching noises. I put all of these files in audacity and trimmed them, placed them carefully, and changed how loud and quiet they are so that a story could be told through the sound.

“This Feels like a Movie”

I had a grand ole time getting this playlist together. I think it not only fits with who I envision my course character, Bethany, to be, but it also brings out some interesting parts of her character.

  1. Marlene on the Wall: This song reminds of her of her deceased partner, and the bond that she’ll have with him no matter what actually happened.
  2. You Send Me: Their song- it just feels so warm.
  3. Christine: She sometimes feels like Christine, disintegrating, someone with multiple faces.
  4. A Means to an End: Besides just liking Joy Devision, Bethany likes the particular brand of melancholy that this song is.
  5. I Wouldn’t Want to Be Like You: In her line of work, it stands to be a good reminder that she doesn’t want to be like those around her. This song is an after-work palate cleanser.
  6. Good News: One of the more modern songs on her playlist, it serves to knock her out of her funks and remind her that there is a world outside of everything in her head.
  7. Over and Over: She likes to turn up this song while she’s cleaning. She just enjoys singing along and pretending she’s on stage.
  8. Don’t Renegade on Our Love: The title is perhaps too indicative- she loves this song but hates that it makes her feel like she betrayed everyone around her.
  9. Fallingwater: This song is either a “cry alone at night” song or a “scream in the car on the way to work” song.
  10. Sabotage: Her guilty pleasure is Beastie Boys!

This Just in, Robots are Sentient

Breaking News Assignment for Week 4

The news jingle at the beginning of the recording was made by chimerical on FreeSound.org. For the voice, I used a text-to-speech feature of ChatGPT. I put these together in Audacity and uploaded it to Soundcloud. Quite frankly, I didn’t know Soundcloud was still being used before this class required me to create an account. The news broadcast relates to my story, as it is broadcasting the moment the public found out that ai had gained consciousness.

I’m Someone, and You’re Listening to Something…

Now presenting, my ds106 radio bumper! I used an AI text-to-speech generator to get the “you’re listening to ds106 radio” audio clip, and then used the tools within audacity to cut that up and make it more interesting. I had some difficulties finding an online program that would let me download the audio clip for free. I’m sure there were ways around this (free trials, screen recording), but since I didn’t need that much precision from the TTS tool, I opted to just keep looking for one that would let me download it with no hassle. Following that, I sourced a variety of weird, eerie music and sounds from Freesound and continued to chop these up and distort them. I was a big fan of the “distort” tool and changing the pitch.

Overall, I’m happy with how it turned out! I used to listen to the radio all the time as a kid (and still do now), so I tried to emulate what I heard there. However, I think ds106 is a little bit more retro/techno/weird than Elliot in the Morning, which led to the decisions to make the bumper a little unsettling.