This gif is of Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality. It’s hard to pick a single favorite movie but this one will always be in my top list. I love this movie because it humorous and because I love the message in it about this strong female character who learned about self-love and self-acceptance.
I also can relate to this GIF when I’m hungry “I’m starved and I’m armed. Don’t mess with me” hahaha
Princess Mira of the enchanted forest had the power to speak to the great creatures that roamed her land, including the mighty Thunder Beast. When an evil sorcerer cast a spell to drain the kingdom’s magic, Mira called upon the Thunder Beast, whose roar shattered the dark enchantment. With the magic restored, Mira and her mythical friends protected the kingdom, ensuring that peace and enchantment would forever reign.
Wouldn’t Want to Hear This on the Radio! is an excellently done PSA that hints at a larger story. How would other course characters react to the announcement? Would some of them be forces behind the issue? Or – maybe it is something other than what it seems at first.
That points to a specific event. In Propaganda, we see a theme represented. It says something about society, and something about the individual character. We’ve seen other glimpses of Malone before, and every little piece helps us understand her better. Something to consider: If people were to tag their character posts with the character’s name, they could pull the posts together under blogURL/tag/charactername.
Femme Fatale Propaganda likewise addresses a societal issue, this time in conflict with the character. That conflict, put together with the Missing Person Alert teases a story. Have the FF Haters done something to Sapphria, or has she gone into hiding, to deal with them behind the scenes?
In response to some of the above, we can see Finn Reacting to Public Service Announcements. Here we have a character positioning himself among the propaganda and announcements. We should consider how this exercise form the seeds of stories. Characters could connect directly, or their stories could tangentially touch, generating a narrative mosaic.
We had many ideas for tech-noir shows already – see how that tagging works? – but these assignments are generating more, creating a fertile environment for creative connections. Where does the class want to go with this?
Jim suggested the idea of doing a news report on an event from a tech-noir film, which sounded fun to me so I ran with it. I watched Death Race 2000 recently so I decided to work with that, even if it strays pretty far from noir. As Wikipedia describes it “Set in a dystopian American society in the year 2000, the film centers on the murderous Transcontinental Road Race, in which participants score points by striking and killing pedestrians.” There is an incident in the film where a motley group of rebels make an attack on the race, and the government and media place the blame on the French Air Force. That seemed newsworthy. For material to work with, I though I would use the crash scene and the Presidential speech about it. I fed some of the details to ChatGPT and told it to make a news article out of it. Serviceable, but not enough. I had the bright idea to ask Needs More Boom to rewrite the scene in its inimitable style, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the output. I had ChatGPT rewrite that as a news article, then fed the articles and the speech to Notebook LM and had it generate one of its goofy podcasts. I added a Dr. Oblivion introduction to that, along with some open source background music for news.
That gave me a bunch of stuff to work with. I made a new subdomain on my site and installed another WordPress, and looked for free news themes, settling on FreeNews. I added all my stuff as posts, then looked through the documentation for clues on how to set it up. Fortunately it wasn’t very difficult. I just had to put categories on the posts and customize the theme options for the main banner article and the sidebar categories.
It’s still pretty lame, since real news sites have much more content, and I didn’t even try to tweak the design other than the header image. But it at least looks news-ish. I should probably apologize for the creepy clown, if I may use that adjective. Needs More Boom came up with that little addition, and the Notebook LM people were quite taken with it, so I chose to appease the evil tech spirits.
This is funny for anyone who has been paying attention to my blog for at least the past week and a half, which might just be me. Last week, I got my numbers mixed up and thought it was week 6, so I titled my weekly summary that. Since then, I have corrected my error and now we have posts 1-6, instead of 1-4, 6, and 6. I had an overwhelming amount of work this week, so I had to ask to get an extension, which is why this is a few days late. But I was really glad to be able to put in the full amount of effort instead of something that sucked that was in on time. Here’s what I did this week (I think you can sing it to the last 3 Twelve Days of Christmas):
The real challenge I ran into was uploading the TikTok because it contained copyrighted content, but I managed to figure it out.
Two Daily Creates:
I love my bike very much, I think about bringing it to campus but I would probably want to keep it in my room which would get annoying. Maybe I can figure out how to do a poll and see what readers think.
Let’s go back to a time that was a little simpler, week one. It was much less clear as to what any courses for this semester would be about and taking seventeen credits didn’t seem like such a bad idea at the time. I have had some highs and lows in this course, getting to experiment with video editing and creating my own website has been both fun and challenging.
I gave myself a bunch of small goals, so let’s see how I’m doing.
→It is true that I have become (slightly) more digitally adept. Perhaps not significantly, but I have a way better handle on the WordPress aspect of this. I was even taught how to embed links into a screenshot so that the daily creates wouldn’t look so ugly!
As ridiculously small as this seems, this was a big win for me. I value sleekness in a website and so I was very frustrated by the way it looked. Now, it’s beautiful!
→ “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.” Honestly, I think I am well on my way there right now. I like to show my girlfriend the website sometimes, so I think that counts! Obviously this is still a work in progress, so I don’t feel that it’s anything to write home about just yet. But, I think it will be.
If I was going to show anyone any post, it would probably be this one:
→”Maybe a goal would be to have the little widgets leading to a real link/page that isn’t just my main page?” Honestly, not quite there yet. I think I’d need another stop by the DKC before I could say I can do this. But, that’s okay! We are not even halfway through the semester, not everything has to be ready.
→”I can feel a reflection on this post coming at the end of the semester” Try just a few weeks from now!
→”Maybe to be able to somehow incorporate my cat, Daisy into this blog?” I checked and I’ve only mentioned her 2-3 times, the goals post being one of them. To my credit: I based my character off of her, so there is a few more posts than just that related to her. Let’s fix that with this post!
Here she is enjoying the outdoor air a little while ago. I don’t take her outside anymore because the avian flu is becoming more problematic for house cats and I am overprotective.
Something else I’m proud of, one of my favorite daily creates:
My next (short-term-ish) goal is to have some new features on the website the next time goals are being re-evaluated!
We had seventeen posts picked for the best of week six, and they’re all winners. I especially like the variety of tools and approaches to video that people used. I hope everyone looks them over, because you can get a lot of ideas about what you can accomplish from reading about what other people did.
I thought the logic behind the certain design choices was well conceived and the final product was very indicative of what it was set out to represent.
I loved this post because it felt raw, real, and vulnerable. Recording yourself and posting it for everyone to see can be scary for some but I feel like he knocked it out the park. I haven’t been brave enough yet to record myself and post it but I aspire to be brave like him one day and do this! Also – I loved hearing what he’d say to himself at 16. A lot of those things I would say to myself too.
I liked reading about their goals and how they accomplished them. Also, from reading this post it made me think about other goals that I’d maybe like to accomplish in this class that I didn’t think about originally. By reading this post I can definitely see that they’ve done a great job so far this semester
Since Jim came up with the news assignment idea, I thought I’d try to mimic a newscast. I Googled “free news background animation” and “free news background music” to find suitable content. Then I recorded myself with a green screen (blue also works in iMovie. Some other programs give more options).
For the graphics, I needed PNG files with transparent backgrounds. I used Dafont for the type and took screenshots, then opened them in Photopea and made a white copy of the text in a new layer and hid the background layer to get the transparency, then exported as PNG. I probably shroud have made a chyron for the bottom of the screen. I’m not sure if iMovie will let me do that many layers, but I could take my exported video and bring it back into iMovie for the overlay.
It’s not really surprising that so many video essays made the Best Of list, given the week’s assignment load. Even so, they are great efforts, demonstrating the fun that can be had through the close reading of media. You can see all the essays here. It’s worth the time.
Phenomenal job on this video essay! I aspire to do this well with an assignment like this one day! The analysis was beautifully captured in the video.
Good job Martina!
I thought that this video essay was a good example of what the other information videos and readings had gone over. She did a good job of explaining different angles and shots
I think the original poem turned out really good. I have a hard time with that kind of stuff so I thought it was pretty cool to see someone be able to come up with that
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!
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!
