Category Archives: ds106

Reporting from the scene!

M. Marshall 2.28

For this project I chose the first video, Police Station Shootout from The Terminator (1984). This scene was definitely pretty intense, but a good representation of film noir. I was very lucky this week because I had an important presentation for another class and decided to do a free trial for a month of Canva. This website is great for creating presentations, flyers, papers, anything you might need for free; however, it is really great when you’re paying for it (or on the free trial). Because of that, I was able to create this beautiful newspaper!

I am struggling to upload files onto WordPress, so working on that is definitely a future goal, for now, enjoy my screenshot.

“…like choosing your favorite snack”

What should ds106 do about those who don't vote for the posts of the week? Should there be consequences for failing to fulfill their democratic duties?

Hmm, that’s an interesting question. In ds106, voting for post of the week is like choosing your favorite snack. It helps showcase great work and encourages participation. While consequences might seem harsh, maybe gentle reminders could help encourage more
voting. After all, everyone’s opinions are important for a fair judgment.

It’s the sigh at the beginning that gets me. I feel the same way. Everyone should be looking over the work of the class, and everyone will definitely see things that they recognize as awesome. But apparently some people can’t be bothered. Who wants to be involved? It’s easier to sleepwalk into dystopia.

That, my friends, is not the 4life attitude. We are all in ds106 together. Get out there and vote!

Super Fun Creates

This week was probably one of my favorite week of creates so far! Not only did I really enjoy creating them I really loved seeing everybody else’s interpretations of the creates.

I completed Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesdays creates read and check them out here:

For Monday’s create I created a GIf based off one of my favorite childhood movies “Alice in Wonderland (2010)”

Monday

For Tuesday’s create I showed the perspective the grass outside sees during sunset. Very beautiful view if you ask me.

Tuesday

Wednesday’s create was my favorite surprisingly. I don’t normally love creating stories or poems, but this one came fairly easy to me. Click here to read the 2 part post about the magical/mystical world of “Neverwinter”

Wednesday (part 1)

Wednesday (part 2)

I hope you enjoy the creates this week as much as I did!

Sincerely, Kristen

Lots of Creativity

I really enjoyed all of the assignments this week. I love editing posters, videos, newsletters, etc which is what this week mainly consisted of.

To start off I completed e daily creates this week Monday – Wednesday. I loved all the prompts especially the short story. I feel like i’m getting much better at the daily creates when it comes to creativity.

This week I created a GIF based off my favorite movie, took a photo of the sunset from the grasses perspective, and wrote a short story about the mystical land of “Neverwinter”.

For Wednesday’s create the only problem I ran into was the word count error. I wasn’t aware that there was a limit to the amount of words you can use, but it makes sense. This caused me to have to make 2 parts.

Click here to check out the creates for week 7!

Daily Creates

The two poster assignments this week were super fun to create. I created one sports related poster and one newsletter based off the movie “The Terminator”.

I created both assignments on Canva since i’m familiar with the site. For the sports poster I based it off my course character’s favorite activity after work, which is watching football with her dad.

In that poster I explain why I used the colors, fonts, specific teams, and pictures to convey a certain emotion. Check it out here:

Sports Poster

For ‘The Terminator” poster I created it was a bit harder since i’m not as familiar with the film. I had to do some background work on the film to fill in the missing holes that could make my poster more exciting.

In this newsletter I explain why I used the color schemes I did as well as the photos I chose to convey a certain emotion. Check it out here:

Newsletter

Overall this was on of my favorite weeks so far in terms of editing. I also loved seeing everyone elses daily creates and posters! Some honorable mentions are Rebecca’s Radiant Realm’s newsletter and @Coni’s Wednesday daily create short story.

Hope you guys enjoyed week 7, see you in a couple of weeks!

Sincerely, Kristen

Reporting From The Scene

I decided to analyze and create a newsletter from this scene from the 1984 film “The Terminator”

I have never fully watched “The Terminator” fully through, so one thing I had to do after watching the scene was fill in any missing pieces that would help me create the newsletter.

This consisted of looking up why the Terminator was looking for Sarah, where the film is based, who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist.

Here is the finished project

I created this newsletter using Canva. I used a simple newsletter template and adjusted the font, photos, and colors. I bolded and added the color red to give the sense of urgency and terror which is what I would personally feel if I had an encounter with the Terminator.

I added eye catching yet simple photos which is what I believe a missing or wanted poster normally looks like.

This was a very fun creative assignment. I’m absolutely loving editing in Canva especially.

Sincerely, Kristen

Battle of The Birds

I’m a huge football fan (my personal favorite team is the Baltimore Ravens) and I plan to got into sports marketing after graduating. Also I have mentioned that my course character Krysta Ghosting is also a huge football fan and watches it to unwind after a long day at her restaurant.

What that being said I decided to create a NFL game flyer/poster

Here is the finished result:

First I chose to do the Ravens vs Eagles because thats a huge eye catching rivalry. This game has always been a highly viewed and anticipated game in past years.

Since this is a Baltimore Ravens home game I decided to add more of the ravens colors in the flier. I added a very minimal amount of eagles colors, but just enough for audiences to be able to identify the team.

The purple, black and white is not only the ravens franchise colors, but the colors are also bold and eye catching.

I used two different fonts “Alegreya Sans sc” font and “Mokoto” font. The “Alegreya” font is what I used towards the top of the poster. It has a sports like vibe to it which is why i picked it.

I added the “Mokoto” font towards the bottom of the poster. I feel this font gives more of a video game type of vibe and I thought it would be cool to mesh the two fonts together.

This has been one of my favorite posters i’ve created so far. I really like the color scenes and images I chose. I created this poster on Canva as well.

Hope you enjoy!

Sincerely, Kristen

Daily Create Shenanigans ;)

Favorite Movie Gif Daily Create:

#tdc4791 #ds106 Gif of my favorite movie

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

Opposite View Pic Daily Create:

#tdc4792 #ds106 “Opposite view” Pic

This is what my phone sees when I’m in a group chat with my besties, hehehe

Once Upon a Time … Daily Create:

#tdc4793 #ds106 One upon a time …

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.

Fun topics this week!!!

Tech Noir Connections

Tech Noir Connections logo

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?

Today in death race news…

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.

Weekly Summary #6: Six Again

M. Marshall 2.23

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):

Three Video Assignments:

Character Movie Trailer

TikTok of my pet

Get Ready With Me!

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.

and One Set of Goals Revisited:

Revisiting Goals

I really think I should be commended for keeping with the rhyming scheme of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

I had wanted to try option A, but I didn’t really know what my character would talk about to Dr. Oblivion, so I decided against it. That’s my week!