Project Summary: ECHO Protocol is a futuristic, interactive sci-fi story created using canva where you play as Kai, a memory technician who uncovers a rogue signal in a world controlled by the ECHO AI. The story explores themes of control, freedom, and identity through branching choices and glitchy cyberpunk visuals. It combines storytelling and digital media.
Weekly Reflection: This week, I focused fully on finalizing the project testing visuals, refining choices, and bringing the story together. The process was creative and experimental, and I’m proud of how it turned out. Echo Protocol reflects what I’ve learned all semester about blending narrative with multimedia.
But here’s what I’ll say here: I’ve been watching all the YouTube videos on cat animating that I can find (admittedly, not as many as a girl could hope for). I’m in the beginning stages of animating, it’s not perfect but I’ve been working on my drawing skills this semester. And I’m about halfway through with a script/plans for the pictures. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of substantive things to say about it that I didn’t already discuss yesterday. So that’s the week 13 update!
I’ve fully planned out how I want my interactive multimedia narrative to play out and I’m starting to put all the pieces together!
I’m using Prezi to create a click-through choose your own adventure-like software as with the planet topic function on Prezi, you can click them to take you exactly the way you want to go; it felt like a simple yet effective way to accomplish what I’m trying to do.
As mentioned previously, I want to do an interactive narrative that is constructed by the player as they make choices throughout to see how the way they conduct their “life” will be impacted by the ever-growing power of AI in this dystopian world. I was heavily influenced by surrealist/horror game lore like Cube Escape, Samsara Room, and even the FNAF lore to a degree. There are multiple endings depending on what choices you choose. There will be mix of text, images, audio, and design throughout to really immerse yourself in the experience and to keep you on your toes as this is meant to illicit feelings of unease and confusion, much like how it feels to know how the powers of AI can expand and make us unsure of the future ahead.
A huge part of this class is talking about what you did and how you did it and why you did it and how it worked out. One thing I am more challenged by than talented at is communication. Part of the holistic liberal arts education that Mary Washington appeals to is why I came, and also, no employer is going to hire someone who says “I’m a hard worker and I am qualified for the job, but I cannot communicate for the life of me.” So as I work to explain my thought process more, bear with me. For my final project, I’m telling my character’s story. I want the story to shine through because D41SY is based on my own pet, who is very beloved to me. I also want the story to into three categories: I want it to matter, I want it to make sense, and I want it to make the viewer feel something. My bonus category would be that I want a really good rainy scene because I love the rain. I think one problem many story tellers run into is that they feel a personal connection to their character, they care about that character, and they don’t realize that other people don’t have that. I want there to be moments that show the importance of her character in the plot, and to feel happiness when she feels happiness, so that the audience will feel sadness when she does too. I want to design her to be aesthetically pleasing, because people are naturally attracted to things that look nice. I also think people will enjoy a good swish-y tail, maybe that becomes more rigid when she becomes a cyborg and then swish-y again when she is returned to her owner? She also needs a goal; I think saving the other animals and reuniting them. I want the story to have a happy ending. One issue: I don’t want to base a character on me, I’m not a writer, so I’m not going to say I know everything about the process. I do know that self-inserts are often difficult because everyone wants to be liked, so it’s harder to show nuance. I think I’m going to make D41SY’s owner a guy to create a stronger sense of separation in my head between myself, the owner, my cat, and D41SY. Any self inserts will be much more akin to Stan Lee from Marvel, preferably.
What have I done so far? I’m so glad you asked. First, I considered my strengths: When I was 12 I was really intro drawing Then I considered my weaknesses: When I was 12 I was really into drawing
Jokes aside, I know that I would be most proud of myself creating an animation, so that’s what I’ve set out to do. I have an iPad and an Apple Pencil, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to utilize that. I’ve downloaded an app called FlipStudio and started sketching. Of course, while not terrible, I perhaps overestimated my drawing skills
Although disappointing, knowing my weaknesses is an important part of the process. The eyes look like human eyes. No good way around it, the drawings are a little stiff and while there is artwork that is very simple that I find to be fantastic, my own is simple in all the wrong places. I looked into YouTube, because it has everything, and looked for how to animate cats and found this:
It’s not the art style I’m going for, but I was really impressed at how much good information this short video conveyed.
Back to the drawing board (get it, because I’m focusing on drawing again? Okay.)
One of the things I really clicked with was viewing the animal as multiple parts of a whole, rather than one part. Which I believe is conveyed well in the highlighted colors and parts of the cat that are highlighted.
Most importantly, it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be a reflection of my effort in this course.
I hope anyone reading enjoyed my post, and I’ll be back tomorrow for a weekly summary!
This is the trailer for our final project. I’m in a group again with Emily H., Sam H., and Brigid W.. Since I edited together the clips for the radio show, Emily edited the clips this time, and put them together for the movie trailer using OpenShot video editor. I sent in clips of my cat, Daisy, for my character D41SY, some with her looking normal, some with her “glitching” (I used a tiktok filter, lol)… Emily used what we all turned in to create this! We had a Zoom meeting Thursday night to discuss our ideas for the final project, and agreed on our different roles in producing this, and we scheduled a Zoom meeting for Monday to write a script. I’m excited to see how it will turn out!
The Multicultural Fair of 2023 had many events on campus. The food was delicious and the people with different crafts and unique menus were a delight to talk to. I was in a class group of three others, but they could not attend the fair. One girl was getting married and went home to plan, hire the cake maker, etc. The other girl had just gotten a job that started the day of the fair. I barely knew how to use the video camera! Some footage was blurry and I deleted it. Amazingly, this video turned out this good.
This week I finished up my final project! I decided to do a long format interview show like 60 Minutes with ads in between different interviews. This project showcases what I have learned this semester, which is way more than I thought I would ever be able to digitally comprehend. I built off of my group radio show the last two projects and I’m happy with how it turned out.
My process was pretty simple. First, I wrote scripts for the entirety of the show and the advertisements in between the segments. Then I recorded the parts I needed to and had some AI voiceover for others since I couldn’t convince my friends to help me out.
I was hoping to create a video with the audio as well, but I ran into many difficulties putting it together and decided to spend more time making sure the audio was as good as I could make it with what I have learned this semester.
Overall, I think this represents what I have learned pretty well since I was able to incorporate AI voice recordings, Freesounds, my own recordings, Audacity, and my newly acquired audio editing skills into this final project. I feel as though I took an audio focused approach to most of the assignments in the course, but if I did it again I would probably work more on video editing so I could have included that in the final project. Unfortunately, my skills aren’t advanced enough to incorporate that aspect, but I am really proud of the work I put in to use all of my skills in this final project.
For this final project, I wanted to expand on the story of Rikaro. I chose to continue the story after the hijacking of the TV. That was my video project. For this, I had an insider send an unknown detective a VHS that contained evidence on who this mysterious hacker was and their plan. It has audio of a famous Professor giving a speech to citizens that are against Aggressive Technologies and the unknown hacker’s. His speech is violently interrupted by a robot from Aggressive Technologies, but it is revealed to be Rikaro. Rikaro explains that he will kill this Professor and frame Aggressive Technologies to gain more supporters. He also adds that he will use bots to spread this narrative. I wanted to show some of the dangers of AI without it being too serious. There are researches that show the possibility of AI assisting hackers in infiltrating power plants to alter the temperatures, which can lead to explosions. I just altered this to robots.
I hope everyone enjoys the video. It took a little more work than I thought it would. Thanks for taking the time!
I put a lot of thought, planning, and effort in making this video, so I hope you all enjoyed it and learned something from it as well!
My thought process:
I wanted to incorporate and highlights parts of my character, myself, and the AI theme of this course. My character and I both love coffee, therefore, the setting of this video is in a cafe. I also snuck in my favorite iced latte recommendation in there. Additionally, I have background music that’s playing nonstop in the back, giving it more of a coffee shop vibe. Lastly, the topic of discussion is AI, in particularly some pros and cons and examples of each as well to make it a more informative video. I wanted to make this interactive as well so I created a GoogleForm where at the end viewers can visit the form and list of their pros and cons based off of their experiences with AI.
I incorporated audio, text, videos, sound, AI, my character, editing, and an interactive aspect throughout my project. I cut the text to fit the clip where the audio was spoken. However, I wanted to to generate the text as the audio played, but I could not get that to align properly and work. Besides that, there isn’t anything that I wish I could change or do better, I am pretty happy with how it all came out together!
To wrap up this week, I opted out of the daily creates just to give myself more time to focus on this final project. Now I’m off to view all of my classmates projects!
Me, Sarah, Greta, Leila, and Sol put together this project. We wanted to showcase a bunch of news media revolving around an AI uprising.
We split our work up individually, working on our own things to all paste together into the final project. I’m not sure about the others, but I used websites such as Fliki to create TikTok-like videos filled with information of the AI uprising, and then I used InVideo to create the News-Like videos. I also made some of the headlines with the help of ChatGPT (because how ironic is it to have an AI make headlines about an AI uprising), and I made screenshots of said headlines by taking my own screenshots of real news sources and editing my headline overtop. Overall, this was the main bulk of it that took the most time. I don’t think I had many issues with the applications I used, besides annoying watermarks that are out of my control because I am not about to spend money on this, all went well!
I think I was able to combine everything I’ve learned throughout the semester into this, which was really fun. I did some audio editing, used some video applications and then I edited the first half together using OpenShot. I even did just some image creating with the headlines, which was a lot of fun. I used a lot of applications I discovered over the semester, even some new ones like InVideo, and I just overall had a really good time. It was nice being able to work on all of this and actually know what I was doing, which makes me think that I really have learned!
I’m not sure what else to say, just that I’m very grateful to have worked on this with my group, who put out excellent work, and I’m very happy with the final product.
