One of the video assignments that really caught my eye was filming as if I was speaking to my sixteen year old self. This was back in 2021-22 and the reason it caught my eye was because it immediately reminded me of how much I was going through at that time. I wanted to be able to make a video to show how much I’ve grown since then. I was also challenged in my attempt to not overshare. In my mind when completing the assignment I thought back to movies that state that if you tell your past self any details about what happens in the future then that future will not occur. I thought it would be a good challenge to uphold.
This assignment requires you to take a video of yourself or someone else and finger spell a word or a phrase in Sign Language alphabet and let others guess what you have spelled. Make sure you do a word that is bigger then 5 letters so you can learn some of the letters. Link to assignment: https://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/signing-words/
For this assignment, I signed something related to my character. It’s just two words, and it’s very connected to them. I hope you guys can guess what I signed.
This was really fun because I learned ASL in high school and haven’t practiced in a while, so I had to get back into the groove of things. But I really enjoyed it!
10 tips…so many different options to do. What do you have 10 tips on? You could inform me on tips when going to the movie theatre, tips to get through quarantine, tips to get through school, ds106….hehe. Anything you want! What are you an expert in? Link to assignment: https://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/10-tips/
Alright, for this assignment, I wanted to use an AI avatar and a synthetic voice because it’s from my character’s perspective. I’ve included some of my previous assignments related to my character for anyone who isn’t familiar with them.
Instead of my usual Canva workflow, I used HeyGen. I had never used it before, I found it online, but I highly recommend it for anyone looking for an alternative to Canva. They offer a free version as well as different premium plans, but for this assignment, I just used the basic features.
It was pretty easy to use, most of it was drag and drop. You can create your own AI avatar, select a voice for them or use one of the available options, then add a script. They also provide options to include elements like graphics, images, videos, audio, and more. For this project, I added text, a script, videos, and my avatar. After arranging everything, I added transitions and edited the background audio to sound more natural. I also adjusted the voice, though I wasn’t completely satisfied with the selection.
Avatar Selection
Script
Text
Elements
Editing Section
Overall, it’s a great application and I would definitely use it again.
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!
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.
I love video essays, especially for movies and tv shows. I watch them in my free time a lot and I really enjoyed watching the Tony Zhou videos. When I was making my video essay, I was trying to emulate what I had seen in the videos before. In this video, I talk about the world building in this episode as well as the movement composure and the audio in this scene. I also tried my best to incorporate that “Therefore & But” method in this video although it was a bit of a struggle. I really wanted to talk about those three things, but I had trouble figuring where the “Therefore” and the “But” went and I had issues trying not so say “and then.” When I was making the video, I recorded my script and added it plus the scene into Adobe Premiere Pro. From there, I tried to cut up the scene so that what I was talking about matched what was being shown.
Help Wanted!
The biggest challenge of this assignment was finding a scene I could use in my video. Normally, if I want to use a video from YouTube I screen record the video. However there were essentially no full scenes on YouTube, even this one wasn’t the full scene and it was blurry. I tried to google how to do it, but most answers were talking about using pirating websites. I liked this assignment and I wouldn’t mind doing it again in the future for another class or for a final project, so if anyone has any tips on how to download high quality scenes in full please leave a comment. I need help!
As an introduction, my dog’s name is Cavi and she is a 6 year old golden doodle with lots of energy. She gets super excited about lots of things, especially going for car rides and seeing new people. I wanted to do this assignment because I wanted to share my dog and I’d actually never made a Tiktok before this assignment. I found a video of my dog and browsed for the perfect sound. I found a sound called the “Jackass theme” which I thought was the best option after hearing it along with the video. Don’t believe me? Look for yourself!
This assignment is called Pictures are Larger than Words. I had a tough time at the start for many reasons. I had forgotten how to screen record first and foremost but I also had no idea what scene I was looking to do. I knew I wanted to do something in Tech Noir so I looked to the TechNoir/Cyberpunk Films/TV list given at the start of the class and browsed through to see if anything caught my eye as interesting. I thought about doing another Black Mirror episode but the scenes I were thinking of were already without dialogue and were just with sound to tell the story along with the visual aide. So instead I went with Tron: Legacy.
At first, because I had chosen an action scene I thought I wanted to add some action music to the background but the film already had a killer soundtrack and I dont think that I could do better or tell a good story with something different but in the same genre of music. So I went with a eerie background noise and let the scene tell itself. Using a mix of a low rumble and a sci-fi machine noise I was able to create a background noise that is not close to the noise already used AND could even tell a different story depending on how the video and/or the sound makes the audience feel. With the more eerie approach I think that the kind of suspense that the scene gives you is now different than the suspense it used to be.
Click on the image for the video
I used iMovie for Apple to create this video and uploaded it (unlisted) on my personal youtube. I first searched for a scene from Tron: Legacy on Youtube and found one that caught my eye. I watched the video with sound and started to think about the type of music or background I wanted to use to replace the audio in the video. In iMovie I used the free audio they had available and I used the sound files “Drone Dark Suspense 02” and “Strange Machine 02”. These two files mixed together give me the type of eerie vibe I was going for. I didnt want static noise so I have the “Strange Machine” to give some sort of variation in the background noise and then “Drone Dark Suspense” was used to get a low humming noise that is used in a lot of horror movies to give a suspenseful feel.
Edits are very popular these days, and I LOVE a good edit. I have seen some really amazing ones for Barbie, WandaVision, and Community. I really wanted to take a crack at it, since I’ve had some experience using Adobe Premiere Pro, which meant I wouldn’t be starting from square one. For this edit, I took one of my favorite shows The Good Place and put it with one of my favorite songs “Love is Embarrasing” by Olivia Rodrigo.
Eleanor Shellstrop has a significant arc over the course of The Good Place’s run. She starts as this loner who is very selfish, self asorbed character and ends the show surrounded by her chosen family whom she loves and would do anything for. These characteristics have been inside Eleanor all along but the people who were around her put down those traits, so she has to learn how to be okay with taking care of others and being a good person. This especially comes through when she stars to catch feelings for Chidi. At first Eleanor thinks he’s a nerd and doesn’t want anything to do with him. Eventually, however, she realizes she has feelings for Chidi even though she doesn’t want to. This song is the perfect choice to capture how Eleanor feels about Chidi because she is almost repulsed by how she feels towards Chidi, given that she has never felt like that towards a person before. She finds love to be embarrasing.
This video was relatively easy to make. First, I looked for and downloaded an Eleanor and Chidi scene pack which compiles clips of the two. Then I added the scenes into Adobe Premiere Pro and sorted through which clips I wanted to use. Once I had my clips picked out, I added Olivia Rodrigo’s Love is Embarrassing. After that I rearranged the clips, trimmed them to keep each clip short. I also tried to sync the clip transitions to the beat of the song. I feel like this makes edits more satisfying to watch. Finally, the last thing I did was export the video and uploaded it to YouTube.
This week, I interviewed my family and friends about their views on AI to get a sense of the differing views of this new future that’s upon us.
It was really interesting hearing these different views. It was also really hard to hold back my own thoughts, but I did, because I wanted this to be unbiased and not about me.
I put my plans in this post last week, and I wish people would comment on my posts more and tell me if I’m being overambitious, because I think I could’ve saved myself a lot of stress if someone just said, “hey, relax . . . you don’t have to do so much.” I used to get a lot of comments! I guess now I’m just sad that I only get around one or two a week.
Okay, no more negativity. I split my interviews up throughout the week due to time. I interviewed my brother, Bryce, on Saturday, my dad, Brian, on Sunday, my friend, Lorelei, on Tuesday, and my sister, BayLee, on Thursday. I had different people intended to interview, but had to drop them due to complications of their own time. It originally was not going to be mostly my family, but I had to work with what I had.
Interesting thing, my brother, Bryce, is getting married today! So that’s in my later plans for the day!
After recording, I ended up putting everything together Thursday night and Friday morning. I planned to edit this together on my computer, but then I couldn’t send the recordings from my phone to my computer, and it took literally 4 hours to send 3 of the videos to my Google Drive, and I just gave up and thought it’d be better to do it on my phone through iMovie. So I did.
Editing was fun! I have fun cropping out all the “ums,” and it was so nice watching the minutes go from like 36 minutes to 20. If I had to upload a 36 minute video, I really think I would explode into a million pieces. Editing was actually also easy. It’s not like I usually do this, or have experience with it, but I understood it. iMovie was relatively easy. Until it wasn’t.
Exporting. Never again. Never. First it said export failed, then it said I had no storage, and then . . . I deleted all of my storage AND IT WORKED!! I EXPORTED IT!! I have never been happier, oh my god this was a mess.
Overall . . . this was fun! And stressful! But, I’m just happy to have it done.
