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!
I completed my Daily Creates and had fun communicating with my peers. I also had fun looking at others work and commenting on their pages!!! Great job on the video essays everyone!
The video essay was a little challenging for me because I hadn’t done one of these before, but I quickly got the hang of it and found a solution. I did my essay on the Black Mirror episode “Hated in the Nation”. I’ve watched other episodes of Black Mirror but hadn’t seen this one yet, so I enjoyed watching this episode and getting to pick apart a scene to analyze.
The material and readings this week were very relevant and helped me created the analysis for my video essay. I loved learning about how to capture an emotion! That was my favorite part of this week’s readings. I also enjoyed relating our Technoir theme to my essay and kind of putting all the puzzle pieces together.
Lastly, I enjoyed voting and checking out everyone’s work for this week! I found some new techniques or processes that I may try for the week 6 assignments from looking at my classmate’s work. Thank you all for including what you did and how you did it.
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!
I have definitely enjoyed getting to learn about and experiment with audio. I had never done anything like this before so it was very cool to learn about. I particularly liked Audacity, it seemed like a great place for people trying things out and I look forward to continuing to try it. Here’s what the week looked like!
I started with the daily creates for this week.
Post #1
Post #2
Post #3
Honestly, I hate how the posts look embedded into the page, I may need to go to the DKC again just to figure this out. It is so ugly it makes me unreasonably frustrated and I’ve tried everything I can figure out. This is just a learning curve, but still frustrating.
I tuned into the DS106 radio on Tuesday which I enjoyed a lot!
I listened to Moon Graffiti by the Truth Podcast. A line that was super eerie to me was, “How many people do you think they’ll bury by the time they’re through?”
I’ve really been enjoying this class. I’ve definitely struggled to connect my posts to the TechNoir theme of the class and my character, but I think as time goes on I will get better at it.
This week was interesting, and I think the experience of delving into audio and the program Audacity has been helpful to my skillset overall. For the 2 audio assignments, I chose to create my own sound effect and whistle a song that was stuck in my head for over 3 weeks and now it’s back (that’s not an exaggeration sadly). I did a “gum bleeding” story using strictly sound effects (thanks Jim Groom for the great descriptive comment), and also made my radio bumper which I hope wasn’t too terrible. Using audacity took a bit of getting used to but I had slightly used it during my senior year of high school for my AP Spanish classes, although we were only recording conversations and responses rather than making media. Other than spending much of my screen time using audacity, brainstorming ideas for a radio show was a nice refresher to use my brain in a different way then messing around with 15 different audios, and so was taking the time to listen to Moon Graffiti and the infamous ds106 radio. I really liked the idea of Moon Graffiti and how it conveyed a completely alternative timeline to the Moon Landing using different sounds, layering of voices, and that big loud crash.
Overall, the weeks are definitely getting smoother as my skillset with media improves, and doing the Daily Creates (the 3 this week) are also a great way to look at things you wouldn’t normally notice or perceive a certain way.
I had a lot of fun with the audio assignments this week. That was one of my main goals of taking this course; That I will get more comfortable with recording myself/my voice. I accomplished that!
The first assignment I started with was creating a radio bumper for the DS106 radio station. I’ve never made anything like this, so the material was new to me. It took me a little while to get set up, but it wasn’t too bad.
My favorite part about this assignment is that my bumper got played on the DS106 radio station. How cool is that?!
Listening to Moon Graffiti & Other Weekly Materials:
I’d never really thought about how important and powerful sound is in storytelling. While listening to “Moon Graffiti”, I could tell you what the setting was, the tone/atmosphere, how the characters feel, and overall, what’s going on just by listening to this audio story.
Abumrad’s videos were very insightful and broke down sound, storytelling, and creation down to its core fundamentals. Very intuitive videos!
I talk more about the reading materials in my post.
I created a Sound Effect Story where people were having fun on a roller coaster ride. The sounds I put together were of people screaming, laughing, talking, clapping, and having fun with rollercoaster sound effects.
This was my first time creating something like this and playing around with all of the other tools on Audacity. Click the sound effect story link above to learn more about how I created the sound story.
I chose to complete the Sick beat – Assignment this week. The only real requirement was to “just get groovy dood.” I enjoyed making this beat, so I hope you guys like it too. Check out my post for more info.
The last creation I made this week was completing the P!NK’s Emotions Assignment. The inspiration behind this assignment is from my character Sapphria Mae. I wanted to use this opportunity to build her personality a little bit more through music.
I used Audacity to create this P!nk Mashup. I used different songs from P!nk that I felt were inspiring and relatable to my archetype character. I felt these songs would be relatable on an emotional level.
Last but not least! I came up with some radio show ideas for our future assignments. I think this group assignment will be a great experience. I can’t wait to meet and talk with my group members and use some of our ideas together to create our radio talk show! My ideas are posted in the link above.
Overall:
I lowkey thought I would have a really hard time this week’s assignments because I wasn’t familiar with the material. Although, it all came to me really quickly and I learned a lot about audio storytelling, the power of sound effects and music, and so much more. I also got the opportunity to build up my character a little more which I love!!
Oh, and I didn’t forget to vote on my FAVE post this week! Great job everyone! Thank you all for another awesome week!
This week was a bit rough but interesting. I have literally no experience editing sound so everything was a long learning process. My audio creations I think came out alright though and I enjoyed seeing the finished version of each one including my radio bumper. So in general I think I am now more comfortable doing basic level audio editing with sound effects, but I wouldn’t trust myself completing anything too long without making mistakes.
Learned how to make an Ai generated voice on Canva
Daily Creates
This week required making 3 Daily creates. All of them allowed me to be creative and make something using Canva, traditional art, and just my creativity for the last one which was a poem. All of them can be found on the post called Inside My Creative Mind.
Assignment Bank
For audio week I made 2 creations and also a sound effect story that required editing with sound effects. For Celeste City I created how I imagined what the place would sound like. For Dysfunctional Home I tried to replicate what a kid hears in a home that has a lot of family drama. For The Eye of the Hurricane I tried to tell the story of my character Runa on a mission.
Audio Reflection
This week I learned about how sound effects can have a big impact on storytelling. I talk more about this in my post called the Power of Sound where I discuss how Moon Graffiti and also the ds106radio’s story of Limetown was able to successfully use sound effects. In it I also showed the Radio Bumper I created.
Radio Show Ideas
I had two fun ideas for a radio show for my character Runa Starr. They can be found on my post called Mission: Probably Impossible
Week four was a good one! I love podcasts and music so I knew this week was going to be enjoyable. I was nervous about the workload because having to listen to assignments can take a while but I was pleasantly surprised that the listening assignments were very interesting. Limetown was fun because it combined elements of cyberpunk and mystery, Moon Graffiti, although listening to two people cope with death as they face it freaked me out, was well made and a very good story. Even other students were doing great jobs this week, I was so impressed with everyone’s sound effects stories, radio bumpers, and assignment banks!
Daily Creates
I always try and get an early start on the Daily Creates, if I do one for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, it’s off my plate for the rest of the week. Additionally, it allows me to skip a task if I don’t like it or find it too hard, I wouldn’t have this option if I procrastinated everything to Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. This week my daily creates included word art, draw a t-rex, and Paul Bond’s brazy look.
The first daily create was word art. Using a website that converted text into a drawing utensil, we were supposed to make a body part and use the different aspects to draw it. Here you can see I drew a foot. I chose a foot because I didn’t trust my ability to draw a hand freestyle. This daily create was frustrating because there was no undo button, so if you really messed up you had to start over. This Daily Create was another reminder that art doesn’t need to be perfect, just done. Apparently I’m more of a perfectionist than I thought I was because I’m learning this lesson every week now.
This assignment was fun and scary. I am not an artist who can paint or draw, so any task with drawing makes me want to close my computer and run away. I decided to give this Daily Create a try because there was a tutorial linked, so I could follow that. I did follow the tutorial and my T-rex still looks funky, but it was a fun exercise and I was able to reference one of my favorite Disney movies.
The last Daily Create was finding a picture that tried to capture the Paul Bond “brazy” look. After some research, I concluded that the term “brazy” means tough and crazy. At first, I tried to take a picture of myself capturing the look, but I fell embarrassingly short so I moved on to a new idea. I love this picture of my cat because she looks like she’s sizing me up, I felt like this perfectly captured the brazy look; she’s tough but in a scary, chill way, like you don’t know her next move.
Assignment Bank
This week the 3 assignments I worked on were creating a playlist for my character, a radio bumper, a sound effect story, and a “Guess the Song.” I had a lot of fun with these assignments, especially because I felt that each process was very different.
To start, I made a playlist for my character: Krissy Ryan. I did this because I thought it would help me understand her a little more as well as other students who want to get to know Krissy’s likes and interests more. The genres that I included in this playlist include country, independent woman, but most importantly yearning for more. I think the most important song on this list is Belle from Beauty and the Beast because Krissy also feels like she was destined for more but doesn’t think she’ll ever get it. This playlist not only shows Krissy’s music interests but mine as well. I love all these songs so if you’re looking for some new music, this is a great place to start.
For the sound effect story assignment, the hardest part for me was coming up with an idea and executing it. Because my only options were what was available in the library, I kept running into walls. At first I wanted to do someone late for work, but I couldn’t find a frantic enough sound effect. It took me a few tries before I landed on Charlie Brown in class, and as much as I would love to take credit for choosing the idea, the idea chose me. I wanted to make what a classroom sounds like but the only sound effects for a teacher talking was Charlie Brown voices. I decided the best thing I could do was act like it was normal because for the Peanuts, it is. I like how the story came out, it sounds average and then the teacher talks and nobody blinks an eye.
This was a fun assignment and I’m curious to see if anyone else did this. I love playing “guess the song” I do it in my free time a lot, so when this assignment offered for me to make one I quickly took the chance. Spoiler alert: The song is “There’s a Hole in the Bottle” by Kelsea Ballerini. I picked this song because I’ve been listening to her a lot lately because I’m going to see on her tour and this song is easily one of my favorites. This assignment was surprisingly easy with the help of AI. The app that I used to remove the vocals is powered by AI and it separates the vocals and the instrumentals. Sometimes AI scares me but it can be pretty useful too, it was a good tool in this assignment.
I liked listening to everyone else’s radio bumpers. They were all so creative and clever, I wanted mine to be just as good. I had trouble coming up with an idea but I was inspired by Defunctland’s Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery. In the video he goes into depth about network identification and bumpers. As an homage to this video, I wanted to incorporate Disney Channel into my bumper. The connection from Disney Channel to DS106 Radio was pretty easy to make and from there I crafted my radio bumper. I used Adobe Audition for all of my audio editing assignments, and I find that it is very easy to use. This assignment was no exception, besides one transition challenge, editing a short audio assignment like this was simple.
Comments
I thought everyone’s takes on the assignments this week were really strong and I loved getting to listen to and read as many as I could. I thought Sam’s Club’s reflection on Moon Graffiti was well done and I could tell he put a lot of thought into it. I said “This reflection was so thorough and well-written! I also found the Moon Graffiti podcast creepy, especially considering that it could very well have been the outcome of the moon landing. I wonder what it was like for the person who wrote those speeches—how it felt to write one celebratory speech and another mourning the deaths of two individuals. Again, great job on this reflection!” The Moon Graffiti podcast left me with a weird feeling because it thoroughly creeped me out but the story was told so well that I couldn’t help but like it. I appreciated what Sam said and I liked being able to bounce my ideas off of his. I also commented on Your Weekly Adrenaline Rush’s radio bumper, I said “Ah! This is so lovely! You did a great job, and I commend you for being the first to do this assignment. I love the dial-in; it’s the classic feel of a radio bumper!” I was really impressed with their courage to be the first person to make a radio bumper. I put mine off as long as possible because I was nervous. Next, I commented on Live it Up With Liv’s Character Playlist, I wrote “This is so cool, and I bet it was fun to make! I see that there’s a trend of older artists and some country music. From what you’ve said about your character, I think she would absolutely listen to Amy Winehouse. I definitely want to try this with my character!” Liv inspired me to make a playlist for my character because looking at her assignment made me start thinking “oh that’s interesting, I wonder what I would do if I did this assignment?” So, I stopped wondering and got to work which is how I ended up with my assignment. Then, I commented on Rebecca’s Radiant Realm’s sound effect story. I said, “Wow! I think you killed this assignment. When I tried doing this, my audio clips were played one after the other, but I love how every sound in yours is overlapping. It creates the busy feel of the office because everything is happening simultaneously or one after the other. Great job!” I was vey impressed with the quality of their story. I felt what Jad Abumrad was saying about the dreamlike state of storytelling; I was in that office, I was hearing those snores. Lastly, I commented on The Digital Canvas and their sound effect story, I wrote “I love this take on the assignment! It’s something that everyone can relate to, and I like how it includes all the elements of an average day: the good, the bad, the great, and the ugly. Putting in different tones makes me feel like I am in this person’s shoes.” I appreciated how they put in all aspects of the day. Showing the realistic side of life made the story seem so real! All in all, everyone did great jobs and I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone better when we do group work
Conclusion
This was a good week! Not only am I proud of the work I did, but I can’t stop gushing over everyone else’s. The assignments were creative and I could tell everyone had an original take and put a lot of effort into their pieces. I’m looking forward to next week!
This week was rough. I had a total of 21 assignments across my classes this week and between those, my time in synchronous classes, doctors appointments, and my job, it just was not possible for me to get everything done. This week I was able to do my two audio assignments, listen to the radio show, and watch the videos linked in the weekly page.
I had a lot of fun with my two audio assignments though; both of which allowed me to analyze music in my life. First, I did the Reverse It assignment to rearrange the Dear Evan Hansen soundtrack to create a new ending that I think it needed. Then I compared Britney Spears’s version of “…Baby One More Time” with a darkwave cover of it by Dead on a Sunday to talk about how instrumentation and vocal tone can change the whole emotion and meaning of a song even when it uses the same lyrics. I also tuned into Wednesday night’s edition of DS106 radio for the last two episodes of “Limetown” and wrote my reflection on how impactful little auditory clues can be throughout a story
I’m having a great time with the content of the class, but the sheer volume of the workload is not meshing well with the rest of my classes and schedule. I will literally be working on work for all of my classes for 5+ hours a day including weekends and I’ve got a 15 credit course load. My other classes have honors, writing intensive, and speaking intensive designations and are almost all 300+ level classes and none of them are nearly as heavy on the workload, but the combination of each of them with this class has been incredibly challenging.
Again, starting the week was rough. I had been sick over the weekend, so I am still fully recovering. While recovering, I thought I would get some work done, so I started off with the Daily Create of the day, as well as commenting on others posts. I also cleaned up my site to make it more personal and easy to look at. Lastly, I started to brainstorm some radio show ideas, and came up with a couple ideas but did not pick one yet. Some of the ideas were maybe a late night talk show or a murder mystery. I will decide later in the week which one is better.
Listening
In terms of listening, we had to listen to an audio story called Moon Graffiti. As I said in my blog post, audio storytelling can be difficult because if you need to convey a message or plot, it has to be done in a specific way where the listener can understand it. Moon Graffiti did this perfectly in recreating possible dialogue that Neil and Buzz could have had when they landed on the moon, such as their first reactions. I also listened to the ds106 radio show. I went more in depth in my blog post, ds106 Radio Show, but in summary, it was very interesting. The stuff that they were playing while I joined was a fictional podcast called “Limetown”. The plot was intriguing, and I was able to catch on since it was in the middle of episode 5. It got me hooked and now I think I want to start listening to the full series. I can’t want to tune into the ds106 radio show every once in a while, as I want to see what other podcasts, songs, or other media it can get me into.
Radio Bumper
For the radio bumper, I wanted to do something lowkey. As I said in my blog post, I wanted to replicate the lofi music lives you could find on Youtube that can play in the background while you are studying and doing work. It was weird to incorporate my own voice (as I do not like hearing my own voice), but it was still fun to make it!
Assignments
The sound effect story was one of my favorite assignments from this week! It allowed me to be a bit creative, and to think about what I want the story to be. For my sound effect story, I decided to do a day at the beach gone wrong. It was fun to find to the different sound effects and to think about the usual sounds that you would hear at the beach. Overall, I enjoyed this assignment!
For the second assignment, I did the soundtrack to Veronica’s life. I saw a lot of people were doing this assignment to share their personal music tastes and favorite artists, so I thought I would do it a bit differently. I would make a playlist of her 10 favorite songs in order to characterize and visualize her a bit more. To see the playlist and see my reasonings behind it, read Soundtrack to Veronica’s Life.
Lastly, I had Dr. Oblivion make a podcast intro for my podcast, Liv Loves Movies. As mentioned in my blog post, Dr. Oblivion Podcast Intro, my podcast was created for my introduction to digital studies class, and I have been planning on continuing it (if I find the time). His intro explained it perfectly, with how I dive into the pieces of media and cinema in order to analyze it’s significance and messaging. Dr. Oblivion’s wit also added the edge that it needed to stand out.
Daily Creates
Daily Create #1
The first daily create of the week was to do visual poetry. We had to pick a body part and draw it with words. So, I listed the five fingers, pinky, ring, middle, pointer, and thumb. I thought it was fun, and almost satisfying.
Daily Create #2
For the second daily create, it was to draw a t-rex, which was easy enough. I don’t consider myself the best artist, but I am proud of this drawing as I was able to do it free-hand.
Daily Create #3
For the last daily create of the week, it was to make a poem out of anti-spam words. Spam is universally annoying, so it was fun to get a bit creative to create a rhyming, quick poem. Here it is below:
Block, delete, report as fake Phishing links? Big mistake! No click, no trick, no shady site… Spam be gone, out of my sight!
Overall
This week was a bit tough for me in terms of motivation, but the assignments themselves were pretty fun in terms of using my creativity and thinking outside the box in order to complete them. As usual, I think my favorite assignment from this week would have to be the sound effect story, as I found it amusing to look through the different sound effects and find the ones that would create a narrative.
