As I embarked on my journey into ds106 and the creative world, I was contemplating what I would do for each of these assignments and if I would be able to do them. At the start of the semester, I was weary, shy, and did not know much about creativity. I was so hyperfocused on making sure I did the work correctly that I was not letting my creativity flourish. Starting the semester by watching a Bob Ross video and reflecting on his ideology on life seemed to help me broaden my horizons. I started my projects by trying to pick the easiest skill level and keeping in my comfort zone of what I already knew how to do. One of my favorite parts and one of “the things” that made me expand my creativity was working on the daily creates on Twitter @ds106dc. Reaching the photography week was probably one of my highlights in the whole class. I was able to be comfortable and yet uncomfortable at the same time. I spent more time behind the camera and focusing on how to tell a story through images that I see photos differently know. This is also one of the weeks that I feel will stick with me for a long time. I will be using photographs all the time as a teacher, especially in history. Now I know what to look for and how to examine photos to get a story and understanding; I think this will be something that I share with future students. One of the most challenging aspects of the course for me was editing software. I really had no clue how to edit photos and how to adjust things, other than my mediocre use of Canva so I took some advice from the class. Analyzing videos was also a huge challenge for me as we moved through the different aspects of storytelling. My mind wanted to go to how I see the characters and see the story, not the actual aspects of the video work. My video essay is probably one of my worst assignments. I wish I had time to go back to it and focus more on the actual filming. Then… enter the radio show. This was my favorite assignment of the course. Reason 1: I was able to let my thoughts be heard but not show my face. I feel like I really flourished during this assignment, I got to sit back and relax and just talk. I also really enjoyed listening to ds106 radio where my story played and my classmate’s stories. All of this being said, my work in this course allowed me to grow as a creator and learn skills that will be useful to me in my career. I was able to make “happy accidents” and learn more about myself.
Author: admin
Creating My Final Project – Weekly Summary 13
This week, we launched into getting all the materials ready for our final product and creating the narrative. My partner and I made our supplemental materials and then combined them in a blog post. I was able to reflect on what a multimedia project is and pull work that was all focused on the same topic. It was challenging to decide what materials to include and how to present the project. I chose to place the project in a blog post and give a little detail about each. This week was not too challenging for me because I have been using my assignments for the majority of the semester to gear up for this project. I hope everyone enjoys the project and takes the message seriously!
Final Project
For our project, Lindsay and I decided to create a multimedia narrative about the ocean and ocean conservation. This project is very important to both of us and we feel like it is a topic that deserves more attention. We decided to take the multimedia approach so that there are multiple forms of sharing this message. We decided to go off of Bob Ross’s ideas about creativity and appreciating natural beauty. Over the past few weeks, we have been creating projects that align with our final project. We have used various assignments throughout the course to explore this topic. We are displaying these as a culmination of our work in different digital tools. Essentially, our goal was to tell the story of the ocean by exploring different narratives from all of our previous assignments. Some of these assignments have been adapted from our original creations to fit this story. And others have been created specifically for this project. We hope that you enjoy our multimedia narrative and feel free to use any of the projects to spread the word!
First, we explain our motivation and outline our story in a short video essay.
Second, we explore a creative interpretation of song lyrics about the ocean.
Third, we project the idea of pollution.
Fourth, we ask you to vote for policies that protect the ocean.
Fifth, we have a haiku representing a need for change.
Sixth, we collage personal images of the ocean to show its beauty.
Mashing Up The Week… Weekly Summary 12
This week, we focused on mashup assignments and remixing other assignments. This was a great way to make several of the tools and topics we have explored come together. I also found that this week was a chance for my creativity to explode. It was easy for me to create some of these mashup assignments because I just went with the first thing that popped into my brain. Although, it was challenging at times to get them to work, especially when I was editing photos together. That might be something I look back into a bit more going further and try to sharpen those skills a bit. This week I was able to stay a bit more in my comfort zone with writing and editing photos, which was nice considering we were focused on video editing last week which is way out of my comfort zone. I still pushed the boundaries by photo editing, which will probably help with my final project in the coming up weeks. The daily creates from this week were actually pretty fun and I really enjoyed the coloring one, so if you did not get a chance to do it, you should go back and try!!
Two Worlds Colliding…Mashup
To be entirely honest, I am not really sure where this one came from or why this idea popped into my head. I chose to do a photo mashup as one of my assignments (4 stars). I had a completely different idea when I started and I somehow ended up here with Octanouts and clone troopers. I decided to add an Octanout character from the episode when they were in outer space to an image of clone troopers. I chose a celestial background to mash these two together. I had recently watched Octanouts with my niece and I figured everything is better when you throw Star Wars into it. I hope someone finds this as strange as I do!
Animals Doing Funny Things… With a Prequel
This is my second remix assignment of the week. I decided to do GIFs because these assignments are relatively low stakes and tend to make me laugh. This is also why I chose animals doing funny things because I thought it would be a good break from all the audio and video editing. As soon as I saw the remix calculator give me prequel, I wanted to do Star Wars theme but the mixer specifically said nothing about Jar Jar Binks. So here we are with the main GIF being the dog hitting his pillow mad at the world. I instantly thought about getting grounded and being sent to your room and being mad at yourself and the entire world. So for my prequel GIF, the dog is being sent to his room by his aunts. I used this GIF because Sabrina The Teenage Witch is like one of my favorite shows ever. Here are the GIFs below:
Non-Human Perspective Story With a Twist…
This is one of my remix assignments. I chose to do another writing assignment because I enjoy being creative with my words and coming up with new ideas. The remix calculator told me to turn my non-human story into something about a boot camp, so that is where Sergeant Sally comes from. I really enjoyed writing this story from the “evil” plants point of view. It is pretty short because I figured no one would want to read along for pages. I hope you find this entertaining and funny. If you have any ideas for what evil plant and sergeant Sally could do next let me know!
The Evil Plant Gets Payback
My whole life I have never been able to move. I just can’t get these roots up and go. They are stuck in the bottom of this little pot forever I think.
Then there are those two cats over there who take advantage of being able to move their legs. All they ever do is sleep. After mom leaves… sleep. After they eat… sleep. (Also not to mention that I can’t even go get my food. I have to wait for mom to finally remember to water me.)
Today is the day. I decided a few weeks ago that I have had it with those cats taking advantage of everything and sleeping all the time. I called in reinforcements. Today is the day… it will happen.
I heard mom getting ready to leave and knew that it was time. Sally would fly in at just the right time to get those cats into shape. They would not be expecting it. See… Sally and I have been working on this plan for weeks now and it is actually happening.
Sally officially made it in without mom squashing her. Oh did I mention it is Sergeant Sally. Yeah that is right she was a tier 1 Sergeant in the bug forces. If anyone can whip these cats into shape it is Sally.
The first thing she does is taunt them awake. And lets just say they were not very happy about that one. Sally announces that Non-Human Worlds United has sent her in to prepare the cats and they have no choice. She even flashed the President’s seal. And Boot camp begins.
Laps. Stairs. Jumping. Swatting. Batting. Repeat.
Sally spent all day making those cats exhausted. Then came the next part of the plan. To announce this is the daily workout that the President wants the cats to do. Ah what an evil plant I am. The cats preceded to do the same Sergeant Sally workout for the next 6 months. That was until they got on the computer and realized that Non-Human Worlds United was actually just a soccer league.
Now I will call this a lesson learned for those lazy cats and a pointed gained for EVIL plant.
The End.
Mashing Friends and Emojis…
This is one of those assignments that I saw and just knew I had to do. I was looking at all the remix assignment options and decided that it might be kind of fun to remix one of my friends and create them as an emoji… so here we are. This is my best friend and roommate Rosemary, who is also a former ds106er. The cowboy hat is an ongoing joke between the two of us and the fact that we are both from southern towns so this is where my inspiration came from. I decided to compare her to the smiley cowboy emoji because of this and the way that when she is in a hat she is always smiling. Here is my interpretation of a remix between a friend and an emoji. This mashup assignment was worth 4 points. Hope you enjoy!!
Final Video Show – Weekly Summary 11
This week, we moved into creating our final video shows. I really enjoyed the overall experience of bringing my ideas for a show to life. There were definitely a few challenging moments with filming and editing. Trying to get both my partner and me to stay focused and film at the same time was… well the easiest way to say it is a HOOT! I think we were able to overcome this and produce an okayish project. We had a good time editing and almost deleted everything we did, but we actually did not. The process of creating this show was a good learning experience for me and definitely furthered my knowledge of iMovie a bit more. I hope to all those that listened, you enjoyed our show and were able to learn something about ocean conservation!
Creating a Video Project…
This week, we moved into the actual production of our short videos and boy was it tasking. I initially started by scripting the video with my partner. Since I am in the digital media studio class at Mary Wash, I have a little bit of experience with scripting in the proper format and judging time. I tried doing this, but then I decided it would be too hard to actually read what we were supposed to while trying to film a video. My partner and I decided it would be good to have points we wanted to cover and then kind of wing the rest. I must say that when you are winging it, you get some really great footage of laughing, etc. We used a laptop camera to record our short video and then I put the footage into iMovie to edit. I have a bit of experience with iMovie from that class as well, so I decided this would be the best editing tool for me. I was able to cut the clip at certain places and crop out the mistakes. I then used pictures to overlay our voices, since we decided to take more of an informational video show route. One of the things that I learned is that I do enjoy video editing, but I could probably use some more practice in iMovie so that I can learn all of the features and how to best use them. Overall, I think our video is pretty educational and entertaining because of the way it is edited. We were not entirely sure which direction we should go with the video, so we chose this way. I hope you all enjoy the short video and let me know what I could do differently next time!