There’s a lot to say about this class. It was stressful, it was fun, and it was cool. Even if you just needed an elective credit, like I did, it’s really worth it. I learned so much I otherwise never would have, and the creativity on part of Professor Bond, his collaborators, and the other […]

Breaking Bond was a tough assignment, as it should have been, but it was a lot of fun. Megan Carey, A.K.A. Agent Annabella Smith, and I made an awesome final. We basically organized our final as a story with different journal updates throughout the semester. The premise we chose was that Professor Bond was up to […]

If Professor Paul Bond has taught us anything, it’s that nothing is as it seems…   Journal of Agent Annabella Smith with Roderick Rush—Breaking Bond         Jan 20, 2017     Agent Roderick Rush, my partner in espionage, and myself have signed up for an online digital storytelling course at UMW taught […]

Agent Annabella Smith [Megan Carey] and I will be working together to compile a dossier and build a case against Professor Bond and catch him conspiring with the Russians. As of yet, for the final mission, we plan on compiling a journal of sorts of our encounters and escapades as we try to track down […]

Week 11 proved pretty difficult for me. Due to some extenuating circumstances, I was unable to really do the whole week’s worth of assignments, but what I did end up doing I was pretty happy with, even if it means not getting the full grade. Creating the Hugh Jackman highlight reel was a lot of […]

For the Favorite Actor/Actress Highlight Reel, I decided to make a supercut, more or less, of Hugh Jackman’s acting career up to this point (from the 90s up to 2017). From his first television appearance in Law of the Land, an Australian show, to 2017’s Logan, I wanted to show his diversity as an actor […]

For the Chipmunk Style assignment, I decided to make it fit with our theme and to use a scene from Casino Royale. I wanted a scene that was pretty serious, but not violent. This was one of the most tense scenes in the film, where Bond wins a high-stakes poker game by the skin of […]

This was, again, a pretty difficult week. I do have some experience in editing videos and in basic cinema studies, so a lot of the assignments didn’t have a huge learning curve for me (maybe except for the kinetic typography video). A lot of the work was just time-consuming. As a tip, if you plan […]

Here is my spy interview for ds106. This one took me a while in selecting the questions, coming up with answers, and splitting the clips and moving them around, but other than that, it wasn’t bad. I decided to go with the “disguise” that everyone seems to wear in the Marvel universe.

  I created this video essay analyzing the cinematography of a fight scene from the film Quantum of Solace, because what’s a spy movie without a good fight? I made it using iMovie and Audacity (and just as a tip: the freeze-frame option in iMovie is a life and time saver). It wasn’t too hard to make […]

For one of the assignments, I decided to create a kinetic typography video from Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York, where Bill “the Butcher” Cutting, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, delivers a chilling speech. I love kinetic typography videos, so I thought I’d jump in. The first thing I learned when starting this assignment is that kinetic […]

For the Inanimate Motion stop motion assignment, I took photographs of some fruit that I was eating and a made a .gif to make it look like the fruit was disappearing. Photoshop has a great feature where you can create a frame animation and export it as a .gif. It was a little difficult to try […]

For the Classical Music Video Mashup, I used Blink 182’s video for “What’s My Age Again?” with Offenbach’s “Infernal Gallop” (often misnamed The Can Can). Even while reading the assignment description, I had the idea of putting these two together. I used iMovie to line up the music with the video, even though I had […]

Week 9 was another grueling but fun week. In some ways the Web assignment group is my favorite category. The work wasn’t as hard as some past work, and it didn’t require as much of a challenge to my creative thinking as I have had before in this class, but it was mostly the time-consuming […]

    The year was 1900. Max Planck had just discovered black body radiation, opening the door to the wild and mysterious world of quantum physics. @ds106dc In December of 1900, Max Planck discovered black body radiation, heralding the birth of quantum physics #tdc1900 pic.twitter.com/7R1Fj5XZ6M — Daniel Hawkins (@Hawkins10000) March 22, 2017 Little did Planck […]

For the X-Ray Goggles assignment, I decided to make a new version of the NSA website (the original can be found here). I probably went a little risky with using a government website, and a very important one, but a little satire never hurt anyone. Before starting the assignment, I had to brainstorm what site to edit, […]

This week I listened to and got a chance to take some notes on the Agents on Air ds106 radio show. From the beginning, I could tell the group put a lot of work into the show. There were good sound effects throughout, some adding to the mysteriousness of the show, some funny. Some of […]

For the Pinterest Dream Vacation assignment, I decided to find a few places that I’ve always wanted to visit and treat the trip as if money was no object. My board includes locations in Italy, Croatia, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Russia. A lot of people talk about wanting to visit countries in western […]

The Google Draw Something assignment was definitely one of my favorites so far. I love messing around with neural networks, especially Google’s experiments (like their dream image generator). It’s actually a really cool feeling to have fun and mess around while actually contributing to science and technology. It didn’t get all of them right, but it […]

For one of the Web assignments this week, I created a Buzzfeed personality quiz about some of the weirdest rulers from Early Modern Europe. This assignment definitely warranted its star rating. I’ve taken a ton of Buzzfeed personality quizzes, and despite how much crap they get, this gave me a new appreciation for how hard […]

So we made a radio show! Finally. I have a HUGE amount of respect for podcasters now (not that I didn’t already), especially ones like Limetown and the Truth who put a lot of work into their production quality. As part of the group, it was my job to also find sound effects, write most […]

Week 2 was grueling, to say the very least. Our group got together as soon as we possibly good through Google Hangouts and then together in person. Daniel Z came up with the idea for the show (mass surveillance), and we just used that as a springboard. I thought it would be interesting to follow […]

  This week was, again, pretty challenging. Creating a week’s worth of assignments on top of collaborating with a group and coming up with ideas for a show was definitely pretty hard. Another challenge on top of all that was trying to make the assignments related to our show/our spy characters. I think I did […]

For the spy design assignment, I decided to go with my tentative idea for the title of our radio show. The group is still talking over the show, so the title is still up in the air, but I thought it would be a decent name. The fonts that I chose from (one of my […]

This one was one of the most challenging but phone audio assignments I’ve done so far. It definitely earns 4.5 stars. Coming up with a script was easily 50% of the work, especially because I had to make it basically a radio show-type of conversation relating to my spy character, Roderick Rush. The other half […]

So this may or may not be a little bit of a stretch, but when doing this assignment I definitely wanted it to fit with a spy-themed show. Spy novels in general, but especially the older noir ones, really remind me of rainy and stormy weather. It’s foreboding, and I always imagine figures in trench […]

This was a really cool Daily Create. I’ve seen similar stuff on Vsauce and a few other places, but I haven’t heard of the Museum of Endangered Sounds. Check it out if you haven’t.   @ds106dc https://t.co/yPJ2kiAl5v#tdc1881 — Daniel Hawkins (@Hawkins10000) March 4, 2017

So, since we didn’t do the last bumper as part of the official assignment bank, I created another radio bumper. We haven’t yet come up a title for our show, so I kept it just themed to DS106 and spying. I did something a little different than last time. The music especially is pretty cool. […]

Pretty happy with this one. I actually based my ship design roughly on an actual prospective design made by NASA and other scientists for a warp-drive-powered interstellar ship. Background image is a NASA free-use image of a nebula, and it took a few minutes to make the ship itself (mostly because of frustrations with Photoshop). […]

Took me a few minutes to find the perfect font and to come up with an idea. If I had to pick one, I would say elephants are my favorite animal, so they were the obvious choice. I also like the Animals, so that was cool. @ds106dc Elephants are obviously the best animals, so… #tdc1880 pic.twitter.com/Ag12dEEVI1 […]