This week was the last week of classes, so it was safe to assume that my week was very busy. Whether it was for studying for final exams, writing 15 page papers, or preparing for professional business presentations; this week was one of my busiest and stressful weeks of this semester. Through all of this, I was able to complete my final project and here is how I did it.
Since I had already done almost half of all the assignments that I wanted to complete last week in part 1 of the story of Buck Smith searching for Crazy Joe Shooter. This week was dedicated to the actual confrontation and ending to the whole story.
For the confrontation, I wanted something as action-packed as I could think of as being the perfect assignment to convey actual confrontation. So I decided to complete the assignment of creating compilation video that had added music to it. This was the best assignment I could do for the confrontation because I decided to make a compilation of various fights and gunfights to show what action was going on in the story.Then I wanted to end the compilation with a huge explosion to make it seem even more action-packed.
Find the videos to use in the compilation was the easiest part of the assignment because I just looked up all my favorite brutal fight scenes that amazed me when I first saw them. I figured those fights would gather the most attention. So I looked up the fight scenes from Season 1 of “Daredevil” (fighting security team) and Cinemax’s “Banshee” (fighting Train Man Inc. CEO) to compile together in iMovie. The next clip that I wanted to use was a western gunfight for the actual confrontation of Crazy Joe Shooter; so I looked up the ending gunfight scene from the western movie that I had watched earlier this semester of “Unforgiven” and made it compatible with iMovie. Then the last thing I looked for was a scene with the biggest explosion; for that I had nothing in mind and was searching Youtube for huge movie explosions. After searching for a couple of minutes I found the biggest explosion to be in the 007 movie “Spectre”.
In iMovie, I trimmed and cut portions of each scene to compile them into one seamless video. The last thing I had to do was find the right music to convey the feeling of action. I tried placing one song (Trapt’s “Headstrong”) into the video, but it had to many lulls in the song that didn’t coincide with the non-stop action going on in the scenes. So I looked in my iTunes library until I found a song that fit with compilation scenes; I found it in a song that I had heard from a football tv series that they used to hype up their players. I then placed it into the compilation video, and it matched everything that I wanted to convey in the video of non-stop action.
I uploaded the video to Youtube, but there was a playback error; so I also uploaded it Vimeo to give viewers another option for watching the video.
The next assignment that I completed for the final project was the writing assignment of rewriting a scene from another character’s point of view. So I decided that I should write through Buck’s sidekick/friend of Jimbo. In this assignment, I wanted his perspective to be the total opposite of what was described of the confrontation being action-packed. I wanted Jimbo to say that the incident was mostly peaceful and then an accident caused Crazy Joe’s death because I wanted to have people choose which story they wanted to believe. Someone could believe the tales of the Unforgiven Gun or they can believe Jimbo’s tale of what happened; it depends what kind of person they are. They can be an optimistic person that believes the Unexpected Gun or a pessimistic person that believes Jimbo.
For the last assignment for the final project, I wanted to complete an assignment that would be like a farewell for the story. So I decided to revisit an assignment I had done earlier this semester of creating an intro to a movie and remixed it (added 3 more stars) to be the opposite of what the assignment says. Meaning instead of an intro, I could create an ending for my story.
Similar to last time I did this assignment, I wanted a great landscape to be the background visuals of the video. So I found a great landscape video on Youtube that was an hour long and cut all the landscapes I wanted out of it using iMovie to make the video. However, I did do something different than last time by adding my own recorded audio of me (edited in Audacity of adding more bass to voice) reading a memorable quote by Mahatma Gandhi about good versus evil. I wanted to read a memorable quote to end this story because I’ve always enjoyed how the tv show “Criminal Minds” always says a quote before and after the episode. I feel that it wraps everything up with extreme calmness, which is what I wanted to convey in this video.
As for posting the final project, all I had to do was combine/embed all my posts from the past 2 weeks into one seamless story and write details of exactly what happened of Buck Smith going to Crazy Joe’s residence, finding a letter from Train Man Inc., calling his friend “Jimbo” for assistance, confrontation of Train Man Inc. and Crazy Joe, Jimbo’s perspective of events, and then a calm farewell ending to the story. This was the easiest part of the week.
Then in the final final assignment of giving advice to future ds106 students, I just wrote down what I had learned from the course of needing to be organized (not waiting last minute) and having fun with all the assignments. Plus, Digital Storytelling can be a beneficial and easy experience as long as they try their best by giving effort/creativity.
To conclude, I am very happy with my ending final project and had a great year in Digital Storytelling learning how use all the different online media formats. I will recommend this class to anyone that wants a fun class that can be beneficial to them in many different ways for the future.
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