Week 6 feels more like week 16 but that’s ok! I’d like to think I should be enjoying these last few weeks as an undergrad as much as possible. Overall this week was MUCH better than the previous two weeks and I couldn’t be happier! This week we had four daily creates, a Design Blitz, 12 stars of Design assignments and finally our design thoughts. We will start with the Daily Creates: 18th: Create a secret agent name by what you last ate and your middle name! Secret Agent Ann Strawberry ready for her next mission! 20th: Make a picture look old! This picture I took this summer at a summer camp, I used an app called Aviary to make it look older. 21st: C64 picture! My dad took this photo of me flying a Cessna 150. 22nd: Whiteboard app, added to it. I didn’t know what to draw so I drew the only thing I knew best, a flower. Assignments Assignment 1: 3 stars A post card from my character. This assignment was a lot of fun because I was able to include my character, Nadia. I even added to her story. Assignment 2: 3.5 stars: for this assignment we were asked to create a minimalist poster for a book or movie. Chose one of my favorite series, Harry Potter! Assignment 3: 3 stars: This assignment was also exciting because I was able to integrate our character! We had to create an outfit for our character. I chose to put my character in all black to go with the secret agent theme. Assignment 4: 2.5 stars: Got DS106? This assignment was awesome! I got to recreate a Got Milk? ad. that represented our DS106 course. Design Blitz The Design Blitz assignment was very interesting and I was able to gain some valuable information about design and photography. I chose photos that represent color, typography, form/function/message, and dominance. I chose these because these are things that I believe are most important when it comes to design. All of the principles and concepts are important but these are the ones that stuck out to me. Design Thoughts I really enjoyed this reflection post about design. I actually took a course in Psychology that talks about the brain and visual perceptions, so I found this topic of design interesting. I even related it to something we learned in psychology, Psychology of Gestalt. I also have a huge interest in possibly being a UX designer one day and this week got me looking more into it! Overall this week was much better than the past two weeks, as I said! I really enjoyed this weeks topic of design. My favorite and I believe to be my best works this week was the 4th assignment and reflection post. Can’t wait to see what is in store for next week!

Week 5! This week was filled with a ton of audio assignments, far from my favorite thing to do! But this is mostly because I have never messed with audio before. When I first saw that we were dealing with audio assignments this week I immediately panicked! Audio is my least favorite thing to do. I tried to download Audacity but unfortunately I do not have enough gig-a-bytes to download it. So I decided to stick to Garageband that was already downloaded to my laptop. This week consisted of a lot. I will start with the Daily creates Day 1: Youth Literature Day 2: Day 3: Overall these daily assignments weren’t too bad! My favorite would be the technology one mostly because I think the meme was funny. Moon Graffiti Moon Graffiti was interesting but overall a great way to get exposed to radio podcasts. The videos we watched before this was also a lot of help in pointing out the important features of the podcast. Radio Bumper I had a lot of fun creating this radio bumper mostly because I was able to feature my brother! He happened to be in the same room at the time and joined in on the bumper! (-: Tweet-A-Long This assignment was very engaging and I think that it should be used by other professors for specific assignments. It was awesome to be able to converse with other classmates about the podcast. Assignments Assignment 1 – 90 Second Story. This assignment was so fun! I wish I could have thought of a better idea but I am happy with what I came up with. I think this was also a good step in the direction of learning more about podcasting and radio shows by using different sounds to create a story. Assignment 2 – Distorted sounds. This assignment was interesting and I tried to keep the sound as simple as possible. This was the first assignment that I was able to play around with the editing setting on GarageBand. Assignment 3 – Another really fun assignment!This assignment was so fun! I wish I had more time to create something better, but overall I am happy with how it turned out. Radio Show Ideas For this final assignment of the week we were asked to come up with radio show ideas for our future assignments. I didn’t really know what would make a good radio show due to my lack of experience in radio shows, but I came up with a few ideas that might be pretty cool to do. Questions I think sounds tell a story in a really interesting way. Sounds bring a lot of emphasis to certain scenes of a story and really help with the imagination of how the story is being told. Time and place are able to be portrayed through sounds because they really help in the “painting a picture’ process of the story. The graffiti assignment was a really good example of how sounds help in portraying what was going on in the story. This Week Overall this week was another stressful one for me! I am happy to say that next week will be a little lighter. I recently started a new job and it has taken a huge chunk of my time. I really enjoy this class and want to be able to put more time into it, so I am happy that I will gain extra hours next week to dedicate to this class. I think I was a little frustrated at first with the audio assignments but after a while of playing around with Garageband, I have a good idea of how the app works. I can’t wait to start on our assignment for next week!

Another week in the books! I was pretty excited about the topic being mostly about photography. I have always enjoyed taking pictures as a hobby and I was excited to learn more what others had to say about their experiences as well. For this week I started out by doing some daily creates: DC 3 – point A to B children’s book For this daily create we were asked to draw some sort of transportation from point A to point B in a unique way. I had fun with this one and I enjoyed looking at what others came up with!   DC 2 – combine celebrity to food For the second daily create I combined a celebrity and a food that was like a run-off of their name. I came up with Ashton Ketchup. Growing up I actually always called him that just as a joke, and I finally got to use that joke for the daily create!  DC 1 – what would you do with money For the last daily create we were told we hit it off really well with Bitcoin and asked what would be the first thing we buy…I said clothes! I am always complaining that I don’t have enough clothes so I thought this would be the perfect thing to buy first! Visual Assignments: For my first visual assignment (5-star) we were asked to take our favorite movie and retell the story in 10 GIFs or less. I had a lot of fun with this assignment. I think the toughest thing was finding the perfect GIFs to complete the story. For my second visual assignment (3.5 – star) we were asked to use a picture of the 1$ bill and draw or add something to it to make it unique. I immediately thought of putting a wig on George! I had fun with this assignment and trying different wigs out on George. For the third visual assignment ( 4 – star) we were asked to put two pictures together to create a message. I thought of many different things to do but ultimately went with a picture of the foresty lands and a picture of a city, to show how we are eliminating wildlife. Photo Reflection For this blog post it was nice to reflect on how photography has changed throughout my life and how I go about photography, and how the two readings describe photography as well. I think overall the readings hit some really great points and especially about how a narrative is seen in a picture. I say all the time that a picture is worth a thousand words and they truly are! Still Shot Story My favorite movie, again, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I promise I will switch it up eventually! For this blog post we were asked to choose a still shot of a movie related to our theme and then talk about the features of the cinematography. I thought this was an interesting idea to look at the cinematography and relate it back to the readings about photography. Photoblitzed Challenge I had a lot of fun with this assignment and I will definitely be using it in the future when I’m bored! I found it pretty simple and entertaining. Other’s inspired me this week through looking at their blog post, particularly their Photoblitz. I find it interesting what others perspectives are on photography. Overall this week was definitely a challenge for me. I have a new schedule and I was really not prepared for the amount of time this week’s assignments would take. I’m happy they are done and hopefully more prepared next week!

Are we there yet?? Week three was definitely a struggle. I am not sure if the frigid weather had something to do with my lack of motivation but something surely did! This week entailed a lot of writing, reading and producing. We had 3 daily creates, 10-stars worth of writing assignments, create our new character, and reflect on a reading and video. Daily Creates To start these are my 3 Daily Creates from this week. These Daily Creates were from Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Sunday: You can’t go wrong with… This first create was something you can’t go wrong with. I felt like a million things came to mind when I saw this Tweet, and finally narrowed it down to two. I thought well, you can’t go wrong with either, so why not post both? I took both of these pictures in Florida. One on the left was of a sunrise on St. Augustine Beach and the second was a picture flying somewhere over Florida during a sunset. Tuesday: Show us your best mask This second create was to show our best mask! The responses to this was pretty funny. The snorkeling photo I took last spring while snorkeling the Florida Keys was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this tweet. I believe other classmates posted pictures of snorkeling goggles as well- great minds think alike! Wednesday: How they did it before This third daily create was also fun! I actually ended up googling “how they did it before” and actually saw a few things I have never seen before! I came up with road map because when my parents used to drive me to soccer games, I was responsible for getting them there. This is literally what I looked like!! Now that my brother is in soccer, he simply brings up his phone and Siri gives my parents the directions. Oh how things have changed! Writing Assignments When I first saw that our assignment bank assignments would be coming out of the writing assignments section I almost panicked! I like to write, but not under pressure. So I was worried that these would be rushed given the crazy week I have had. But overall they weren’t too bad, I just wish I had more time! 3.5 stars: For this first assignment, we were asked to blog about our dream vacation. This blog was kind of fun actually! I decided that I wanted to take an extended vacation and travel around the world. It did take a while to compile all of the places I wanted to go, and towards the end they weren’t as in depth but I think it turned out pretty well. 2.5 stars : For this second assignment, we were asked to to time ourselves for 10 seconds and in those 10 seconds come up with a list of things we are thankful for. I found this fairly simple and kind of eye opening! In 10 seconds I identified what I was most thankful for and that felt good. I also added a quick picture of myself. 3 stars: For this third assignment, we were asked to take a poem and create a parody of it. This was my one assignment that tied in our theme! I had fun doing this poem though it was a bit difficult to do. I think the most difficult thing was to find a poem that could be turned into a secret agent theme. 1 star: For the final assignment, we had to create a haiku from one of our favorite fairy tales! This assignment was actually quite simple and I really enjoyed it! Character Dossier When I first read this assignment piece, I was very unsure of how I would tackle creating a character. I played around with many different ideas and introductions but this one was by far my favorite. I think the greatest struggle about this assignment was the time in which I had to create it. Mostly because this is possibly going to set up future stories. I struggled with how much should I reveal? How far should I take the opening scene? Who should Nadia be? Come from? Where is she going? Etc. Etc. I eventually settled with the story I posted mostly because of sake of time. Which is probably actually best because otherwise I might sit on this character development for a while! Nadia’s code name ends up being Golden Eagle which I thought was an awesome name. I came up with it by googling native animals/birds in the French Alps. I’m not sure how I came up with the name Nadia and John Smith, but something tells me that the movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith had a huge help in the name. Which brings me to our story analysis. Story Analysis Mr. and Mrs. Smith is one of my favorite movies and I can’t believe I didn’t realize how much it relates to our secret agent theme! For my story analysis, I decided to re-watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith and analyze it. I enjoyed this assignment because not only was I able to re-watch one of my favorite movies, but I was also able to watch it in a new way! This time watching it, I really paid attention to the story-line shape. Something that was talked about heavily in the video we watched this week. I even drew my own version of the story-line of Mr. and Mrs. Smith! Slack Questions The final part of this weeks assignments was to answer some questions regarding blog titles. Here is my response: A good blog post title is engaging and easily catches the reader’s attention. I believe a good title for a blog post is not only engaging but also short and simple. I don’t mean simple as in bland, but I mean that the post is creative and simple to quickly read and understand. Good blog posts are creative and have a visual aspect to it. If you can paint a picture from just looking at the title, it’s likely a good title and will intrigue someone to find out more by reading the post! I think what’s different for writing for the web versus print is the creativity of the page or blog itself as well as the length of the writing. Online writing must be concise because people are constantly looking for the next best thing and will continue on if it takes longer than five minutes to read. Writing for the web also allows for visuals, which is something I enjoy most. I enjoyed having these questions to consider all week when making blog post titles, because it made me question if my title was engaging or catches the readers attention enough. Final Thoughts This week was certainly a crazy one! I think overall it turned out decent. I wish I had spent more time on the character dossier but I am still happy with it! I am happy the week is over, and the best thing about this course is that there are no two weeks alike. So, I can’t wait to see all the exciting new things we get to try out next week!