Lauren Falkenstein’s Cheesy UMW Ad inspired me to take everyday things from my life and incorporate them into assignments. She took the sayings that scroll across the UMW website and created an ad out of them. While it poked fun at UMW’s cheesy sayings, it also ended up sounding just...

This week I got together with Lauren Falkenstein and Kayleigh Barbee to do the “You’re a Pinteresting Character” assignment (4 pts). The idea was to get 20 pins about a character (we ended up with 25) and see if people could guess the character from the pins. However, because our...

This week I completed three daily creates. Two of them have to do with my life, but the other is completely different. First, I made a collage of the different sides of me. For this assignment, I tried to find pictures that conveyed my personality and the things that are...

Looking through the different assignments to find one that could work for a collaborative assignment was kind of difficult. However, the Professor Groom Poster (4.5 pts) was easily adaptable. Janelle Pierangelino and I decided to work together to create a movie poster that included Jim Groom, Sasha Kellogg, and Sebastian...

Monday night I live-Tweeted along to House of Noir. This was a great experience because unlike previous Tweet-alongs, this was one group’s project (not a professional show). I have some friends in this group, and it was strange hearing them impersonating their characters. Also, while listening to this, I was...

This week was a little funky because it was mostly a continuation of last week. Instead of doing assignments all week, my group was getting together and finishing up the radio show. I did enjoy the change of pace because it spices things up for a week. The three daily...

Because my group did all our voice recordings last week, this week was not as stressful as I thought it would be. There was obviously a lot of sound editing that we did, and that took a while, but it worked out well. At the beginning of the week, Lauren...

This week I completed three daily creates, and they were all different forms of creativity this week. I made a poem for Grant Potter’s birthday, a emoji story, and drew a picture interpretation of what “Deep Space 106″ would look like. I used to write poems a lot as a...

This week was full of anticipation. The preparation for the radio show is both exhilarating and kind of nerve racking because I want it to go well, but I know it will be a lot of work. First, finding a group was pretty easy because I have lots of friends...

My radio show group decided to write voice messages into the script so we could complete the assignment about leaving a message. This way, we could make sure each character had enough air time and also subtly add the theme of missed opportunities and mixed messages in the show (because...

Figuring out what Sasha Kellogg’s theme song would be was very hard! I wanted to complete this assignment in the hopes that maybe my group could use it during our radio show, because characters in shows often have some type of theme or background music that always plays when they...

Working on my group’s radio show this week was very fun! We got together and bounced ideas off each other until we formed a plot. We are making ours a soap opera noir, but I have little experience with soaps, so I deferred to the other group members for that....

To make a ds106 radio commercial (3 pts), it took me a long time to come up with a product that I liked. Inventing a product that would be useful to my character was tricky, but I finally decided to take inspiration from Sasha Kellogg’s name and create a noir...

To promote my group’s radio show, I created a poster. I wanted it to say enough about the show that people understood kind of what it is about, without simply giving away the plot. The point is not only to promote my group’s radio show, but to really get people...

On Tuesday, I live-Tweeted to the Mildred Pierce radio show. Once again, live-Tweeting was lots of fun, but what made it even better was that I was listening with my friend Lauren Falkenstein. It was fun to just make eye contact during the show and share an unspoken hatred for...

This week was very educational. While I knew vaguely what went into design before this week, I now realize the true extent of the art. After reading the Vignelli Canon and reflecting on it, I see how design is in literally every man-made thing in this world. The proliferation of...

The assignment “Light switch art” (3.5 pts) was lots of fun! I remember one summer camp as a child they had blank light switch covers and all the kids decorated their own light switch cover. Mine is on the light switch in my room, but because I mainly used marker...

I decided to do the “Origins of…” assignment (3 pts) not for my online persona but for my character. Even though my character is not a superhero, there is one thing that almost all superheros have in common: they have a tragic back story (usually having to do with their...

Blade Runner is an interesting mix of science fiction and noir. It is set in Los Angeles in 2019 (so basically any day now they should be creating flying cars), and the design element of space plays an integral role in setting up the noir feel of the movie. There...

Creating a magazine feature about what’s inside my character seemed pretty simple, but it forced me to think long and hard about what Sasha Kellogg would have inside her. The assignment “WIRED Feature–What’s Inside you” (3.5 pts) would have been easier if I was talking about myself because throughout life...

The Ultimate Merger assignment (4.5 pts) seemed pretty easy at first because all you had to do was combine two famous logos. However, I found that it was difficult to choose two logos from the millions out there. Many other people chose two companies that directly compete with each other,...

This week we were back to three daily creates. The daily creates that I completed were: creative hands, what’s your superpower, and creative family tree. When deciding what to do for the creative hands assignment, I thought about the work of artist M. C. Escher, who made “drawing hands” (he...

Going on a design blitz was a bit overwhelming, because I couldn’t decide which objects to take a picture of. I mean everything man-made is designed and could work for at least one of the design concepts! The four concepts I settled on in my photos are typography, metaphor, rhythm,...

Reading/watching this week’s resources on copyright, fair use, and creative commons was a struggle, not because I didn’t like learning about these things, but because I just got very angry about them. I should explain. I have struggled through copyright laws before because I am in UMW’s color guard. We...

The Vignelli Canon made me realize that even little details that seem obvious are aspects of design. To me, use of space and colors are obviously design qualities because they catch the eye and are interesting (hopefully). However, I never thought of little things like flush left or centered as...

I learned a lot this week, because before now, I knew absolutely nothing about creating sound (except obviously I know how to talk). This week I found the Tweet-along to The Maltese Falcon incredibly fun, not just for the story, but to interact with people who were going through the...

The assignment “emotions through sound” (3 pts) was harder than I expected. I wanted to do this assignment because I know that different sounds can make me feel happy or sad, and I wanted to play around with sound effects more. At first, I was positive that I would create...

To make a 20-30 minute radio show seems like a monumental task right now, but there are a few things that might make it more interesting. First of all, I think murder mysteries are fun to listen to, but kind of overdone. I think it would be hard to keep...

The Touch of Evil Opening Shot and Touch of Evil (no restored version) have very different feels to them, even though the action is all the same. The differences also connect to the Helen Hanson reading “The Ambiance of Film Noir” about how sound is an essential component to noir....

The “dramatic reading remix” assignment (3.5 pts) was interesting because I had to think hard about the lyrics to some of my favorite songs. I always thought dramatic readings of song lyrics was cheesy, but adding instrumental music underneath the reading made it sound natural and powerful. I decided to...