This week, on the syllabus proved to be the least complicated, but was the hardest week yet for me. I pride myself on my time management, but that all went down the drain this week. I helped my boyfriend move from Monday to Wednesday, so this gave me two days to get all of my work done, while also having other assignments due for other classes. This meant that I had to get on my phone and complete assignments in the car, stress cry in between boxes, and flooding the new house with my tears. But after two days of constant work and Cherry Cokes, here I am to say that I have completed this week. Thank GOD! First up this week was the read and reflect, which I incorporated my questions of the week into. This was actually the last thing I did this week, and normally I do a majority of everything in order. This was something new for us, as we haven’t had to read an article (and go down the rabbit hole) to write a reflection. I quite liked this. I didn’t have as much time as I would’ve wanted to completely end up at the bottom of the rabbit hole, but I did enough to feel comfortable with the material. I enjoyed reading about design and how to convey them. It offered an insight of how to make my work for this class even better. I know now to think more about the message I am trying to get across to my audience and how to do so. Next was my designblitz. I am embarrassed to say that I got lucky with this one. I took a photography class in high school, and was able to find these elements easier than most, as they were already edited and downloaded to my laptop. In my photography class we processed film, learned how to edit photos, and captured images depicting the elements in photography. This also gave me a slight advantage, as I was already familiar with the work we would be doing this week. For my first photo, I chose to use a photo of flowers for color. I felt like this was the most appropriate. I had already edited the photo to better depict all of the colors of the plant and soil, and upped the contrast to further convey this. Overall, I am pleased with how well this photo fit the element. My next photo was rhythm. I thought this would be a difficult photo to find, but it was quite simple. I opted for a photo of a waterfall in Occoquan. In my post I address how nostalgic this photo is to me and how much it means to me because of this. I felt like water perfectly captured rhythm. In the photo, my shutter speed was timed to capture the water rushing down the rocks and splashing everywhere. In turn, this created a sense of rhythm. The next two photos were up for my own interpretation. I chose to use a photo of the clouds before it rained as dominance. This is due to the fact that in the photo, you don’t focus on anything other than the clouds because they are so captivating. This in turn, is the definition of dominance. I feel like normally, one wouldn’t choose to use a photo of clouds to depict this, but I felt like this was perfect. My last photo was proportion. I stated in my blog post that I felt like normally people would interpret this element in a different way. Normally, you would see people trying to lean the Tower of Pisa or falling off of a cliff, but I took a more original approach. I chose to use a scenic photo of land and water. The viewer can definitely make out how some aspects are closer than the others, some overlap, and there is a sense of foreground, middle ground, and background. I love my interpretation and I feel like it is very unique. Find my entire blog post here: Next was the daily creates. These always seem to make me engage in this class at least everyday and I really appreciate that. I feel like my commenting always ends up lower than I want it to be, so these allow me to stay keeping up with the class and my other peers. They truly are a breath of fresh air. I always really enjoy the assignment banks as well. However, this is where I ran into a slight disadvantage. In my photography class, we became familiar with photoshop. However, it came to my attention that I do not have photoshop at home. I turned to my sister as back up, and she had also cancelled her membership. She suggested using a few apps that she uses, and I began using one called Over for all of my assignment banks. I felt like this app wasn’t an adequate way to replace photoshop, but it was easy to use, offered many different editing techniques, and got the job done. I did three assignments of 4 stars each. I also noticed that with some mediums, it is harder to find certain star difficulties. For example, it was hard to find 5 star assignments with the photography assignments, but this week I had no trouble finding assignments. For my first assignment, I had to make a Valentines Day card. I opted to take the cheesy route, and I love how it turned out. I wanted to make it cute and appealing, capturing the true meaning of a pick up line. I state in my post that my boyfriend came to the rescue with the pick up line, and from there I created the photo. This was the first assignment I used the new app on, and it all went smoothly. I chose a cute picture to correlate to the joke, added text to display it, and added a few decorations to further make it appealing. My next assignment bank was to take a cartoon character and advertise a product with it. Pretty soon after I start this assignment, I felt like Ariel advertising a beach texturizing spray would be perfect. There is a lot of emphasis on her hair, and many people try to achieve her hair, so what better model to advertise a hair product than her. I simply chose a photo of her, added some text, and decorated it to further convey the message. My last assignment bank was to create a wallpaper for this class. I wanted to relate it to the theme, while also making it usable for anyone. I googled a photo of a secret agent, found the perfect photo, and added a filter to it. I chose to add a filter to the photo to better convey the contrast between the blacks and whites of the photo. Then I added some text, which I thought looked very relatable for the class, and added a simple decoration. I am very proud of how this assignment came out. So much so, it might be my favorite I’ve ever done. I really love how simple, but yet perfect it is. It adequately fits the class, and can be used by anyone. I feel like every time I write a weekly summary I address how I need to comment more. I feel like this point I am jinxing myself. So this week I’m not going to blatantly say that I need to, but I will imply it. Hopefully next week it will rise up to my standards. That is the only thing that I feel that I am lacking during this class. After three emotional breakdowns, two hours of further procrastination, and seven hours of sleep, I have never been so excited for a week to be over in this class. I enjoyed this week and what we focused on, but I have never lacked so horribly in time management. See you next week, where hopefully I don’t have time consuming obligations.

This week was the hardest week by far. I usually am able to get a majority of my work done in the beginning of the week, so I never feel stressed. However, this week I was training for a new job and barely had the time to do any of the work for my classes. I also know nothing about audio and how to edit it, so this created a new challenge as I also had to learn how to do everything for this week. This created a crazy amount of stress for me throughout the week. Overall, I was able to get everything done before the due date, so this week was a success! The first thing on the list was to download and experiment with Audacity. This is an application I have never used before, so it was quite difficult. Downloading it was obviously easy, but getting to know a software I have never used before proved to be a problem. I tried getting to know it on my own, but this did not work. I tried watching youtube videos, but they didn’t help much either. I was having trouble getting everything into one fluid track, instead of overlapping each other. I eventually gave up after about an hour, and chose to face it head on when I had to do my assignments. I really enjoyed the videos we needed to watch. I thought Abumrad offered a great insight to what audio in storytelling really means. His examples and metaphors to help convey his points are very well thought out. It really offered some explanation to everything. It also made me focus more on the audio that I heard during this week to understand how it helps convey the story. Next was “Moon Graffiti.” This was a really amazing take on an audio story. I have recently been loving podcasts, so listening to this was the highlight of my week. I tend to lean towards listening to more crime based podcasts, so this was a nice twist. Everything in the podcast have some meaning behind it. Every audio component helped tell the story, which I don’t normally realize in the crime podcasts. Crime podcasts use facts and narrators to tell the stories, while this needed actual audio tracks and voices to help convey the story. It really did convey the message it was trying to. Creating a radio bumper was a really interesting idea. It was the first thing I did to experiment around with making my own audio. This caused some embarrassment for me, as I didn’t know what to say AND I hate hearing my voice played back. I thought about what I would normally hear on the radio to promote radio shows and went from there. I chose to keep it simple, add a secret agent track in the back, and add a slogan to pull it all together. My voice came off a little melodramatic because I had just woken up and it was honestly awkward to sit at my desk and create my own bumper. However, I think it turned out pretty good. The tweet along is what brought me great difficulty. I had just recently started training for my new job and didn’t have any spare time to get anything done. This, sadly, inhibited me from listening to the audio drama live. I was very nervous because of this, and emailed Professor Bond. He was very understanding and allowed me to simply listen to it on my own terms and write an analyzation on it. This eased my stress greatly and I listened to it during my commute to the university. I held true from my weekly summary last week to include the star ratings into my summaries for the assignment banks. This is one of the only aspect I was able to carry over, especially with how busy I was. For the mandatory assignment bank, we had to create a morning routine out of audio tracks. This was THE HARDEST thing for me this week. As earlier I stated that I gave up on figuring out Audacity after about an hour, as soon as I picked it up for this assignment I wanted to rip my hair out. This is where I started to experiment around again, and my boyfriend saw the anger in my eyes and decided to see if he could figure it out. I couldn’t figure out how to make everything into one track, it just kept overlapping all of the sounds. After five minutes of having my laptop, he found out you can cut the tracks and then just copy and paste them all into one track. After he handed me back my laptop it was go time and I finished this assignment no problem. The syllabus also stated to not make this a typical morning routine, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to bring in my character for one of the assignment banks. I made the morning routine focus around her as a spy. I felt like this jazzed up the assignment and made it an original morning routine. My first assignment bank assignment was to post a video of a memorable song, and then through audio explain why it has so much meaning to you. I thought about this topic for a while, and even went through music on my phone to help. I eventually thought of Back to Black by Amy Winehouse. Amy Winehouse is a very nostalgic artist to me. She was my sisters favorite artist and I remember her having her CD in her car and popping it in whenever I got in. I talked about how one night, she picked me up late at night and we had a sleepover. The entire car ride from Woodbridge to Springfield we listened to old throwbacks. This was one of the songs that she played, and not only do I love this song because of the memories, but I also love this song because of the passion and meaning the song has behind it. Recently, when I rediscovered this song, it gave me goosebumps at how well this song is executed. Amy Winehouse was truly a legend. My second assignment was a celebrity speed date. I had to say all that I could to my favorite celebrity in the hopes that they would want another date with me. I took this as an opportunity to make my celebrity Lana Del Rey. I also interpreted the assignment into my own. I did not want to date Lana, but instead become friends with her and hangout. I also did specifically say exactly what I would say to her, I basically just said what I would actually do. I would want to have a conversation where I get to know her, and I ask questions about her and we can relate and joke around. I didn’t want to come off as a typical fan, but instead show her how special she is and focus the conversation around her personally. I feel like as a celebrity, she probably doesn’t get that very often. I picked Lana because she has gotten me through some tough times. Her music is very relaxing and beautiful (and sometimes a little raunchy). I used to listen to her with my friends also, so her music is very personal to me. My last assignment bank was to create a new sound on free sound. This was quite easy once I got the hang of it. I went through my videos to see which sounds I had, and came across one of my family singing my mom happy birthday. I feel like this video had a lot that normal happy birthdays lack. In this one, everyone is singing, and my mom is giggling and singing along. I felt like it added a personal touch to the entire track. Then I sent the video to my laptop, grabbed my phone, recorded a voice memo of it from my phone, sent the voice memo to my laptop, and uploaded it to Soundcloud. This may sound complicated, but I found it really worked for me. I did almost all of my assignments this way, and found it was the best way for me to do them. Daily Creates: Brainstorming radio show ideas was pretty simple. I noticed on a lot of my classmates blogs they did not relate it to the theme. In the syllabus it says to do so, so this offered a little bit of guidelines to create my ideas around. I wanted something that would be interesting to everyone, despite if they were enrolled in this class or not. I just grabbed my notebook, jotted down a few ideas, and made a post further explaining them. I’m actually really pleased with all of the ideas I came up with. Questions of the Week: How do sounds tell a story? Sounds tell a story by further enforcing the facts. One could say that they got into a brutal car crash, or they could have a clip of the car crash with the tires squealing and the giant boom. It creates a specific image in the viewers mind, that can still be manipulated. It offers a sort of second storytelling that gives even more detail to further depict the story. How do they convey a sense of time and place? Audio tracks can easily convey a sense of time and place. For example, we associate birds chirping in the morning and a rooster crowing morning sounds. If one adds these to their story, the listener will know that it is morning time. If there are car noises, one can assume that they are around a place surrounded by driving vehicles, like the highway. The storyteller just has to use commonly associated sounds to convey what time and place they want to to their audience. A sense of action? This fits the same theme. If there are sounds of punching and fighting, one can assume that there is a fast paced and high action scene taking place. If there are crickets chirping, one can assume nothing is going on. It also takes into account the things we associate sounds with. Commenting was quite another thing I fell short on. Last week I talked about how I needed to comment everyday, and I was going to strive to do that this week. I feel like I did comment more, but it was all packed together instead of spread out over the week. Next week my schedule will be better, so I will honestly try my hardest to comment every single day. I enjoyed doing the posts of the week. It forced me to go through as many posts from this week that I could to find the best. I noticed that one blog in particular got two out of the three of my submissions. I really enjoyed looking through everyones posts this week to find the best, it inspired me to step out of my comfort zone to achieve the things they did this week. I always look through the blogs every week to comment, but finding the best this week also pointed out the things that I didn’t like. I now know what I won’t be doing for next week, while also being inspired to achieve more. After an insanely stressful week, I am proud to say WEEK FIVE IS DONE!

This week was fairly quite simple. I really enjoyed focusing on one medium for digital storytelling. The first couple of weeks there were a fair amount of assignments, but each week seems to become easier. I’m sure this is because slowly, I am getting the hang of this course and how it works. I originally thought I would like this class, but not to the extent that I have been. I thought this would offer learning, but with more enjoyable aspects. This course is the only class I am enrolled in that I actually enjoy the work for. I don’t mind doing work all week, because it allows me to express myself and be creative. I normally finish all of the work within in a few days because I dive into the assignments and never get the urge to procrastinate. First up this week was to think about the visuals of storytelling. This was pretty self explanatory. All I had to do was make a blog post and answer some simple questions regarding the topic. I state in the blog post that I took two years of photography in high school. This allowed me to develop film, learn the elements of art, use photoshop, and much more. Having a background in the learning and experience of photography made this week a whole lot easier. If I didn’t have any background, I would’ve been pretty set back and it would’ve been a little bit more difficult due to having to research a bit. Then we were assigned to find a number of different elements in movies or videos. Once again, I chose to do the movie S.A.L.T. I chose this movie due to the edits in cinematography. I knew that this movie holds many different elements. There is a critical change in how the movie is edited through her mission. During the beginning, it is very well lit and brings a sense of happiness through the lighting of the scenes. As she becomes more determined and emotional, the scenes tend to become darker and have more contrast. That is one of the reasons I chose this movie. Finding stills was actually difficult. It’s a lot easier to find gifs of movies, rather than stills of the movie. I was not expecting this. I eventually found all of the photos, but sometimes I had to interpret them into my own ways. I firmly believe that the photos portray the elements, but I have a fear that some people will disagree and not be able to see it. If I have learned anything from this class though, it’s that everything is up for your own interpretation, and that nothing is wrong. Next was the photoblitz. This was actually a really unique assignment. I intended on doing it the day before, but got caught up in the rest of the assignments and decided to do it the next day. However, by the time I got to it, it was already night time. This limited me to only photographing things in my own home. I feel like this is why it took me so little time to do the assignment. The maximum time was 20 minutes, and looking at the amount of photos we had to take, I thought I would be rushing around my house trying to get everything done in time. It only took me 8 minutes to complete it, and I wasn’t even rushing anymore. The photo that took the longest was the one with my cat, Tisha. This is because I hadn’t been home for a few days so as soon as I sat on the floor it was impossible to get her to stay still. I probably spent a few minutes doing this photo alone. Which, in retrospect, made the other photos take such little time. I think the thing that contributed the most to how short of a time it took me is that I planned all my pictures out. When I saw the list, I thought of the things in my house that I could relate to the tasks. Then it was just a matter of walking around and taking photos of each. Then it was my favorite part of the week, assignment banks!! I love assignment banks because it gives us the opportunity to pick our own assignments and the difficulties of them. This week I opted to do more difficult assignments, and they didn’t even seem to be that much of a challenge. I also decided this week to include the star difficulty into my blog post. I’ve been really enjoying to focus on one type of assignment bank as well. Last week was writing and this week was visual. This allows for some stress of not knowing which medium to pick, to be resolved. It also gives a sort of sense as to what we should be focusing on. The first assignment bank I chose to do was to show the love you have for your animal in an assignment bank. This assignment struck close to home because of one of my animals passing. I take so many photos of my two cats, and I knew it would be simple. I have never had to go through the loss of an animal, and while it been months, I still love to show off my boy. I honestly don’t think anyone can understand the impact an animal can have on your life. I may seem odd to be so attached to a cat, but he was with me through my entire life. I know some people find it hard to go through photos, but it brings me such happiness to see him. Once I found the assignment, I downloaded a collage app, found the photos I wanted in the collage, and then the app did the work for me! It made a collage that I simply just sent to my computer and inserted it into a blog post and wrote about my experience. My next assignment bank was where things became difficult. During the first few weeks I saw on someones blog that they did a barcode through hundreds of images. I thought I would try this out as well. I immediately ran into a wall once I downloaded the software and didn’t know where to go from there. I looked on other peoples blogs to see how they did it and downloaded a plug in on chrome. This plug in would downloaded hundreds of images from your computer in a few clicks, and I thought I was set. I filled up my computer with nearly 1000 images from the hospital scene of The Dark Knight. Once I downloaded the file into the barcode facilitator, nothing happened. It said it was processing it, but after 10 minutes the screen was still blank. So I deleted all of the images and softwares from my computer and went on the hunt for another 5 star assignment. I chose the only other 5 star assignment I could find, where I had to show I movie in GIFs. This assignment was a lot easier than the previous barcode assignment. All I had to do was search for the GIFs I wanted and them make captions to tell the story. I was actually quite pleased with how this assignment turned out. Things got sticky with my last assignment bank as well. I originally did an assignment where I had to match a quote with a picture and mesh the two into one photo. I had completed this and was about to embed it into a post when I realized…. I hadn’t related one of the assignments to my character. Yet again, I deleted everything and went back to the drawing board to find a new assignment. I found one where I had to make a photo unrecognizable. I was in bed at midnight, where I had to wake up at 6:50 the next morning to commute to biology lab, flailing my phone around to distort what I was taking a photo of. Then I sent this photo to my computer, put it into a blog post, and wrote about my experience with it. All I know is that I need to stop waiting until I’m tired and delusional to do assignment banks. Daily creates are always the most simple of assignments. They take little time and it’s always fun to look at everyone else’s interpretations of them. This week I fell back and didn’t get them done as early as I would’ve liked to. The first week we did them, I did this exact thing. Last week, I got them done as soon as I could and this is definitely the way to go. It’s so simple to take five minutes of out your day to do them, but since they are so minimal I always forget about them. For the rest of the semester I definitely need to get into the habit of doing them sooner rather than later. Commenting is also something I need to work on. I always comment on at least three blogs whenever I am working on this class. However, I need to start to do it every single day. During school, I am on my laptop almost every single day. So instead of commenting every time I am working on this class, I need to do it every time I am on my laptop. It also is such a simple task that I seem to overlook. There is room for improvement for the future, and it is definitely something I will be working on for next week. Questions of the Week: I always seem to take some sort of inspiration from peoples blogs. This week it was that nothing can ever be wrong. I saw someone do their own interpretation on an assignment, where in a normal class, not following the rules would kill the grade, but the way she did it was genius. It was the assignment where we had to find the elements in cinematography, but instead, she took time out of her day to take the photos herself. She took photos around her house and with her and her dog. I loved her spin on it, and I thought it made her post very original. I also looked for inspiration during my struggle with the barcode assignment. When I was stumped, I realized I should probably look at other peoples posts on how they did it. I went through three posts and followed one persons blog in order to obtain the photos I needed. Even though the barcode still didn’t work for me, it gave me the inspiration to try it again and always look at my classmates blogs when I run into trouble. I always try to make my blog posts as detailed as possible now too, to help anyone who is having trouble with assignments. If I can help someone like they did for me, then it’s a win win. There is nothing worse than to be stuck on an assignment you have put a lot of work into. I also try to comment as much as I can to show my classmates how I feel about their work. There are a lot of people in this class that are absolute geniuses. I need to get into commenting more, but I always try to. Whether that’s on blogs, or even twitter. Overall I think that inspiration comes significantly from our blogs, and they are absolutely vital to this course. And that’s a wrap for week four!!!!!