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!!!!!
