percyonline

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  • Final Project: Reflection

    This week’s posts:

    Daily Creates
    Final Project

    Assignments used in final project:

    Averaged Portrait
    Create a Story Using Music
    Story Within Photos
    Missing Person
    Ambient Storytelling
    Designception
    Art used in the final post was drawn by Ayami Kojima.

    What I Learned

    This semester I learned a lot about visual media! I got to experiment with media types that I don’t normally think about using like music and photography. Having the opportunity to try out new photography methods or using different video editing methods has shown me that there are lots of different ways to create and tell stories online. Hopefully in the future I can continue to sharpen my skills with these formats to use them better!

    What I Would Do Differently

    If I had to take this class again, I think I would prepare better for writing my blog posts. I didn’t quite understand the importance of telling a fictional or non-fictional story throughout each post and instead spent a lot of time talking about the process of making the assignment, and I think this was detrimental to my finished work. If I took another digital storytelling class I would like to think of a character or story beforehand so that I could base all my posts for the class on that narrative, it could be fun to tell a story like that.

    Other Thoughts

    I think my favorite assignment to work on this semester was this video assignment, Animatic Joy. Like I said above, I had a hard time putting together stories for this class, but the characters I used for this assignment were characters I had already been working on before I took this class, so they were easier to work with. My characters don’t work that well for every assignment, so I didn’t use them at all for any of my other posts, but this one was fun to make.

    Overall, I had fun creating posts for this digital storytelling class, and I hope that I can use the skills I learned this semester to enhance my storytelling!

  • Final Project: Who is it?

    Within these documents are the records of one man who, allegedly, lived a new life every single day. Some days begin with the notion he’s finally figured out once and for all who he truly is. Most entries end the same way: the realization that he wasn’t quite right that time either. Before his disappearance, we get to look into one final recall of his final epiphany.

    Page 1

    After yesterday’s hallucinatory spell, I find myself further from being able to control who I really am, but closer to piecing together who I really was. I ponder if it’s worth going mad just to find out what has turned me insane in the first place? A few months ago, I would wager that my brain was in an equilibrium between the sane and whole. I notice I am rambling now, and I wish to not run out of page space. All that is important is that I disregard my humanity for the sake of the truth.

    Page 2

    Yesterday I was a soldier. I was stationed in my current residence and was told to seek shelter in place until someone came to get me. Nobody, not even one of my hallucinations, came to get me. I eventually searched my house with great caution, then wrote yesterday’s journal entry. I looked back at my old journal entries as if they were logs to tell me just how long we’ve been deployed, and that’s when I realized just how many of these delusions I’ve had related to the military. I believe that before my brain was scattered completely, I must have been a part of the military. This morning I have counted, and there are no other jobs that are as frequent. This morning I write, hopefully as myself. I do not believe I have any hallucinations; I feel I am doing an internal investigation on myself. As I look back upon how many days I have written in here, I have concluded that I am lacking cognitively. How many times have I come to see this before? Why haven’t I written those down?

    Page 3

    You wouldn’t know this unless I’ve told you, but I have taken a several-hour break from my journal. I’ve spent time inside and outside pondering what it is that has my brain ticking the way it does.

    Suddenly, it has occurred to me that it does not matter who I was then, but whom I choose to be now. If I truly am a war veteran all the time, should I choose to carry out my days as a disabled vet? It makes the clearest sense, and explains how I remain truly unemployed this whole time. What happened to me in the war that’s cracked open my head and turned me into the man I am now?

    Page 4

    It has been several more hours, at least I believe it has been. There are no clocks in my room. I’m in a much safer room than I was before, but I cannot recall why. It’s most likely due to my search for the truth that my brain slipped into insanity again. I was told that I do not need to worry about the past, and I do not need to uncover it. Frankly, I now agree. I just need to stay in here safely. Today I am not a detective; I am safe. I am no longer what I wrote above. A soldier just sounds preposterous to me now.

    Page ?

    Looking above, I can see the account of that soldier losing his mind. Perhaps they were forcing him to forget everything terrible that had happened to him. I write this in an unknown room, where I was told to remain safe. I will not abandon my orders, and I will spend this time reading the accounts of the past military members who have written in this book.

  • Final Week Daily Creates

    #tdc4941

    Forced Perspective

    He looks quite tall here doesn’t he?

    #tdc4942

    Retainer Wall Art

    I just think its cute.

    #tdc4943

    What Music Would They Play?

    Ska. They would probably make ska.

  • Week 4 Summary: Video

    This weeks posts:

    Week 4 Daily Creates
    Learning About Film
    Look, Listen, and Analyze
    Animatic Joy
    I Am Me
    Tell Your Characters Story

    Reflection

    Reading Roger Ebert’s article on reading film had me thinking more about shot composition while I watched my movie clips this week. I think principles like the ones talked about in that article can be applied to other mediums like illustration. They don’t have to be restricted to movies either, and are applied the same way in TV shows and animation. I liked the exercise where we got rid of one sense (sight or sound) and focused on the other. It was great for trying to pick up on smaller details in a scene to enhance analysis.

    The easiest assignment for me was the Animatic Joy assignment. This is only because I have made animatics in the past, and have just a little bit of knowledge on how to make them. The harder ones were the non-animated videos where I used a different software to make and record them. It was difficult to get the elements and music to line up properly, but I got it worked out!

    I enjoyed making the videos for this weeks assignments, and I probably will make more videos and animatics in the future. I don’t often watch a ton of movies, but now when I do I think I’ll be paying more attention to the stylistic choices in each scene. I’m excited to apply the things I learned this week in my regular life!

  • Tell Your Characters Story

    Link to assignment post

    For this assignment, I needed to create a short story with a video to tell it with! I decided to make up a very silly short story about a flower creature. Like my last assignment, I used a power point slide show to animate my story and played music in the background while recording.

    My short story is about a flower man who keeps to himself and lives in a town with humans. Everyone thinks he’s sad and wants to be a human too, but really, his dream is to be some kind of sea creature.

    I was able to draw the frames for this assignment myself, and I used stock images to add other elements like backgrounds and realistic people. Since the main character is a silly creature, I wanted the other things in the video to be realistic looking to contrast his appearance. A real human and a real fish are very different from our little cartoon character.

  • I Am Me

    Link to assignment post

    I wanted to do an introduction, but with a video this time! This assignment required me to make a video introducing myself while using photos, videos, and music to do it. I used google slides to make my images and sort my introduction out, and then I used OBS to record it.

    I’m not that I even have Windows Movie Maker on my computer right now, so instead of editing the video I played music in the background in another window while I recorded my video. That way the song and the video are layered together easily! I included images to show the things I liked and a video clip at the end to combine mediums together.

    It’s kind of difficult to put together videos by myself like this, I’m more used to editing pictures myself. It was fun though, I think using a slideshow to make the video was a good workaround for video editing.

  • Animatic Joy

    Link to assignment post

    For this assignment I needed to create an animatic set to music about a character.

    I wanted to use characters I’ve already developed myself for it. The main character, with the shorter hair, is a college dropout that got pulled into a cult. In a twisted way, they fell in love with the cult leader, and so after leaving they feel like they see him everywhere.

    They feel like he’s haunting them as a ghost, and they can’t move on. I used Clip Studio Paint to draw the frames and stitch them together, and the program allows audio as well so it was easy to finish it up by adding music! I tried to use some of the framing techniques I learned about in the articles I read this week.

    I’d like to make more animatics after this, they’re fun to make and not super difficult. Hopefully the video conveys the feeling of the story well enough.

  • Look, Listen, and Analyze

    The movie clip I chose to look at for this assignment was this scene from the Matrix:

      Look

      The first step was to turn the volume all the way down, and make observations about only the visual parts of the scene.

      The first shot is an uncut zoom from the main character Neo to the other character in the scene, Morpheus. It then cuts to Morpheus standing tall in the frame, on the left side. Neo however, stands confused, on the right side of the frame. The surroundings are completely empty and white, putting all the focus and pressure on the characters themselves. The TV turns on, and we slowly zoom closer in to the screen. Shots of the characters also become closer and more boxed in. The surroundings change, and now both characters are in the TV scene. The relative positions of each character doesn’t change, with Morpheus still on the right and Neo on the left. The chair behind Morpheus makes him appear larger in the frame, he takes up more of the screen. Neo is by himself, alone on the left, and this could visually represent his confusion. The ominous and gritty shots of a fog and wire filled world as the world of the construct is explained fade away as we’re taken back out of the tv, where the zoom-ins on the characters get even closer and more tense. Finally, Neo runs away, and gets the furthest from the camera we’ve seen him yet, and wakes up.

      Listen

      The second step was to not look at the screen, and only observe the audio elements of the movie clip.

      The scene opens with a jarring sound. Morpheus talks in a calm and knowing way to explain the construct to Neo. Neo’s voice is weaker and more timid here. He talks as if he’s in complete disbelief of whats happening. There’s a very quiet white noise in the room as they talk. Ambient music plays quietly when they first turn the TV on. Once the TV cuts to the construct, scary sounding violin music picks up along with thunder and lightning outside. The music builds as Morpheus continues to talk. The high pitched string instruments create an anxious feeling. Even after we leave the TV, the music comes with us. It finally builds to its peak when Neo wakes up at the end of the scene.

      Put it all together

      While watching, I thought about the article I read earlier for this weeks assignments too.

      The way that Neo is always small and talks timidly emphasizes that the information he’s learning is totally unbelievable for him. He’s unsure of the world around him and can’t process what he’s learning properly. Morpheus is sure of the truth, and is always on the left-hand side of the screen and is large in the frame. From the article beforehand, we learned that the sides of the screen and the size of the character can be interpreted in a certain way. The left can usually symbolize the good side, the truth, and that’s where we see Morpheus. The slow building of the music goes with the information Morpheus relays to Neo, and as each piece is explained the music gets louder. The zoom out at the end is a lot like what I saw in the last assignment where zooms are used for realizations or waking up.

    1. Learning About Film

      After reading Roger Ebert’s article about film language, I felt a lot like I did when I took an art history class in my first semester. It’s important to remember that you don’t really need to be an expert in film or art to deconstruct artistic language. He says “the audience, and the film itself, are your most helpful collaborators” and it’s very true. When I sat in that history class, it was full of different kinds of people, and of course those who are artists and those who aren’t. But through simple visual observations we can make meaningful analyses of film scenes and frames even if we don’t know anything about the technicalities of the medium. Observations like “one character is larger in the frame” or “the colors are cold here” can be expounded upon to dig into the deeper meaning of the choice.

      I liked the video compilation of Kubrick’s one-point shots. Compositions that focus on a single point can do a few different things I think, and it depends a lot on what’s happening in the shot. They can be used to show desolation with wide open space, they can put the pressure on a single character in the center of the shot, they can be used to show how alone a character is. It’s a very versatile composition.

      The zooms in the next video also seemed versatile to me, but less so. I feel that kind of shot is mostly used to show a realization or a waking up. Zooming out and showing more of the world around the character allows them (and the audience by extension) to ‘realize’ and see what’s really going on. A zoom in can be used for realizing too, but it feels more like the character is being boxed in by what they know now. A crushing camera angle makes us feel tense and anxious.

    2. Week 4 Daily Creates

      Handwritten Poem

      #tdc4935

      I’ve been playing a game called Uma Musume recently, it’s about horse racing. So I wrote a silly haiku about horse racing.

      Sit and Listen

      #tdc4936

      Sounds I heard in a full three minutes of sitting quietly:

      Youtube video

      Music from Spotify

      My refrigerator

      My housemate in a voice call

      Keyboard clicking

      Rain outside

      My cat playing with her mouse toy

      A creaking chair

      My own breathing

      I tried using what I heard to write a haiku again:

      TV, window, clock,
      Ticking forever without you,
      Breathing on their own.

      Shadow Hand

      #tdc4937

      Today I used lighting and angles to take an interesting picture of my hand’s shadow. I decided to make it look like my shadow was picking something up!