Class Reflection

When I signed up for Info 303 I did not know what to expect. The class description certainly sounded interesting, but it was a little vague to completely understand. After looking back though, there have been many ideas I have learned through creating projects through non-traditional means instead of just simply writing essays.

One of the prominent themes I learned is presenting idea through images. This idea was solidified during the sequential art project. While the idea of my news project was simple it was not always the easiest thing to present. First of all it was hard to find the images to convey what I wanted to “say.” Even after they were found, it still was difficult deciding which ones to use since an image does not have as much concrete meaning by itself as most words do. The project certainly helped me in understanding how to convey meaning through images.

Displaying media through sound was another concept I learned through class. The podcast project helped me with this idea. It helped me focus more intricately on the tones of my voice even beyond the project. In addition, it reinforced the power of sound effects, music and silience.

The themes of objectivity and subjectivity were also important lessons I learned. Perhaps the most important part of this lesson is that nothing we present can truly be objective; there always is some bias. Despite this idea though, it is possible to strive for a more neutral tone that attempts to be objective.

While I have not had the opportunity to apply this idea yet, I would like to be able to write in a less rigid structure for future projects and papers. Presentations can go beyond the typical intro, body and conclusion format. It still however is a good format to use I have learned. Many of the presentations, including some of mine followed something similar to the intro, body and conclusion format.

Remediation in general should also help me in the future. The more formats I am able to apply an idea to the more opportunities I will have to express the idea. I have learned though from class that one cannot simply go from one form of media to another without some changes though. For example, words cannot always accurately describe a picture and sometimes a picture will be too vague for the words it represents; each media has its different strengths and weaknesses.

The class has also solidified the idea that different ideas can have different meanings in different places based on the stencil project and my final project. Through the stencil project the graffiti we created had meaning based on its context. Some made perfect sense in one context but were completely abstract in another. The final presentation also helped me learn more since I learned all about geosemiotics.

Looking back on the semester it has become clearer what INFO 303 is about; it is simply to help explain how to showcase ideas in different ideas in different mediums. While the definition is rather simple, a lot can be learned from it.

Final Presentation Powerpoint

final presentation

Final Project Process and Reflection

Pre-Production – Most of the ideas we had made it into the final product. However, some did not such as remediating geosemiotics into sound.

Composing – After we had our ideas down on what to do for the project, we decided to create a power point slide since many of our ideas could be easily expressed in pictures. We also added a part where I went into the audience to explain the differences of spacing between people and what its consequences are. We decided also to split our presentation into three separate but connected sections: geosemiotics, visual order and visual semantics.

Presenting – The most challenging part of presenting was presenting all are ideas in within 10 minutes. Each section only had slight introduction so the audience could get a general idea of the topic followed by deeper analysis. Geosemiotics was represented with the no talking sign, the graveyard comparison and the McDonald’s slide. Interaction order was presented through the example of me moving in the classroom and the slides showing people interacting differently. Visual semantics was presented was shown through modifying pictures and how it can change modality. An example of an incomplete picture and a modified by color picture were shown. A clip from Sin City ended the presentation to show how black and with a limited use of colors could emphasis certain parts of the movie.

Postproduction/Critique – Overall I believe the presentation well and it seemed the audience understood the concept well. The example of the World War II photo was understood by the audience, but they also had their own good ideas about it showing part of geosemiotics was interpretive. Despite this idea, there are some things that I think we could have done better. One would have been to analyze Sin City more instead of simply showing the clip. Another thing to do differently would have been to look more into remediating sound into the concept.

Video Project Reflection

Pre-production/brainstorming – As usual, the planning what type of documentary to shoot was one of the most challenging parts of the project. We had limited time to create a video in addition to times we could work together so we decided to do something that required just us. We eventually settled on creating a documentary based on interviews between two candidates running to represent Illinois in an economic convention. The interviews were not planned ahead of time to make sure they were not scripted. We also had planned a mini debate between the candidates to have more on the spot filming with no script.

Shooting – Shooting was a fairly easy process since we would do no editing at the time. We started with Lochlan interviewing me and then me interviewing Lochlan. When I interviewed Lochlan I sometimes moved the camera zoom in and out but other than that there was nothing special about it. We then filmed the debate from a fixed camera angle since we did not have any additional people helping us.

Editing: The toughest part of editing was finding appropriate clips for the subjective side of showing the candidates are incompetent. Although the film bank was about 30 minutes long, it still made the task difficult. I felt as if I really had to dig for the candidates to say something “wrong” that fit into my documentary. I also choose to overlap the candidates twice with text since I felt what they said when I “covered” them may have helped the candidates redeem themselves in the audiences eyes which I did not want in the final project. The patriotic sounding song “The Stars and Stripes Forever” by John Philips Susa was chosen to introduce the candidates to make the economic conference seem as something important for the country. The middle sound track was ominous sounding music from “Final Fantasy X” which was used to negatively influence the candidates by making them appear as bad candidates. Finally the song “Winter Road” by Georgy Sviridov was chosen at the end since I felt the song was a bit depressing but became more uplifting as the track went on to symbolize how the candidates in the video do not have to be elected.

Post-Production/Critique – For the most part I believe my video was effective at getting my message across, although it is likely if this video was serious it would be critiqued for being overtly one-sided. Another issue was with music. For example, one comment on the video was that the ominous music was out of rhythm with the candidates speaking. This comment helps show that music in documentaries needs to be chosen very carefully. Another issue I think is that the section with the candidates talking is still a bit boring even with the text. Perhaps there should have been more B-roll footage shown, but I think that may have detracted from looking at the candidates’ response to make it feel more natural and not deceptive.

Video Project Subjective Side

Here is a link to the project. For background information, the Economic Council is a made up organization which takes elected representatives from each state to help solve the current economic crisis.

 

Question Response

In response to Georgia’s question “Do you personally enjoy working with other people in group projects? Why or why not?”

I believe it really depends on the project and people you work with. If you have people who do not contribute or try to get by on others work I despise those group projects. On the other hand, working with people who want to contribute and collaborate makes the experience much better.  The type of project depends if a group would be enjoyable or not. For example, if it is some research project where you could easily do it yourself it becomes a hassle with a group since it is difficult to get everyone together to work through it at once.  It also becomes an issue when there only can be one paper written since its difficult to fit everyone’s ideas together. On the other hand, other projects such as video projects work well since they can benefit from more people being in the film and the filming process.

Ede & Lunsford Questions

1. Do you believe with print and electronic technology we can ever go back to the medieval idea of there not being authorship?

2. Do you agree with the idea of collobarations being credited with a group name? Why or why not?

3. Can you think of some ways the ideas of authorship and copyright laws have helped and hurt society?

Hampe Question Response

In response to the question “How important are interviews in relaying a sense of reality on a specific subject?  Hampe suggests pre-production planning and a some-what rigid organization yet says that while interviewing one must let the person being interviewed tell the story without asking leading questions.  Would this ruin the pre-production planning and organization as the interviewee could talk about whatever they wanted and the footage would be useless to the overall story?”

Relaying reality is one of the key concepts for serious interviews I think. The audience has to believe what they are hearing is not only something real but also true. It is odd Hampe suggests two seemingly opposite things but they both are needed in most interviews. There has to be some rigid organization, planning and some questions to get the interview process going. However, the interviewed person should feel comfortable enough to veer from the rigid schedule and tell whatever he or she feels appropriate to talk about. If what they talk about what is truly unnecessary, it can be cut in editing. Pre-production would not be ruined, since one should not have a process so rigid that it expects the interviewee to say only certain things. If anything, the interviewee’s thoughts may give the documentary more insight to what the director did not exactly expect.

Podcast Reflection

Pre-Production/brainstorming: As usual, the most difficult part of the project was thinking of an acceptable idea. I was interested in parodying the stereotypical NPR style of radio. I also wanted to throw in cryptid monsters since I thought they would fit well into a Halloween theme. Originally, my idea for the show was slightly different were the episode was explicitly a “Halloween episode.” The Loch Ness monster broadcast was originally “live” and the discovery of the monster actually shocked the announcer. I also only had vague ideas with what to do with the Bigfoot report such as having the reporter storm off the set for being on a fake show. Eventually, I decided to make the announcer seem oblivious to most of the situations while slowly becoming frantic and realizing what was really happening at the end. I also decided to make the Loch Ness footage a recording to keep with the idea this was a fake show with all the hoax/lie related names (i.e. Hoaxenburg and Swindlesmith). This also was done so the Bigfoot encounter would be more of a surprise for the announcer. Finally, I wanted to have music that would set the mood effectively, I thought lyrics would detract from it so all the bits of songs I added contained no lyrics. As an interesting note, since I am familiar with video games and video game music typically has no lyrics 3 out of the 4 songs came from video games.

Recording: The recording took surprisingly the most amount of time for the project. Finding the music and various sound effects were the easy while the actual recording was more difficult. I did split recording into various sections but had to record many times to get the recordings to be error free. The only exception was the announcer’s final message since the announcer was to be nervous at the time so I thought one recording would appropriately represent it. Part of the problem was mimicking the NPR voice, which made it difficult for me to properly say my lines while mimicking what was not my natural voice. I also ran into the problem of making distinct voices for the two reporters. Because of this problem I decided to modify the voice by changing the pitch.

Editing: One part of editing was changing the two reporter’s voices. For Bob, it was rather easy, all I had to do is change the pitch slightly up and it surprisingly sounded much more high pitch than my actual voice. For Joe, I did the same thing except down, but the voice was not much different. Because of this idea, I lowered the pitch much further to make a clear distinction between the voices. Another sound effect I created myself was the noises after the supposed Loch Ness monster ate Joe. I created the gargling underwater noise by having myself make choking and gargling noises followed by short taps on my desk to mimic bubbles moving in water. After lowering the pitch greatly it seemed to fit perfectly by mimicking the sound of being underwater while it happened. Another editing technique I used was changing volumes of various voices, sound effects, and music. The editing tool that allowed music to change volume slowly or quickly proved to be very useful.

Post-production/critique: After I finished with recording I listened to it in one sitting on my headphones to make sure I got all the sounds and sound volumes correct. Everything seemed fine at the time, but after listening to it on speakers in class I realized some parts were hard to understand such as when Bob was first introduced his voice was sometimes drowned out by the “storm” in the background. Another issue was the voice modification, the modified voices were sometimes a bit hard to understand, especially Joe. Part of the problem though is I on purposely cranked up the music for a few seconds since I did not feel the speech at the time was important until he was surprised something was actually going on. Another issue occurs with all the silence of voices when Bigfoot appears. I choose to have it occur like that since the announcer was surprised while Bob was focused on getting away from Bigfoot. I probably could have made this more apparent if I did something like have the announcer throw in some interjections like “uhhhh” during the silence. On the other hand, the sound effects and music seemed to go through pretty well, although sometimes at a cost of overshadowing the voices. Overall, I am happy with most of the project besides the poor sound quality in some parts.

Podcast Response and Three Reading Questions

Julie: Very good use of setting an NPR tone with the announcer’s voice and music choice throughout the majority of the podcast. The instructions for actually making the zombie costume seemed to be well thought out and easy to follow along.

Tom: Overall the story was very interesting to listen to and the tone of your voice was appropriate throughout the whole podcast. The changes in tone were subtle but certainly effective such as how when you talked about thinking of reality you could hear a hint if disappointment. The only suggestion I have would be to shorten the intro, which seemed to last a bit too long.

Patrick: The intro at first seemed far too long, but when the sarcasm finally hit me like a brick truck I appreciated the build up much more. The tone was perfect for the parody value of the podcast. I loved the style of the podcast and the images certainly did help in a few cases such as the ones with athletes helping the community.

Amanda: The theme of the podcast worked well, especially with the actual poem itself. I also liked the condescending tone of the over confident narrator. The only suggestion I have is that the drastic classical music after the uniqueness of identical twins comment seemed a bit out of place in my mind. However, I do understand the idea you were trying to get across with it.

Jen: The music fit well with the theme of mushrooms and overall the podcast had a good presentation. I especially liked the element that the interviewed person seemed knowledgeable about the subject and slightly nervous for someone who is not used to talking on the radio, unlike the announcer who did not seem nervous.

Brian: The instructions for making briskets seemed a little rushed and difficult to understand, especially at the start of the podcast but it seemed to get easier to understand as the podcast went on. Part of the problem may have been due to the extra audio not linking up with the voice when you presented and I am guessing that would have made the podcast better overall.

Christine: Using Warcraft music helped set the tone for the podcast. In addition, it seemed like a good fairly quick overview of World of Warcraft for someone unfamiliar with the game. I also liked the idea of effectively putting a positive spin on the idea of the game being a “time waster” with the community aspect. The podcast however could have a used a little bit of extra sound elements, such as appropriate sound effects, to spice it up to be more than just a reading of an essay.

Katie: For the most part it fit the Halloween theme, except the middle part with Legends of the Hidden Temple. The sound effects also were well used except for the deep/ghost like laugh near the start of it.

Dan: The story telling format worked well, and I especially liked the idea you used your own (what seemed to be unmodified) voices for the various minor characters. The sound effects and music were also very appropriately placed in the podcast.

Hampe Questions:

1. Hampe mentions how one scene in a documentary caused the audience to have the same pity effect for the boy in it. Do you think it would have been different if the audience was not in a group setting but just one person?

2. Can you think of any examples in documentaries or any media (such as the news) where “Roll-B” filler is used? And what could be a suitable replacement?

3. Could the idea of using an ironic clip to counter a lie someone stated be considered an inappropriate use of images in any situation and why?