For the “Sound Effects Story” I used the software that we were provided within the weekly assignments tab for week five. I have never thought about creating a story only using audio before, and this was a great way for me to do that and try something that I have never done before.
The first thing I did was downloaded the audios onto my laptop, and then I exported them onto Audacity. The audio is not as seamless as I was hoping it was going to be because I was not sure how to layer audios, so instead, I put them next to each other. My story is a sad story about a person who is taking a walk in a forest and then suddenly a plane crashes in the forest. There is no particular ending to the story and it is up to the imagination to come up with what happens next.
I never knew that there was such a thing where you could convert a picture into a sketch. I love the “By Any Sketch of the Imagination” DS106 assignment because it made me think more deeply about what sketches are and their importance. The drawing is the base of an entire art piece, and without it, there would not be much room for error and creativity to happen. The photograph that I took above was a beautiful picture of the sky when I was on a plane coming home from Florida, and seeing it in sketch form was super cool because it gave me an idea of what it would look like if someone were to draw
I say “Fear, No” because I am not a fearful person. To me, fear has little use except to cripple and stop you in your tracks. When I saw the assignment “Facing Your Fears” then asking me to describe my biggest fear and what it might think of me, then write a terrifying story of what my fear might think of me, well, I have no fear! So nothing would think nothing of me! Except there IS one BIG thing but it is not Fear. It is Post Traumatic Stress. Some throw the qualifier “Disorder” at the end of PTS, but seven years ago the shrink said I was fine, and besides, I’m not sure there’s any disorder going on in my head. Following the guidelines of the assignment, here’s what my PTS thinks about a particular event.
“She had not planned to face that sense of complete loss of control on Monday, January 3rd, in sunny Los Angeles, and after it was over, I was impressed that she beat me at my game. Her friend, Tara, told her not to take that route from Rancho Palos Verdes to the train station in Santa Ana, but she did anyway because she knows she can navigate anywhere in the world–she’s been in many countries like Iceland where she can’t read a word on the signs but she is great at figuring out how to get from Point A to Point B. Tara told Jenny that this particular route confused everyone, so just take the 110 to the 405 instead of Highway 47 to the 710. Just ignore Google Maps till you get on the 405 when and her navigation system will pick up the correct route. What Jenny didn’t know was that navigating was not the real problem. The real story was that by going on Highway 47 to the 710, she would be going over, not only the Vincent Thomas Bridge but also the Gerald Desmond Bridge. (If you want, check out the drive in that hypertext link. Maybe I’ll have fun with you, too!) So now I had her, Jenny was just tooling along the road and the first bridge popped up.
“I’m in in her head now, and I hear the alarm bells going off just like before. This is not the first time since coming back from Fallujah in 2005. I came into her head over there in 2004 when rockets and mortars were hitting Camp Fallujah, and no one could control whether they lived or died in the moment, over and over, day after day, for seven months. She thought I’d go away when she came back to the world but that’s when I really pushed it. Now that things are safe, her brain is trying to resolve all the bad stuff she saw and experienced and then crap like this bridge, where she can’t control the space, pops up, and I get to take over.
“So she approaches the first bridge, The Vincent Thomas Bridge, and it’s uncomfortable but doable and she sees the ground pretty quickly down below with a lot of shipping containers. So there are distractions. I’m not getting to her. Then she rounds a corner and I hear her: Holy Mother of Jesus! You have to be F…ing Kidding Me!! and every other expletive a Marine knows that can’t be repeated.
Gerald Desmond Bridge
I got her good. This bridge in front of her was high, unknown and there were no exits and she had to go over it and I’m in MY GLORY!!!! This is my Finest Hour of PTS!! So I hear her inside her head, a constant conversation with herself, “Breathe. Loose grip on the steering wheel. Make your mouth smile. Keep breathing. Pull beside the truck that’s to your right to create one wall. Press your foot on the gas pedal. Stay in the left lane so you’re on the inside with a barrier wall on the left. You are fine. Stay between the lane markers. Good, the lane markers are solid, stay inside the lane markers. All positive. Breeeeaaattth. Keep your foot on the gas. Stay with the truck. Breath. Keep the mouth smiling. Eyes open. Loose grip. Now you’re going downhill and keep your foot on the gas pedal. There is no one behind your, even if there is. This is your journey. Breathe. Smile some more. You are fine.”
“She kept this up for God knows how long but I knew I was losing the battle. Her heart rate never went through the roof and she made it up and over the bridge. She always kept it positive and that smile on her face really helped to change what was going on in her brain. I guess all the meditation and yoga classes over the years have a purpose in her life now. So now, she’s back down on the ground and she sees trees and that means solid ground, and she still has over 30 miles to go to get to the train station. I give up. She did it. She’s drinking water and driving on. She didn’t stop to throw up or cry or anything. She drove on. She breathed and smiled through it and cursed me all the way.
PTS didn’t win that day, and now, allow me to explain why I believe this is not a fear. By definition, fear is “an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat. I knew the bridge was safe, not dangerous and would not cause pain, nor threaten me. The problem was control, and that the problem was essentially my recovering and reaction to Post Traumatic Stress from Iraq. One way I found to help explain this loss of control was through art. Here is a book sculpture representing loss of control:
Book sculpture of loss of control that I’m falling over a cliff at the top of a mountain on a hike but saved by a dog.
Now, I still need to continue to recover from this PTS and I want the triggers to stop creating a reaction like this. So I’m working on it, and getting help.
To help the reader understand better about this driving experience, I found a video of this particular drive and inserted it as a hypertext link when I named the two bridges in the second paragraph, then I challenged the reader to watch the video to see if they have any sort of reaction like I had. Frankly, when I watched the video it wasn’t nearly as awful as the real thing. My point also was to try to make a distinction between fear and PTS–I hope I have accomplished that. Some people are deathly afraid of heights but this is not that. Before going into combat, I found tall bridges or long causeways over water to be uncomfortable at most, but never fearful. But when I came back from Iraq, there have been many behaviors that I’ve changed, not out of fear but out of loss of control or perceived loss of control. I chose to add the book sculpture that I created in art class last semester to also explain the sensation of loss of control in wide, open spaces. Again, it’s not about fear, yet perhaps it is anxiety that can be very difficult.
This assignment caught my eye for many reasons. I love photography in general and I really liked the idea of being able to turn some form of art into another new form of art that could incorporate different mediums of art. Over this past year Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” album turned 20. I remember growing up listening to this song on the radio and I actually even got to see them preform in concert.
I wanted to take the album and turn it into something literal. I wanted to take a photo of rain drops and turn the droplets into tiny Jupiter.
I started out by finding an image of rain drops that I could set as the background for my image. Once I found one I liked, I started looking for images of Jupiter. I know I didn’t want a super realistic photo of the planet, I wanted to have a more cartoon like image. I found one that had a dark background so I cut the background out in order to get it by itself. When I finally got it on its own, I started placing it on the drops. I didn’t have a specific idea of how many drops I wanted to show that were regular or how many I wanted as the planet. So I just started throwing some planets on the background until I was happy with my final product!
I wanted to leave some rain droplets visible as well because I thought it would give the image another layer to it. Its called drops of Jupiter and so my interpretation would have some real rain drops mixed in with some Jupiter drops. Our theme from ds106 is The Joy of Painting. Although we aren’t necessarily painting while we do our work in the class I believe the point is you can find joy within art. While making this I actually was having fun and was enjoying my time. I was also proud to be able to practice some of my digital skills as well. It is really nice to see myself making progress especially since I was buggin about how limited my digital skills were. I really loved the idea of taking something from one artist and the imagery they have created through lyrics and turning it into visual art. It was a really fun assignment that got me into a creative zone, I highly recommend.
Ok, ok, ok, I know it sounds crazy, but Baby Groot was in my room! Look, that’s totally him! (my photo is on the right, reference on the left) And it makes sense right? It’s snowing outside right now so he probably came in to get out of the cold. He ran off after I took the picture, but I’m gonna try to lure him out with some pant food as soon as I can google what juvenile sentient alien vegetation likes for dessert. Maybe Oreos?
Visual Assignment: It’s A Bird, It’s A Plane
“Have you ever seen that picture that *might* be the loch ness monster, but it’s probably just a floating log? Well, now it’s your turn to perpetuate a myth – the myth of superheroes. Go out and take a picture of something that you know isn’t a superhero, but could be. Is that Superman, or just a bird? Is that Antman, or do you need to do a better job cleaning the kitchen? Who’s to say?”
Just to forward, this whole thing is very very silly. It doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but I like it. I like the idea that a little alien tree found its way into a UMW dorm room and is avoiding the resident who is trying to befriend him with human cookies. I think it’s rather cute. It could be the beginning of a great comedy about two very different people (and tree) becoming best friends getting into all sorts of trouble. Just imagine when the student goes to school and Baby Groot tries to tag along. No one can see him, he’s an alien! If the government found out, he’d get taken away and experimented on! The student must distract the class while Baby Groot dances on the window sill, has to smuggle him into the UC to get food, the possibilities are endless! So I think it’s kind of a funny story. It makes me smile and that’s all I will ask it to do.
Now, making this little story was rather easy. After finding the assignment, I started daydreaming about what superhero I could do. I thought about trying to catch a photo of Jack Frost because it was snowing outside, but when I started thinking about the plants in my room and what superhero they could be, I had it. Once Baby Groot was a possibility, I was not going back. I used the camera on my phone to take the picture. Believe it or not, it took a minute for me to take an appropriately shaky picture. My first few tries were way too static and clean-looking. This was going to be best if the alleged sighting of Baby Groot was suspect at best. Imperfection really is an art. I couldn’t figure out how to make the two photos appear side by side on the blog page, so I just took a screenshot of them in a google doc and used that. If the wall is too high, dig underneath it.
Heres my collage of my favorite photos where I feel the most relaxed! #ds106 #visualassgnments#visualassigments2109 pic.twitter.com/b4ccu3uOsv
— lindsey hendrickson (@lindshendric) May 24, 2020
Here are some of my favorite places to relax and chill. Top left is the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fransisco. This spot was so beautiful and I took this with my camera and edited it with a filter. The top left is Alcatraz. May is not a relaxing place for some but it was the best trip EVER. I love learning about history so that was ALL FOR ME. The Picture with the Sunset is one of my all-time favorites. It’s just so calming to be on an airplane excited to go somewhere and look out your window and see something like this. The last photo again is one of my top 5 photos I have taken and it was on a beach in San Fran. It was just me and my Aunt and that day were just so marvelous.
For this remix assignment, I chose to mix two 80’s film and audio together.
The trailer is of the movie Hitcher, a thriller movie and a comedy audio of planes, trains, and automobiles. I used Quicktime to record both the film and the audio, mixed it together using iMovie, edited here and there to get the time right.
For this assignment, we had to go through old videos and pictures from high school and create a video reflecting on that time. I really enjoyed this assignment because a lot of the pictures I used, I haven’t looked at in ages.
I first downloaded the pictures I wanted to use. I then put them into iMovie and in the order I wanted them. I then put text over all the images explaining what they were from and the year. Lastly, I added some fun music to the end and a little introduction page.
I am really happy with how it turned out and glad I took a trip down memory lane
PS: This is a 2.5 star assignment so I am done for the week!
When you hear the word “honor,” what person or character comes to mind? For me, it’s Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender, my childhood show. For some reason, I’ve been going down memory lane a lot lately. As I was looking for another video assignment to do, I went along with Character Description (originally 3 stars, personal effort at 5 stars). However, I wanted to add my own little twist to it.
Have you watched “Learn the Alphabet with _______” videos? That’s where I got the idea to modify this character description assignment. Since Zuko has a lot of iconic lines, I thought that I would use each letter in the alphabet to present as many Zuko lines as possible. In this way, I can present Zako’s character from a unique and unconventional perspective. That said, it turned out to be more tedious than I expected.
My first challenge was finding quotes for each letter, and I eventually had to get a little creative (especially for the letters “v” and “x”). I first searched Zuko videos and went through dozens to find the specific quote I wanted or to listen for anything I could play around with. Some quotes I wanted to use I could not find videos. Even though I have the full DVD set, I did not want to download them onto my laptop because of the lack of storage in my laptop. Of course, I plan on binge watching the show now that I went through all this effort of browsing through videos. But that’s besides the point.
I downloaded a number of videos and trimmed them to get the exact words and phrases I needed, and put them all together. To add on to the silliness of the video, I made the automated speech voice say things like “A is for… B is for…” At the end, I added one of those childhood trap remixes.
Looking at this video again, it’s one of those things you create where you say jokingly, “Wow I hate myself.” Honestly, this is such a gag video, it’s garbage, but I had so much fun with it.
so the goal of this assignment was to be Super Open about your past & share a diary entry from when you were an angsty teen. However! in light of our current radio show project! i decided to dramatically read snippets of Winston (from 1984)’s diary! And honestly? the end result is really really good, if i do say so myself!
So what i did was open up a free online pdf of the book (interested?) & use the “find” feature on google to look for whenever the word “wrote” appears. This led me to all of the times in which Winston wrote in his diary. I copied them all into a word document with the intention of reading all of them for the upload. However, upon attempting a dramatic reading of some of the longer entries, I realized that it was a little bit boring and irrelevant. Thus, I decided to pick and choose the entries that i thought showed Winston’s progression through the novel, from a man full of rage with nowhere to put it, to a critically reflecting outcast, then to an ideal member of the party machine. Once I decided on the diary bits i wanted included, I took a couple takes in the vocal recording booth & spliced and edited into a final product that i’m happy with.
Overall I think this turned out really well, and I liked trying to show Winston character development through just tone of voice and words. I did struggle with figuring out what to cut, however. For example, the very first entry in Winston’s diary is a monologue of a war movie he saw, and I think it encapsulates how, at the beginning of the novel, he was A Little Different from everybody else, but still pretty heavily conditioned/under Big Brother’s thumb. I realized I had to cut it, however, because it was a very lengthy entry that just didn’t contribute enough to the progression to be worth keeping.
