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Bumping up the Girl Power

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This week, I completed a radio bumper as one of my 10 star audio assignments.

My radio bumper is for my group’s radio show called “Girl Power.” “Girl Power” is a radio show dedicated to discussing some awesome, strong, female secret agents and what makes them so amazing. The goal for this radio show is to be a way we can diversify our understanding of the secret agent theme, and how to the same elements we have explored through the course of this semester (audio, imagery, design, etc.) combine differently in female secret agent films versus male secret agent films.

Since our radio show is all about female secret agents and how awesome they are, I decided to include one awesome secret agent theme song in my bumper. I picked the “Kim Possible” theme song because Kim possible has come up consistently in our discussions this semester about secret agents. I think she is someone that people always recognize and she is also one awesome female, secret agent!

I created a radio bumper before for one of our last audio assignments, but this time around I think my bumper was a lot smoother and flowed a lot better than my original one. To create my bumper, I first downloaded the Kim Possible theme song to an audio file. Once I had the audio file, I them imported it to audacity where I could cut and paste the clip as I wanted it. Once I had the file cut down, I faded it out to include my talking introduction on my radio bumper.

As I said, this was not the first time that I used Audacity and made a radio bumper, but I felt a lot more comfortable creating my bumper this time than I did last time. I feel that at this point in the semester, all the work I put in to learning is now paying off!

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This Seems Suspect

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One of this week’s design assignments tasked us to create a suspect board.

I am an avid watcher of crime shows. And if you are like me and watch a lot of crime shows, odds are you have seen a suspect board, in which the cops hang up all the evidence they have and try to connect the lines between pieces of evidence until they lead to one final lead.

For this assignment, I decided to make a suspect board the relates to my character Justin. Justin knows that the murder of his wife and child occurred by one of Detroit’s most infamous mobsters. However, he doesn’t know who that mobster is or where he is located. All he knows is his name is Scar Face. So, this is the suspect board he has to try to piece it together.

The first piece of evidence is the crash that killed Justin’s wife and daughter. Connected to the photo of the scene of the crash is two men called ‘Freshie’ and Junior S. They are brothers and were working for Scar Face. Justin found Freshie and Junior one night after the crash and identified Freshie immediately. He planted evidence and took Freshie to jail. Junior, on the other hand, has not been seen since the crash.

Justin discovered who Freshie and Junior were through an intercepted phone message. This piece of evidence is hanging in a folder on the board. In this phone message, we can here Freshie speaking with Scar Face about Scar Face ordering them to kill Justin’s wife and child in the crash. The voices were disguised, but Justin was able to use his high tech gear to descramble the voices and match it to Freshie who was in the police’s system.

The folder is connected to a piece of evidence that is an old abandoned warehouse. Justin’s intercepted phone call traced back to this abandoned warehouse. This warehouse turned out to be headquarters for Scar Face’s mob, and is where Justin goes to infiltrate the mob frequently and plant/gather evidence. This is also where Justin discovered some hidden secrets about the mob and its ties with his father. the mob had a large file on hand that contained a lot of information n Justin’s father, who was a lawyer also notorious for putting away mobsters, one mobster was Scar Face’s son. Justin believes that this file suggests motive behind the attempt to murder him and his family as Scar Face wants revenge.

All of these pieces of evidence connect to back to one person…Scar Face.

And while Justin doesn’t know where to find him or where he is, the suspect board sets up a lot of evidence that Justin can use and add to find Scar Face and finally get justice for his family.

I used a site called Stencil to make my suspect board. Usually when I make projects like this one, I would use Canva. However, I have used Canva a lot and wanted to branch out to new design websites. Stencil was recommended by a friend and was very user-friendly. It is very similar to Canva, but I really enjoyed using some of the features that Canva doesn’t have such as more access to images and photo editing features. On particular great thing about Stencil was that it had a background that specifically look like a corkboard. This was great because it added to the design of my suspect board that made it look characteristically enough like a suspect board and people would look at it and recognize what it was. It took me a while to get used Stencil, but I’m glad I got out of my comfort zone and found another design website so I am not relying on just Canva all the time.

The thought that went into my suspect board took a lot of work. I needed to make sure that when designing my board, I was able to show how each piece of evidence fit together. I also needed to make it look ‘clean’ enough that people could recognize each image and the lines that connect them. I found that the more I imagined the story and importance of each evidence, the more lines I created to connect them all together. But as shown in my board, all the lines merge together to one giant square that is Justin’s ultimate suspect.

I had a lot of fun creating this board. Designing this board gave me the chance to design another aspect of Justin’s life that adds to his story.

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Type 1 to Type None

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One of this week’s Design Assignments tasked us to create an ad to inform them about a charity and encourage them to donate.

This assignment stuck out to me because I saw a lot of real world relevance to it, but also had the perfect charity in mind.

JDRF stands for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and is an orgnaization that is extrememley close to my heart.

I am Type 1 Diabetic. Type 1 Diabetes is also called juvenile Diabetes because it occurs in young children. For example, I was diagnosed around the age of 9. Type 1 Diabetes often gets mistaken for Type 2. People with type 1 diabetes don’t produce insulin. You can think of it as not having a key. People with type 2 diabetes don’t respond to insulin as well as they should and later in the disease often don’t make enough insulin. You can think of this as having a broken key. People with Type 2 often get it due to improper diet or weight problems. Type 1, on the other hand, is an autoimmune disease that is no fault of the person who has it, and there is nothing they can do about. JDRF is dedicated to funding research that turns Type 1 into Type None. And when I saw that this assignment dealt with making an ad of a charity, I knew this was the one I wanted to use.

I used Canva to make my graphic. Canva has quickly become one of my favorite websites to use for graphic design. To make my design, I first used a pre-used template that someone else had used to make a campaign for AIDs research. The color template was originally red, but I switched it to blue because that is the official color for juvenile diabetes. Then, I inserted the JDRF logo and using the photo tool, I searched for images that would be related to my ad like the blood drop and the shoe.

The biggest challenge to this ad was the design aspect. Asking for money is never an easy thing, but that is why design is so important. When designing an ad, you want to design it so it is attractive enough that is attracts the viewer’s attention. To do this, I needed to make sure that my ad was consistent with its color scheme and word to image ratio. I needed an ad that had a pretty color, and wasn’t very text heavy but still got the message across.

As I said, the other reason that this assignment caught my attention was that I felt it had a lot of real-world application. This assignment reminded me a lot of the types of things I would do when I was an intern this past summer on Capitol Hill in the Press department. I used Canva a lot to create images to share on the Congressman’s Social Media accounts. My internship stressed the importance of designing images that grabbed attention but had good ratio and balance in the image with its colors and words. This assignment gave me the chance to practice some of the skills I learned while in my internship. And since this type of design is what I want to do with my life, I can never get enough practice!

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A Case of Cloudiness

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For this next design assignment, I decided to create a word cloud that relates to my class character.

I have completed a word cloud before for a previous class. For that class, I had to use a word cloud generator to create a word cloud for a book. When I was first exposed to making a word cloud, I didn’t understand what the point of a word cloud was. However, I quickly learned what a world cloud is and what its use is. For my first word cloud I ever created, I used the book The Fault in Our Stars. By running the downloaded copy of this book through a website, the website automatically took out the most frequently used words in the book and created a scrambled ‘cloud’ of them. At first glance, word clouds look like a jumbled mess. But by creating a cloud of the words that appear the most frequently in the book, it provides an outline for many of the important parts of the book and main themes/ideas that appear.

With this understanding of what a word cloud is and why it’s important, I decided to make a word cloud for one of this week’s design assignments and connecting it to my character. The hardest part of this assignment was definitely coming up with the words to put in m cloud. This took a lot of thought (and some dictionary.com searches) to pick specific words that I felt were most important to include. But once I had my list, and using the online tool wordclouds.com, I typed a list of words that I felt best described who my character, Justin Case, into the website and watched my cloud form.

Here you can see both my word cloud and an outline of the words that I used and how often they appeared. The more often a word appears, the bigger it is on my word cloud. This is important because I purposefully made the biggest words/the words that appear the most be the ones that were most relevant to Justin’s story.

With this being said, you will see words like ‘death’ and ‘family’ and ‘justice/revenge/vengeance’ really big in the image. This is because these are the words that are most important to driving Justin’s story. The death of his family causes him to become a secret agent in his pursuit of justice, revenge, and vengeance for his families murders.

This was the first time I have used the website wordclouds. This website was very user-friendly. To make my list, I typed up the words I wanted to have in my word cloud and the website generated my cloud for me. The great thing about this website, however, was that you could manipulate the color and shape of the cloud to further tell a story. For example, I was able to add a briefcase to my word cloud because the briefcase itself is important to Justin’s story. Justin is a lawyer/secret agent that fights bad guys at night and locks them away during the day. As we saw in a previous post I did about the contents of Justin’s briefcase, his briefcase is important to him because it contains pictures of his family but also all of his tools he uses to fight the bad guys. So by getting to change the picture of my cloud, I was able to design an image in which not only the words told Justin’s story, but the actual cloud itself did as well.

I had a lot of fun creating a word cloud for Justin’s character. I feel that every time I complete an assignemnt and connect it back to Justin, I am making him more alive and relasitic.

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America Runs on Starbucks

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Team Dunkin or Team Starbucks?

There’s one right answer, but no matter what team you are on, one thing is for sure. America runs on coffee!

I am an avid coffee drinker, and I take my coffee drinking very seriously. And any coffee drinkers like me know that Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks are competitors with one another. Avid coffee drinkers usually fall under Team Dunkin or Team Starbucks. I personally fall with Team Dunkin.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Starbucks. In fact, I drink Starbucks a lot. But to me, Starbucks is overpriced and overhyped. And since I tend to only drink hot, black coffee, Dunkin is the way to my soul.

One of this week’s assignments gave me the chance to tackle the Dunkin vs. Starbucks debate in a fun design. The assignment called “A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” tasked me to imagine my favorite company and take it’s trademark image or logo and reinterpret it in a way that reflects the design of its enemy. With that being said, I decided to take on the Team Starbucks and Team Dunkin debate and reimagine the two logo’s into one new logo.

Making my logo was a lot of fun but required a lot more detail than I thought it would.

In order to make my logo, I first downloaded the Starbucks logo (minus the weird looking mermaid). Once I downloaded the logo, I uploaded it to a new app called Movavi Photo Editor 5. This app is available on the apple store and was an app that I have heard friends use before but never personally used myself. Since I used Photoshop for my last design assignment, I wanted to branch out and use Movavi and compare which I liked better. Plus, I only have the free trial of photoshop so I figured I should try to find a replacement that I can use when my free trial is up because I am cheap and don’t want to pay. Movavi was very simple to use. Using the tools, I took the Starbucks logo and erased the color green inside. Once the green was gone, I was easily able to fill in the text with Dunkin Donuts signature colors.

While making the logo was easy, it required a lot of careful thought and calculation into how to design a ‘mashup’ of these two companies logos.

I had to make sure that I had an appropriate balance in my new logo. For example, I needed to design my logo that incorporated both Starbucks and Dunkin, but one didn’t overpower the other. I also needed to make sure that I was incorporating both of the company’s logos original essence. Both of these companies logos are pretty recognizable, especially in regards to color. Starbuck’s green and Dunkin’s orange and pink are so easily recognizable, that for my logo I thought it would be a good idea to keep Starbuck’s original message with their name, but add in the classic Dunkin colors.

This assignment brought up a lot of new ideas about Design. When you are designing a logo, things like colors or images are almost just as important as words. If you want to design something, you want something that will be easily recognizable and stand out.

And besides, with this logo, now team Dunkin and Team Starbuck can unite.

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Oh Mamma Mia WHO IS THE FATHER?

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Can you dance…

Can you jive…

Are you having the time of your life…

Well then you my friend are a Dancing Queen!

Mamma Mia is one of my favorite movies. The scenery, the characters, the ABBA music…LAY IT ALL ON ME!

However, with how much I love Mamma Mia, there is one thing that I always struggled with….I get so frustrated not knowing who Sophies’ real dad is!

For this of you who don’t know, Mamma Mia is the story of singer mother, Donna, and her daughter, Sophie. Donna owns a hotel in Greece where Donna has raised Sophie on her own. At the beginning of the first movie, Sophie is all grown up and getting married. She wants her father to give her away but the only problem? She doesn’t know who her father is. However, Sophie discovers her mom’s old diary, and that around the time Donna was pregnant with Sophie, there were three men Donna saw. She secretly invites three men from her mother’s past in hope of meeting her real father and having him escort her down the aisle on her big day.

Bu (AND SPOILER ALERT) the end of the movie comes and we don’t find out who her real dad is. Instead, Sophie agrees that she is happy to have them all three in her life and doesn’t care to learn who her dad is.

Well guess what Sophie….SOME OF US DO CARE AND WANTED TO KNOW!!!

However, this past Summer, the world found out that there was to be a Mamma Mia 2. I was so excited to learn finally if this was my chance to find out who Sophie’s dad is. But guess what….WE STILL DON’T

One of this week’s visual assignments tasked us to create an honest movie poster. This assignment caught my eye because I love movies, and it seemed like an assignment I could have fun completing! When I stumbled upon this assignment, I was actually in the middle of watching Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again. And I knew in that moment, it was like the ABBA gods showed me a sign that I should use Mamma Mia and make my honest movie poster.

So…here we go!

The sequel to the original Mamma Mia is called Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. A lot happens in the sequel, but one thing that doesn’t happen is finding out who Sophie’s dad is. So, with this in mind, I decided to create my honest movie poster for Mama Mia: Here We Go Again!

To create my movie poster, I first downloaded the movie poster online. Once I downloaded it, I uploaded the movie poster to Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is not a software that I am familiar with, so this assignment was a good chance for me to get to practice using Photoshop. Photoshop was really easy to use. Using the eraser tab, I was able to erase the Title on the movie poster. Once the title was removed, I saved and uploaded the image to Canva and added me new title. I had a lot of fun making this movie poster and it was a great chance to get a little familiar with Photoshop.

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Driving a Story Along Using Audio

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When I think of stories, I usually think about movies or tv shows. I think of amazing visuals and images that drive the story along. Never before have I really thought of audio as a major part of the storytelling process.

One of this week’s assignments was to create a sound effects story. This was a challenge to tell a short story using nothing but sound effects. I was really nervous to complete this assignment, because I was unsure about my ability to make a story driven solely by audio, but I had a lot of fun creating this assignment.

My first task to complete this assignment was to decide on a story to tell. I came up with multiple different stories that I could tell. I thought of a boat trip, a soccer game, or a secret agent fight scene. But after a lot of thought, I finally came up with my story.

Can you guess what it is?

To make my story, I first outlined the sounds I think I needed to make my story. After that, I used a website called FreeSound. Free Sound made it really easy to find the audio clips I used for my story. I simply searched for an audio that I wanted, and Free Sound generated possible audios that fit my search. I simply had to find the perfect one I was looking for and download it! Once I downloaded all of my audio, I imported the audio into Audacity. Using Audacity, I was able to quickly cut, edit, and overlap the audio files to make my story!

Despite my nerves, I had a lot of fun with this assignment. For starters, this assignment made me a lot more comfortable using Audacity. This week is the first time I’ve used Audacity and I am starting to feel a lot more comfortable. Lastly, this assignment was my first time creating a story just using audio. Usually when I make stories, I focus on videos and images and combine audio at the end. Never in my life have I made a story simply using audio. This was an eye opening experience to show how audio is often forgotten as an important part of the storytelling process, but how stories literally cannot happen without the small background noises that sometimes go so easily unnoticed.

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Talk Secret Agent to Me

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Everyone talks to themselves and has conversations with themselves.

But would you ever record your conversations with yourself?

One of this week’s audio assignments tasked us to do just this.

Using Audacity or another audio editing software, the assignment asked us to record ourselves speaking in which we are holding down both sides of a conversation. Once we recorded ourselves, we could use the pitch changer and/or other effects to change our voice so it sounds like two different people are talking.

With how often I talk to myself, this assignment seemed easy enough. I carry lengthy two-sided conversations as just one person, and I could talk for hours. But for this assignment, I decided to remix it and involve my character’s story and this assigment.

So for this assignment, I decided to have a conversation that Justin Case intercepted on one of his missions from an old conversation between the man that murdered his family and the man that tasked him with the murder.

I started off the assignment by typing up a script of what I wanted each side of the conversation to say. Once I had my script, my next step was to download Audacity to my laptop. Audacity was one of the sites that were suggested we use this week to complete our audio assignments I have never had any experience with audacity before, so I figured I would take this assignment as an introduction to audacity.

Audacity was surprisingly really user-friendly! I recorded multiple audio recordings of me speaking. Once my recordings were finished, I could easily go back and edit the audio using the effects options offered such as changing the speed, frequency, pitch, clarity echo, etc… Since I was not very familiar with Audacity and its features, I spent a lot of time editing this assignment. I actually recorded myself multiple times because I had so much fun playing with the features that I would often lose the credibility that this was a conversation between two people. So for my final audio recording, I really focused my attention on changing the speed and the pitch, and tone. I decided to use two extremes of high and low pitch to create my character’s voices. While they don’t sound like real people, they are supposed to represent the Mob in Chicago that Justin Case is fighting against. But it’s not enough to just change the pitch or speed of how you speak, the tone you could or the vocal inflections matters as well. I made sure to be aware of how I was raising and lowering my voice in certain situations or lines of dialogue to make it all more believable.

I had a lot of fun playing around with audacity. While I feel this was a very brief intorduction and audacity has so many more capabilities than I am currently aware of, I am excited to use it more and get more comfortable with it!

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“Hey Magic Mirror, Play Me a Disney Mashup”

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I have many obsessions in my life.

Harry Potter…Coffee…Dogs…AND DISNEY!!!

To give you some context of my love for Disney, here are some pictures I took from my family’s trip to Disney last year…

I may appear like I am a 21-year-old girl in these pictures but don’t be fooled, I am actually basically a 2 year old in my heart.

So when I saw that one of this week audio assignments involved Disney, I jumped at the chance.

This assignment tasked us with creating a story using the lyrics from various Disney songs. For example, if you start with “did they send me daughters when I asked for…,” from Mulan, you could follow it up with “happy snowmen!” from Frozen.

As I said, Disney holds a special place in my heart and when my academic side and my obsession with Disney can collide and collaborate, I will always go for it.

https://soundcloud.com/user-426398537/disney-mashup-1

For this assignment, I decided to take songs from some of my favorite Disney movies and overlap them so that they flowed into one another. What this means is I let a song play and when the song hit a specific word that another song had, I then changed it so one song flowed immediately into the next to create this brand new mashup song! The song’s I used for my mashup were…

“Go the Distance”- Hercules
“How Far I’ll Go”- Moana
“Let it Go”- Frozen
“Let’s Go Fly a Kite”- Mary Poppins
“Breaking Free”- High School Musical
“Star to the Right”- Peter Pan

To create my ‘story’, I first downloaded all these songs from youtube and used a site to transfer them into audio files (***disclaimer I do not own the rights to any of these songs that belongs to my main man Walt Disney***).

Once I downloaded them into audio files, my next step was to cut and merge the audio files into one song. But let me tell ya, this part of the assignment was not all Disney love and magic….it was tough! But, for my love of Disney, I stuck with it. Usually, when I do a project like this, I use iMovie. But I got a new laptop this semester and it is an HP, so I no longer had access to iMovie and had to find another option for how to merge my songs. Luckily, after many Google searches and help from previous students who took this class, I learned about a couple of websites and apps where I could merge all of the songs and cut them into one audio file.

The first site I used was a audio merging site where I uploaded all of the audio files and merged them into one giant song. From there, I used an app I have never used before called Video and Audio Cutter and Converter. This app allows you to upload one piece of audio and cut it at various places until you are left with one audio file of the clipped song you want. To figure out where I had to clip the videos, I listened to each song and set time parameters for how long one song would play and another song would begin. After I did this for each song, it merged the clipped audio files to play one cohesive song. Then, I just uploaded my song to Soundcloud and shared it with the clas!

This assignment definitely pushed me out of my comfort zone a little bit. I have always relied on iMovie to create assignments like this in the past, but this assignment allowed me to explore other sites and apps out there that can create awesome audio files!

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The Type 1 Diabetic of Fredericksburg

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Beverley Hills…Orange County…New Jersey…Atlanta…and now thanks to one of this week’s visual assignments, Fredericksburg!

Looking through the audio assignments for this week, the Real Housewives tagline assignment immediately jumped out to me.

I hate to admit it, but I am a Real Housewives fanatic. My dad loves to call it ‘trash’ tv, I love to call it Real Housewives Sunday Ticket (Like the NFL Sunday ticket but you just binge watch the Real Housewives all Sunday). The Real Housewives of New Jersey, of Orange County, of Beverley Hills…you find a city and I’ve probably watched every Real Housewives show that’s available near that area.

For this less familiar with the Real Housewives franchise, every episode starts off with introductions, in which the Housewives introduce themselves with their very own tagline. Some opt for the humorous tagline. Some go for more sarcastic or snarky statements. I’ve memorized more tagline than I care to admit, and actually, have a top 10 list of the all-time best taglines for those interested (#noshame). And I know that every Real Housewife fan, myself included, has spent time and effort into coming up with their own tagline if they were ever called to be a housewife.

THIS ASSIGNMENT WAS MY CALL TO BE A HOUSEWIFE

Well, sort of. This assignment gave me the chance to share what my tagline would be if I was on the show which I will take!

As I said, I’ve had my tagline for a long time. When I hear someone’s tagline, it is supposed to represent who they are or who they want others to perceive them as. It can be dramatic, funny, sarcastic, witty, or snarky. But these taglines represent the women and the stories that unfold throughout the season and their lives while on the show.

So, if I were to be on a show like this, my tagline would be…

Featuring “the Type 1 Diabetics of Fredericksburg” a spinoff show of the Real Housewives with Diabetics instead of Housewives!

I got the idea to complete this assignment as part of a spinoff show called the “Type 1 Diabetics of Fredericksburg” from my love of the real Real Housewives and after I saw a spoof video in which type 1 diabetics made their taglines that were similiar to the show’s taglines but fit their lives as Type 1 Diabetics.

I am a Type 1 Diabetic and found this video to be so hilarious that I decided to make up my own tagline that would fit if I was ever on the real Real Housewives of my ‘spinoff’ real housewives.

As a type 1 diabetic, sugars tend to make my blood sugar spike. In order to control my blood sugars, I have to give myself a bolus, which is an injection of insulin that counters the sugar levels in my blood. Type 1 Diabetes obviosuly runs my life, so I thought coming up with a catchy tagline that fit my life as T1D would be perfect for this assignement.

Simply using my iPhone, I downloaded an audio recording of the music used during the taglines in the Real Housewives show. Once I had the audio, I voice recorded over it saying my tagline. Then I simply uploaded it to SoundCloud and became A Type 1 Diabetic of Fredericksburg!

I had a lot of fun with this assignment and it was a great intro assignemnt to get me ecxited to making more audio projects throughout the week!