They say you can tell a lot about a woman from the contents of her purse.

But in all honesty, I think you can tell a lot about a person from the contents of their “constant companion” throughout life. This visual assignment tasked us with showing off and describing the contents of our purse, backpack, murse, etc.

Personally, I don’t carry a purse around; And as much as I’d love to show you all my messy backpack filled with my laptop and old food wrappers, I thought I would take this visual assignment as an opportunity to show you the contents of my character Justin Case’s “constant companion”: his briefcase.

Justin Case’s briefcase is vital to his success as a lawyer and an agent. His case looks like a regular briefcase, but you will notice that it contains two sets of lock combinations in order to unlock it. This is because this ordinary looking briefcase opens up and contains some of Justin’s most important and prized possessions.

The first item in Justin’s case is his most prized possession, an old family photograph. As we know, Justin’s wife and daughter were murdered. His wife and daughter’s death is what inspired him to go undercover and help bring the same mobsters that murdered his family to justice inside the courtroom. His family is a huge part of Justin’s family because Justin’s family is what drives him to fight for justice throughout Detroit.

The next thing in Justin’s briefcase are the case files for fighting against the mobsters he brings into court. These case files contain information that is public knowledge but also contains information that Justin found during his time spent undercover infiltrating Detroit’s most notorious mobsters and finding any and all information or evidence that He can either plant or use to win his cases.

This device is a small, cellphone transmitter that Justin will use to gather information on his suspects and bring them to justice. It contains a microphone so he will often place it so he can eavesdrop on the suspects he is prosecuting both inside and outside of court. This allows him to find evidence and information that make his cases better!

The last item in Justin’s case is his hat. While this hat looks like an ordinary hat, it contains a microphone on the inside that connects to the cellphone transmitter. This way, Justin can easily hear and eavesdrop on conversations without appearing like he is doing so. He also just looks really good in his hat.

The best part of completing the What’s in your bag? assignment was that it allowed me the chance to give my character, Justin, more life. I applied personal characteristics to Justin, who he is, what he is like, and what is relevant to his story to the items that would be found in his actual briefcase if you were to open it. Doing so, I not only gave you all a better idea of who Justin is as a lawyer and an agent and a better idea of what types of things are most important and relevant to Justin and his story.

This assignment was fairly easy to complete. Using Justin’s story, I took the time to search the internet for various items that I think Justin would have in his briefcase. Then by adding descriptions of each item, I was able to express not only what the item was, but why it was so important to Justin. the items range from ordinary items to spy gadgets that Justin uses undercover.

I had a lot of fun with this assignment because ti was a chance for me to use photographs to embellish Justin’s life. Sometimes seeing is believing and being able to see what would be included in Justin’s briefcase allowed me to visually believe that Justin’s character is becoming more and more alive.

Have you ever heard and song and a particular lyric stood out to you right away? Have you ever heard a song that takes you back in time to years and years ago? Have you ever felt so emotionlly connected to a song that its almost as if the artist was in your own head at the time they wrote it and was able to convey your inner thoughts and feelings that you couldnt even express?

There is no denying the power of music. Music has the ability to connect us to one another, to change our mood, and to express our inner feelings that we ourselves have trouble expressing. When I think of music, I think of some songs that I have gotten me through the best of times and the worst of times. There are times where I will hear an old song, and regardless of how many years has passed, the minute I hear the first chord begin to play I am brought back down memory lane to a time where that song was the most relevant soundtrack to my life.

Growing up, I used to keep a journal of some of my favorite song lyrics and songs. I would color coordinate them based on how they made me feel, and include the date that I discovered the song or lyric. As I got older, I would refer back to that journal a lot as a reminder of some good times and some bad ones. But that journal also served as a symbol for the ability of music to move a person.

We all have that one song or that one line/lyric stuck out to us so much so that when we heard it for the first time, it was as if it was written just for us.

The purpose of one of this week’s visual assignments was to use a lyrics or lyrics from a song that stood out to you, and make it into a visual. 

When I first read this assignment, one song immediately jumped out in my mind: “Praying” by Ke$ha.

For those who don’t know, “Praying” was Ke$ha’s comeback song after she was forced through an emotional sexual assault trial against the director of her former record label.

The song is all about overcoming fear and hopelessness, and going through life’s hardest battles but still having the strength to get up and fight no matter what.

The first time I heard this song was an emotional experience because I was familiar with why Ke$ha wrote the song in the first place. But as I listened to the song, one line was sung that clung to my mind and my heart was:

Ke$ha’s song and these lyrics, in particular, came to me at a time in my life where they expressed exactly how I was feeling and expressed my feelings more perfectly than I ever could. It was a time in my life when something that I loved and have loved for most of my life was taken out of my life, and I was left to feel hopeless. When I heard this song, it showed me that there will be times and people in your life that leave you feeling like you are worthless and that all hope is lost. But through those feelings and through the darkest times, you can rise and become stronger than you or anyone else ever expected you to be.

I wanted to make sure that if I was going to make a visual for this lyric, I made something that fit not only what was being said, but visually would express how this line makes me feel. To this day, this song lyric is one of the most tragic lyrics I have ever heard in my life, but it is also one that fills me with strength and hope. Using Canva, I designed this graphic by uploading an image of a sunrise my friend took from a camping trip and typing the lyrics in a text box over the image.

This image I felt was the perfect representation of this song and these lyrics. Sunrises represent new beginnings, and hope for a brighter today and an even brighter tomorrow. Sunrises rise from the shadows and illuminate even the darkest of spaces. This image fits these lyrics because like a sunrise, this song is all about rising from out of the darkness into a strong light that illuminates a brighter future. I decided within the types lyrics to emphasize keywords that I think further express this idea of strength and courage in the face of fear and hopelessness.

Music makes us feel things all the time. I really enjoyed this assignment because it gave me the chance to visually express the way a song lyric made me feel. While I have never experienced the time of darkness Ke$ha did, her song and her lyrics speak volumes the a wide range of hopelessness and fear that people feel in many different situations. And that’s the power of music: One lyric can inspire or be interpreted by one person one way, and a completely different way by a completely different person.

Everyone is familiar with the old saying, “A Picture is worth a thousand words.”

Well if that’s true, what kind of words would come to mind if someone saw a picture of your bedroom?

Growing up as a kid, I probably redecorated my bedroom a million times. Every week I would move around furniture to a new spot in my room. Every Summer I would beg my parents to let me redecorate or repaint my bedroom. I longed for a room that was so artsy and dreamt that would constantly spend my time searching Pinterest looking for bedroom inspiration and fantasizing about my perfect bedroom.

It wasn’t until I was in college did I realize that constantly trying to make my bedroom look straight out of a Pinterest board was dumb. As much as I love Pinterest and look often to Pinterest for inspiration, I quickly realized that a bedroom is an area that should reflect you and who you are, contian all of your favorite things, and can overall be a space you can enjoy.

Well, it took me until my senior year of college, but I finally have my ‘Pinterest’ perfect bedroom.

When I think of my bedroom, I think of a place that perfectly reflects who I am and contains all of my favorite things. It’s a place that I go to not only sleep, but to get away from the outside world and let my guard down and just be in an environment that I find totally comfortable and at peace in.

My favorite parts of my bedroom is the color, my bed, and my tv. I picked the colors of my bedroom as coral and seafoam green because it reminded me of beachy vibes, and a beach is a place that I always feel calm and relaxed in. My bed is my other favorite part of my room. My bed to me is the ultimate place of comfort. I have the comfiest mattress possible, a plush comforter, and about 9 pillows built up on my bed. My ultimate favorite part of my bedroom is my tv. One of my favorite things to do is to watch movies, and I love being able to watch movies in my bed. As you can tell, I keep my room fairly clean (And no I didn’t just clean in to take this picture). While I can be messy sometimes, I like to keep my room clean. To me clutter is chaos and the last thing I want is chaos in my bedroom.

To show off my bedroom, I decided to create a Pinterest board because as I said, I spent so much time growing up building up my Pinterest board with Pinterest worthy bedroom aspirations. And to show it, I decided I would upload my bedroom photos to a Pinterest board.

To make a Pinterest is fairly simple. All it takes is to make a Pinterest account, create a new board, and upload pictures from your own camera or repin it from other peoples boards. I use Pinterest a lot and I had a lot of fun being able to take my love for Pinterest and use it to complete this assignment! Pinterest is a website that many people are familiar with, so the ability to use it for not only entertainment but for school I think is pretty awesome and shows potential for how the everyday digital spaces we use can be used in different ways!

When I look at my bedroom, I am proud of it. I love the space I created for myself at school here, and am going to be devastated when I have to pack it up in May when I graduate and move back home to DC where I will work. But who knows, maybe I can convince my parents to redecorate my bedroom at home again:)

Anyone who knows me knows that I love movies.

Movies to me are the best form of entertainment and the best way to spend free time. I mean come on, there’s nothing better than curling up on the couch with a warm blanket and ignoring all of life’s responsibilities.

And if you couldn’t have guessed it by now, my favorite movies are the Harry Potter movies.

My love of Harry Potter inspired me for one of this week’s assignments from the visual assignment bank.

For this assignment, our task was to create our own unique bar code from our choice of movie. A movie barcode is essentially every frame of a movie compressed into a line.

Given my love of Harry Potter, I thought this would be an interesting assignment to see what the movies I’ve watched a million times would look like all at once. Furthermore, I have had to make a barcode in the past and remember it being fairly difficult, so I wanted to try again and see if I still remembered how to make one.

Since there are 7 Harry Potter movies, I decided to do a barcode of my favorite one from the series, which is the first one (because helloooo the first one is always the best one)

To make my barcode, I used Professor Zach Whalen’s Movie Barcode Generator. This generator provides a step by step breakdown, which is fairly easy to follow, for how to turn a movie into a barcode and is the same generator I used when I made my first barcode back in Professor Whalen’s Intro to Digital Studies course at UMW.

The first step to making a barcode is to download MPEG Streamclip for Mac. I have a downloaded version of all the Harry Potter movies (I’m not kidding when I say I am obsessed) so it was fairly easy to upload into Streamclip. Once I downloaded MPEG, my next step was to set my barcodes total size in pixels. This was something I had to play around with as I kept trying to perfect my barcode and took a bit of trial and error until I finally got the correct size for width and height that made my barcode not fuzzy. My final step was to load the images from a saved file from MPEG Streamclip. After all of this, I finally got my barcode!

(SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVENT SEEN ANY OF THE HARRY POTTER MOVIES THIS BARCODE WILL COMPLETELY TELL YOU EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS SO PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK)……Jk

So if you are anything like me, the first time you looked at a barcode, you were confused. I didn’t understand how this image was meaningful and why anyone would take a movie, separate it by frame, and piece together the frames into one line that created a totally weird looking photo. But the more you look at barcodes, the more you realize that the amazing things about barcodes are what you can tell from them about a whole movie from a picture that looks like a bunch of random color lines.

Movie barcodes are useful not only gives a cool effect but can be a useful tool to study movies, especially regarding elements of color. Color is an extremely important element to any movie. Color not only gives us vibrant characters and environments to look at but also helps convey emotion through the overall color grade and lighting of a scene.

When lookin at my barcode for Harry Potter and the Sorcerers stone, it is easy for me to make out the plot that is occurring from the lines just based on the color alone. Even if you haven’t seen the movie multiple times, you can still tell based on the colors when there were happy moments (brighter colors) and when tension or conflict was high (darker colors). So when analyzing the colors of the first Harry Potter film, it is easy to see that overall, the movie conveys a positive plot line with some moments of suspense, conflict, or tension mixed in.

With this in mind, I decided to make another barcode using one of the last Harry Potter films. If you are like me, you know that as the Harry Potter films go on, it gets darker and more intense until the last but of the last movie. Watching all the Harry Potter movies, I remember always commenting on how much visually darker the later movies looked compared to the first movies. So, with this in mind, I decided to make another barcode using the second to last Harry Potter movie and compare it to the first to see if there are any differences.

Visually, this barcode is automatically very different from the first barcode I made. This barcode contains much darker colors that are consistent throughout the entirety of the film with only one or two light moments. But if you are familiar with the movies, you will quickly realize this makes sense.

As the Harry Potter films go on, we get closer and closer to the moment that Harry must face and defeat the Dark Lord. But towards the end of the series especially, the Dark Lord gains more power and influence in the magic world. This plot explains why we see such darker colors compared to the beginning of the series. Even if you haven’t seen the movies, you can tell just from the colors that drama or chaos is building due to the shift to darker colors.

I really enjoyed making and analyzing my barcode. It’s amazing the things you can tell about an entire movie simply by looking at an image that visually makes no coherent sense. More importantly, though, I am glad I completed this assignment because I was able to remilitarize myself with how to make a barcode. As I stated, I had to make a barcode in the past for a movie in a previous digital studies course. Starting this assignment, I thought I would immediately remember how to use the generator to make a barcode. For example, I completely forgot to use MPEG Streamclip to make my barcode. I kept getting frustrated because I tried to make my barcode without using Streamclip and I was having some major difficulty. It wasn’t until I went back, and reread all of the steps word for word again did I realize that I had forgotten about MPEG Streamclip and that’s why I was having so much trouble making my barcode. Even though I have made a barcode before, this assignment was still a new learning opportunity for me. Making my barcodes showed me that it doesn’t matter how familiar you are with something or how familiar you think you are with something, it’s important to take the time to make sure you are completing every step as accurately as possible. Having made a barcode twice, I definitely feel more comfortable with this kind of software/form of digital work and feel I can add it to my list of skills I have gained from this course. But I also am moving forward through the rest of this course more cognizant of making sure I am taking the time to actually follow guidelines step by step and not rushing the process because I think I know how to do something.

How do you tell a story? With pictures? Videos? Words? Well, how about telling a story with texts?

For one of this week’s assignments from the assignment bank, I decided to take on the task of telling a story using text messages.

Before this assignment, I had seen videos on Facebook or Youtube ads which tells funny or horror stories using texts. For this week, however, it was my turn to create a story.

My first task to create my story was to decide what story I wanted to even tell. This took a lot of brainstorming for me. I thought originally of posting funny conversations that occurred between me and a friend or family member. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that I could be more creative and have fun with this assignment by creating my own text exchange between two characters. That is when I got the idea to do a text exchange between two characters from my favorite movies: Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape.

As we all know by now, the theme for this course is Secret Agent. I personally don’t have much knowledge or experience when it comes to secret agent movies or characters. However, to familiarize myself more with this theme and prepare for class, I researched many characters that fit the secret agent theme. To my surprise, one character that popped up was Severus Snape.

As I said earlier, Harry Potter is my favorite series and my favorite movies. (When I say they are my favorite, I watch at least 2-3 Harry Potter movies a week). But with how obsessed I am with Harry Potter, I never considered Severus Snape to be a secret agent until this class. But the more I think about it, the more I think it is acceptable to classify Severus Snape as a secret agent.

For those who are not familiar, Severus Snape is a fictional character in the Harry Potter series. He is an exceptionally skillful wizard who is also a professor at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Snape is often described as a cold, sarcastic character who has a hatred for Harry Potter and at one point was actually working with the Dark Lord, Voldemort.

However, as the series progresses, we learn that Snape was in love with Harry’s mother when they were both students at Harry Potter. His love for Harry’s mom actually compelled him to betray Voldemort and the Death Eaters and become a double agent for Albus Dumbledore and the Order of the Pheonix.

With that being said, I decided to create my story of texts between Snape and Dumbledore and simultaneously explore our secret agent theme to uncover more of what it means to be a secret agent.

My text story contains dialogue between Snape and Dumbledore that explain how vital Snape was to the success of defeating Voldemort by gaining his trust (It also contains what I hope to be humor).

Severus Snape serves as a great example for me to have a greater understanding of what it takes to be a secret agent. Snap was able to deceive Voldemort by gaining his trust. Doing so, Snape was able to better protect Harry and help Dumbledore and Harry ultimately defeat Voldemort. Even until the end, Voldemort never suspected that Snape was crossing him and actually helping those who were attempting to defeat him. arguably, without Snape, Harry may not have been able to stop Voldemort.

In order to create my text exchange, I used the app ChatStoryMaker. This app was very user-friendly and allowed me to create my dialogue between two characters and switch back and forth. While I am not totally satisfied with how my text exchange turned out (as you can clearly see I am switching back and forth to talk), this app was really user-friendly and showed me how many apps and pieces of technologies are out there to help you easily create stories such as the one I did.

Overall, I had fun with this assignment and also had fun incorporating our Secret Agent theme! This is the first time I have created a story using texts, and I definity think it could be useful for future projects I plan to do!