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And Then The End {Amen}

Welcome to the infamous, the legendary, the spectacular DS106 Roller Coaster Ride! On this interactive trip, we will take you all around the highs lows and middles of this here semester of Digital Storytelling in Spring 2022. 

First, we will start off with the best place to begin, the beginning! Here we get a good look at the first introductions, a smorgasbord of media introducing me, bird!

(i was a little unsure of myself at the beginning of this semester, which is to be expected. so i can kind of tell in my first week of assignments that i am floudering a little, but that clears up as i got used to the class.)

And next up— Oh, look over there! Is it a cloud? it’s a plane? It’s an alien specimen! And a high point of our ride!

(i just like this assignment a lot, it’s fun, but it was also the moment where i kind of really got this class. i understood then what this class was about and caught on.)

And now a plot point that totally won’t resurface later with a callback, a very nice olde cooking show!

(this took me so so long, as there was a learning curve, but it was so worth it. and later, when i did pt.2 it went faster because i knew what i was doing.)

And another small detail that you will never see again, this moving art piece!

(this is something i didn’t think i could have made before this class. i had no idea that making a gif was so easy! this project is also important in my wider ds106 experience because making visual and audio glitches was something i found myself doing so so often. definetly a cool recurring theme)

Quick! a detour into a house that is very normal, no skeletons in these closets! or ghouls, or zombies, or ghosts, or p.e. teachers. Nothing scary here.

(this was probably the most shocking assignment for me. i did not expect to get scared or make something so wonderfully unpleasant. this was a very interesting change of pace for me, much like my other work about a monster in the woods, though a little basic, it holds a special place in my heart)

Oh, what is that sound? could it be? yes, it is! the first ever album with no music on it! If you listen closely you can’t hear it!

(this one was a bit of a happy accident, a “yes, and—” senatio that turned out quite lovely.)

Please meet our very special guest, the tranquil deamon, we’ll only meet him for a moment.

(this one is a joy of mine, it took a lot of playing around with, but i loved how it came out)

And as the car starts to tick up wards on this mountain of rickety supports, behold our not-so-halfway-halfway point, the Coroner’s Tale, look at it zoom across the sky leaving trails of blood sweat and tears poured into it.

(for the full story, read the progress post, but this was very very taxing, but yielded a great result even though i lot a lot of precious sleep over it)

Here is our middle piece. A nice level path, perfectly mediocre. A simple one.

(this assignment fulfilled it’s purpose. it wasn’t anything crazy. just kind of there.)

And now a remix of a first try that wasn’t included cause it didn’t really deserve to. This edited version does though!

(i really loved all of the remix assignments for the chance to go back and re-do things, and this is one of my favorites of the remixes. i like this version much better, and it was fun to try to edit it down but retain it’s integrity)

And look, a mosaic of the strange types of glass and some interesting tweets!

(daily creates were of course a staple throughout this whole semester, but i really started to get them more towards the end so i am more proud of these later ones.)

Now for a completely surprise of a callback, our second cooking show!

(i learned this semester that i really like editing video, though i like it more when i am not on screen. this assignment and the first cooking video are some of my stand out assignments. i had a lot of fun with both)

And for the fan favorite, we have the one and only Keira Knightley!

(this was a triumph for me, i really liked making this amv and the class liked it too, most of my engagement comment-wise was on this post. and as it should be, keira knightley is not to be ignored!)

Now for our nose-dive! here we hurdle down in the lowest part of our here ride, the audio trainwreck!

(i would say this was a struggle, so many things went wrong. i should have chosen songs that matched up more, and i had no idea that it was going to take so so long to really do well. i bit off more than i could chew, and on a week where a had a lot of other stuff going on. this is not my favorite, but it happened)

And this Bird hit his stride with tweeting around here, better late than never, but almost never.

(again, i like a lot of my more recent daily creates, they are fistfuls of fun-sized candies)

And for the final falling drop, we have the final project! And a bit of it’s construction.

(i mean, read more in the construction post, but this was crazy. the final project was a very fun experience that taught me more about my own creative process.)

And it is only fitting to end this ride as we ended my first ever blog post:

“May the grass be green for you, even if it has snow on top of it,

I’ll catch you on the flippity flop,”

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Pulling Back the Final Curtain…

So, this is the weekly summary for the final project week. I’m putting the gimmicks up on the shelf for this one, here you get my process, and hang tight, it’s a long one.

Also, spoilers ahead, I’m talking in-depth about what I did for my final project, obviously.

To begin, I already had some content made for this project, though they were kind of spread out and sort of out of order.

I had a bit of writing,

A very impish outline,

Two characters,

An incomplete video explaining a magic system,

A strange event,

And a group of reactions to a strange event,

When I sat down to put it all together, I realized I not only had to organize it but also add in more connective tissue. The first thing I did was write a better-behaved outline, detailing not only what I had done but the things I needed to create to add to the story. Like most of my outlines, it changed a lot as I realized what I was actually capable of doing. For instance, I would have loved to do more videos, but I had no way to film them.

My new outline

Then I wrote how Eric and Miller met. This was an interesting thing to do. I originally was lost. But once I thought of the setting, that they could meet in a library, it flowed from there. I like writing, so that was very fun. And that is where the marble imagery comes from, but I’ll discuss that later.

Then I made the audio of Eric talking with Hector. This was really fun actually. I wrote up the script, practiced my semi-New Zeland accent, and went at it. I edited it in iMovie and added in some applicable sounds from freesound. I actually recorded the sound of Hector’s chair moving back because I didn’t find any online that I liked. When I uploaded it, I kind of made the photo of the Miller’s hat. I couldn’t find a black hat with a good background so I edited that together.

Then it was time for another autopsy report. This one on paper. I found the template online and filled it in with what I wanted. Then the police report, which I also found a template for that online. Goshen is actually a real place in Indiana, and it came on the police report template so I just used it. I did have to edit some of the report because it was originally about vehicular accidents, but I made it work. Shout out to Photopea, my savior.

At this point, I started thinking about how it was all going to be displayed. I knew I wanted it on a subdomain, but I originally wanted to see if there was an application that would work better than a blog. I tried to use Omeka, I even downloaded it and everything but it wasn’t what I wanted. I decided to stick to what I know and use WordPress.

So I made the new blog and started customizing it. I took a photo of an old piece of paper for the background and used a photo of marble as the icon.

The picture that shows up in the corner of the tab is of the watch face from the last chapter and also my impish outline.

Then I started making all the new posts, each one being a different chapter, and thinking of titles. There was some trouble with getting them all in order and also making the first chapter come first but the prologue also being an option before it. I made the first chapter the landing page and linked to the prologue at the bottom of it. Not the most eloquent solution, but it worked.

Then all I needed was the ending. This also took some time. Again, I know that I love writing so I didn’t want to be biased and immediately do that. But after looking at the options, there weren’t any. I didn’t feel like I had the set/costume/acting to film it, and audio just wouldn’t work. Lord knows I don’t have the ability to do a visual drawing/photo thing. And it was nice to end it how it started, with a blog post of writing. So I did that. I know Eric as a character well enough that the last scene was pretty easy to write. Endings are difficult, but I don’t think this one is so bad.

Now, enough nitty-gritty-the-making-of, time for my thoughts on this final project overall.

I have never told a single story in a variety of mediums, so that was interesting. There is a part of me that views it as a first creation, a first try. There is so much I would go back and tweak, knowing what I do now, but because it is already filmed or edited, or photographed, I can’t.

I don’t often know what story I am telling until I finish it, so usually my first draft is going back and adding in all the details that make it all make more sense. I couldn’t really do that with this one. Also because I am so close to this work and no one else has seen it I don’t know how it reads if that makes sense. I don’t know where it is confusing or disjointed for the viewer. I tried to toe the fine line of mystery and lack of information, but still comprehensible and followable. I wanted it to be a kind of fill-in-the-blanks for the viewer, but because I am the author and I know everything that happens, I don’t know if I left the viewer too many blanks. For instance, there are time jumps. Some chapters immediately follow each other but some do not. I don’t know if that is obvious to the view or not.

But overall, I am very proud of my story, and I do want to show it off to people and see if they like it as well. I put a lot of work into it, and I have found myself thinking about it even after I finished assignments and shouldn’t be thinking about homework. I might write a longer story about Eric and Miller for myself, I have intrigued myself with their narrative. This is something I will be glad to look back on in a few years, and maybe laugh at, but also remember all the cool things I learned in this class.

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Swim Meet Results W12

Welcome to the recap of our very close but not close enough to the last swimming event of the year! Our athletes have worked hard to improve themselves and keep up with this year’s intense training schedule. To give our swimmers an appropriate challenge, we choose more difficult events for this past meet.

The first event was a 200 backstroke,

Then the 200 IM,

followed immediately by a 200 breaststroke.

and the 500 free, of course!

and for the cool down, 250 SKIPS.

Everything was a tie, down to the last agonizing twentieth of a second. If you want to see what some of the fantastic work other teams did, look no further!

Animals Doing Funny Things with a Prequel

Weekly Summary 11

Two Worlds Colliding Mashup

https://blog.wadenelson.net/blog/lets-play-some-vidya-games/#comment-118

Stop and Listen

X Men the Live-Action

Music and Imagery Remix 

Superhuman in Every Day Life

Remix on Death’s Door

https://oliviafoster2.com/ds106/a-changing-character/#comment-102

It’s a pocket protector its a calculator its super nerd 

Don’r Rain on my Parade Broadway Mashup 

Be sure to swim on in next week when all of the lengths are doubled!

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High Afternoon on Monday the 31st of March

The salty air whipped through his lungs and he breathed deep, letting it fill him to the brim. Exhaustion blanketed him, pressing him down. He sank into the sand, burying his hands into it, the warmth from the fine white grains seeping first along the pattern of thin scars still healing, then into his calloused palms and aching fingers, turning it all into a heat haze. Now that the projection was done, the tattoos that had flared into prominence on his hands were fading slowly, returning back to his own original skin tone, leaving the pinkish marks in its place. He closed his eyes in simple rest bite, letting the sunlight emanate through his eyelids. The waves roared their approval, their pride in his accomplishment. This was the first time he had tried to call on anything with the markings on his skin, and he made it, he was here—

“¿Qué haces aquí?” a voice asked. He looked up to see a woman silhouetted against the falling sun. She wore a loose shirt flapping in the breeze and pants with the legs rolled up. Hints of colorful embroidery curled around the sleeves and cuffs, like thread vines curling around whatever it pleased. She wore a hat low over her features. 

“Nada, señora,” he said politely. She frowned.

“¿Cómo llegaste a esta playa?” she asked. 

“No me vas a crees,” he said. He moved to stand up but she moved back and held out her hand in a warning.

“¡Siéntate!” 

He stopped and slowly sat down again. “Lo siento.” 

“¿En serio, por qué estás aquí?” she said, “dime rápido.” 

“Necesito visitar un hombre,” he said, “él está aquí, su nombre es Héctor?” 

“¿Héctor? ¿Qué quieres con él?” she asked.

“Quiero hablar,” he said, “solo hablar.” She hesitated for a second but relented.

“¿Te llaman Eric?” she asked.

“Sí, me llaman así,” Eric said.

“Bien. Sígueme,” she said, turning. Eric stood and bid the beach farewell as he followed her inland, the swell of the waves fading with each step.

I used the last remix to expand on my final project idea, and that went very well, so I wanted to do the same thing with this one. Because I only have a few assignments about the final project story, I decided pretty much by default to remix Monday the 31st of March.

This remix prompt immediately spoke to me because I am taking Spanish right now and I loved the idea of trying to write dialogue in Spanish. So I gave it a shot. Because the characters have some more advanced sentences than what I am learning in class, I sent the story to my Spanish professor for him to read it over, and he gave me some corrections, so shoutout Prof. Campos Dintrans!

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Two New Characters for the Price of One!

For this remix, I wanted to tell more of my final project story, expand on what I did in set 2 video 2 | Ted Lewis and Permissions, and figure out more of what is happening. So when I saw this remix, it just fit! But instead of one extra character, I added two for the price of one, but just their voices.

To make this, I wrote out a script, recorded the lines, and spliced them all together in iMovie. It was pretty simple, which was a fantastic and much need break from the more intense mash-ups I have done this week.

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bugs and cats and a distinct lack of rats

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Filthy Blueberry Brow Disaster

“Mashup two (or more!) songs that are similar to each other, by either the same or different artist(s). Do your best to show the similarities—edit parts of the songs next to each other. If it’s possible to do this without making it sound terrible, try to overlay the songs at parts to highlight how much they sound alike.”

Similar Songs

Well, I did this assignment. I spent many many long hours recording different layers of these songs and trying to mix them together. Am I very proud of what I did? Yeah. Not cause I think it’s very good, a lot of the transitions could be better, and the whole thing could be better, but because there are some parts I like and I really tried my hardest.

To be fair, I did do a song mash-up a few years ago that turned out really well, and every other mash-up I do is compared to that high standard, but still.

To make this, I recorded different layers of both songs so I could pick apart the seams a little and put them back how I wanted. Youtube had most of them, but I had to find a program to isolate the lyrics of ‘filth’ myself.

My iMovie looked something like this

I put it all in my editing method of choice, good old iMove, and played around until I got the thing you can hear now.

In the future, I probably would have chosen two songs that are more similar or at least have better transition points. Hey, maybe me in the future can come back and remix this assignment with new and improved editing skills. Until then, I think I’ll stick with the originals of these songs.

If you want to hear what might be my peak music editing skills, Take a Breezeblock is right here.

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Dancing Queen of Moonlit Times

“Make your own song using other lyrics. Complete this assignment by combining the lyrics from at least 5 different songs in order to make a song with flowing lyrics. This song should be at least 2 minutes long.”

Making a Song

I know, I know, this isn’t two minutes long. It’s about half that, but I have a good reason. This assignment says at least five songs, and I used clips from nearly fifteen different songs, which is an equitable amount of work I’d say.

So I started with the poem, obviously. This is actually a poem that I wrote years ago in high school as a mash-up of a bunch of different songs. I immediately thought of it when I saw this assignment and thought that using it was very much in the vein of remixes and mash-ups. Something old and something borrowed made into something new.

I recorded all of the bits of the songs and put them in iMove, cutting them all down to just the relevant line.

I used google docs to make the visuals, just changing the color of the text line by line. The assignment didn’t mention visuals, however, the poem is a little more abstract, the songs do not mesh super well and the words can be difficult to pick out, and I thought having the visual of the poem would help bring it all together. And I think it did just that.

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Weekly Index 11

Cars, 14

Commenting,

christmas, 2

crash, 8

creates (daily), 19

eating, 35

milk (and honey), 38

recovered, 23

scenes, 49

video (lyric), 127

wheels, 62

Keira Knightly, 19

Pirates of the Caribbean, 72

Permissions, 73

Rats,

index of 26

Ted Lewis, 54

Skirts,

sewing of, 39

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set 2 video 2 | Ted Lewis and Permissions

“Make a how-to tutorial about something you are good at like a sport or hobby. Add a song that fits and narrate it”!

How To Tutorial

Again, I might have gone a little off-book, but this week was for video, not writing. I chose this assignment because I wanted to do something that related to the story that I want to do for my final project, something to help me uncover more of what is going on.

I started with the idea of this magic and filmed the video. Because I didn’t have a tripod I hung my camera from the bottom of my bed (it’s lofted) with yarn to get the correct perspective.

I recorded the audio and mixed it together, adding all of the glitches and static over it. I am getting very good at manually making glitches, they seem to be a re-occurring theme.

Below is a sneak peek of what my iMove looks like, this is the most I could get to fit on one screen, but there are still nine more layers of audio and two minutes of film that go off the page.

The story I was going for, more like the story I am beginning, was someone explaining how to do magic in a video format. Later I want to expand on this, because the back story is that there is a war on magic happening and the recorder of this video knows that magic is about to be destroyed. At least for now. So he is trying to preserve the magic so that people in the future can learn it. The song at the beginning is a cover-up. I plan to do an assignment later with two people discovering this and it will be their reactions to it and the story continuing on in that way.

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