Time for the next one

Back to work, another project on the way. This time it's the "Culture mission". I have looked through a few assignments for this mission and so far, I have been interested in "Youtubing", "Memes" and "Blogging" the most. Not sure what I'll choose yet but I'm going towards "Blogging". I've never done proper blogging before and would like to try it. I would like to find out more about it and hopefully create a blog with a group that could be beneficial. 

For our next project we need to choose another group and we can’t work with the same people again. This means we will learn how to work with different people. This will improve our communication skills and co-operation skills.  

I have read through “Youtubing” and tried to think of some ideas. I already have a Youtube channels which would made it easier and since I use Youtube often I know a lot about the site. Using Youtube often means I am comfortable with it and I have an idea of the types of videos that are the most popular to watch by other users. Youtube is constantly being use all around the world. There is a lot of different topics to choose from for Youtubing. We could use our own phones for this which would make it easier and faster to record the videos as we are all familiar with how to use our own phones. We can also collect any of our videos for this and create a compilation of some topic. I would like to do Youtubing because then I could use and develop my video editing skills.   

“Memes” also looks interesting. They are everywhere on social media and many people use them often. They bring humor and are easy to make. Very often they are in the comedy category but can be serious and have a hiding meaning to them. I do like “memes “and have some ideas but I think that doing the project on “memes” would be very similar to my previous project that I did on “gifs”. Therefore, I would prefer to pick something else. I would like to gain some new skills and learn something new. 

I have had a look into Blogging and found it very interesting. I was always curious why people blog so much and why is it so popular in today’s world. I never fully understood the purpose of blogs and wanted to know what makes the blog a great one. I always thought that blog is just writing everyday about some hobby like cooking for example and then just posting photos and a paragraph of writing. What I like about this assignment about blogging is that there is a variety of topics to choose from. I think that writing up your own blog about anything you want would be a very entertaining experience for a mission. I really like that for blogging we can have almost everything from photos to videos. This means that during the project we can create many different things to make it more appealing and interesting. I think that blogging gives more choices to choose from once we will start it.      

My First Project

Our first project presentation is done. It was really stressful and it took a lot of time but we are finally finished. Since it was our first presentation in College and for this course we didn’t know what to expect. The fact that we weren’t the first ones to go up made it slightly easier for us and gave us more time to prepared ourselves. You could see from a distance that everyone was nervous and lost at first but then as they carried on they got better. We all had to go up to the bored and present our project in front of our group.

I think that for our first presentation it went ok. We never went through who is saying what and how we will present it so it was difficult but thankfully it all went along the way somehow. We helped ourselves during the presentation. Whenever one of us was starting to feel uncomfortable another one took over with the reading to give the person a little break and to calm down. Thankfully we weren’t too stress once we went up there so we read out things clearly and no one stuttered. We tried to keep eye contact with our audience and avoided to look down. We were trying hard to be present in the moment and to read things loud and clear. We placed our gifs that we did ourselves into a powerpoint which I think made the presentation more interesting. Our audience seemed to like our gifs which had a positive effect on us during the presentation as it relaxed us. We all took turns in reading the powerpoint and even gave an occasion to ask any questions.

In terms of feedback we were told that we had too much research on the history of gifs which made the presentation very long and not so much interesting. We had placed a lot of information into the presentation which I think was a bit too much. I got the sense of people turning off halfway through the presentation. We all were also notified that all our presentations were loaded with paragraphs which isn’t good. For future powerpoints presentations we should have short sentences or keywords on the powerpoint instead of long detailed paragraphs. We also shouldn’t be just reading stuff of the board or computer. We should all pay more attention to our audience and on what we have achieved and learned.

I myself agree with all that. I do think we all just read things off the board and avoided eye contact with our audience. Most of us were staring at a computer or down at the ground. I think our presentation needed more information on how we developed our gifs and what we have learned by doing this project. I agree that the long detailed paragraphs were boring and many people lost interest throughout our presentation. We should have had spent more time on the layout of the powerpoint together rather than quickly editing by talking on the phone. More work and thought was needed from us. Our paragraphs were too long and we read everything of the computer. We have learned a lot from that day and we now know how to improve in our next project presention.            

Mission 1 Creativity gifs

Working together on our project getting all the hands we can to get it done. It's tough at times to meet up so we can work on our project but we are getting there slowly.We have started to research the history of gifs and looked at some popular gifs.We also have checked out a few apps on our phone
and websites to create gifs ourselves which we can then use in the presentation.

So we have started to work on our first project and we have already decided on the layout of our blog.We have the basic steps all done after just one meeting.we hope we will be able to meet up a lot because it's much better to get things done when we have a meeting rather than texting or calling. We have starting to do some of our own research and we are planning on then getting all the information we found together and decided on what goes where as a group.

We decided to start off with the powerpoint first so we should have a guideline of what to research and what we have left to do. We have discussed a few ideas together about the presentation and what each of us wants to add to the powerpoint. We are finding a lot of information which is very detailed which makes it slightly difficult because we aren't sure what to focus on more and what we should involved in the powerpoint. Apart from that we are moving forward everyday and have met up a few times outside of college in a local cafe where we go through what we have gathered during the week.

So far as a group we are working well. We are meeting up when ever we can and communicate on social media such as Slack and Messenger. We would discuss every idea together before making a decision. Since we all live far away from each other most of the communication is done through social media. we are trying to do video call and send pictures of any work we have researched or done. We have shared the powerpoint amongst ourselves so the we all have access to edit it and discuss any changes that must happen. This means we waste a lot of time as  it's hard to communicate fast when we are texting or calling through social media. This makes it harder at times and means we are moving too slow with the work.

It's hard since this is our first project we don't know what to expect and how we should present it correctly.We are getting stuck at times because we aren't sure how much into details we have to go in and whether we will present it right. We are constantly going through the powerpoint, adding or changing bits to improve it.In order to get some inspiration we are watching different gifs online and practicing our own ones. We have decided to do our gifs on the theme of "comedy" after doing the research. We agreed that if we stick to the theme it will make us more focused on what has to be done and how to go about doing it. I find the comedy gifs the most interesting to watch and I think that they are used the most. unlike gifs that have the theme of sadness or anger the happy and funny gifs are more popular and the most familiar.

We are slowly getting there and I hope we get in all done in time.  

First Week

So the first week is going good so far we are slowly being  introduced into our course. We found out the things we will be doing and also have received some information about the group work. I find the labs interesting. The tutorial videos and steps that are written out for us on the website re very useful and easy to follow. They are straight to the point and tell you what you have to do. 

We have discussed the missions we must do for this module and what has to be done for each one. There is a variety of different tasks for each mission and I like how we can choose it ourselves. This means that we can pick whatever interests us the most.  

I have read to all the projects that are available for mission one. I’m interested in Gaming, gifs and digital audio. They all look interesting and involved a lot of creativity which I like. The gaming looks fun to make and I would interest in exploring video games in detail. I play some video games myself which would be beneficial for the purpose of this project. I have ideas for many games and would be interested in making a small education game because one could learn something by playing a game. However, I think this would be very time consuming and I'm not sure whether I could get it done on time.  The game will take a lot of time to create and then the PowerPoint will also need some work. 

I have some interest in Digital Audio. Since the project would focus on everyday audio one could do the project on “Siri’ for example. This would be a guideline for the whole project. You could mess around with the sound and technology.    

Out of all of my interests I’m finding gifs the most appealing. I have gathered a lot of ideas already by just reading through the assignments on the website. There are a few proposals for how the project could be done. I personally think that this would be the most creative one out of them all and it would be the best for our first project. I haven’t thought much about the gifs before and I’m interested in learning about them. I would like to find out where they came from and what’s the actual purpose of them on social media. I have a few ideas for the gifs    

I like how I could use some of my own videos from the past to create a gif. This would make the process quicker and it would mean that I wouldn't be plagiarising. I could also use some of my drawing to create a gif. I was thinking that I could draw something and take photos of it step by step and then put them together to form a short video clip. This would be time consuming but it would be easier to make rather than looking through videos or movie scene in order to create a gif.

It's a new beginning

October 03, 2019

Just starting the Creative Digital Media in TUdublin              Blanchardstown Campus. :)