“All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
On the first day of class, Professor Anderson made a joke. “You guys have to write approximately one hundred pages over the course of the semester, so we better get started right away”. My finger hovered over the “drop course” option in ConnectCarolina. There was no way I could write one hundred pages of anything in one semester. On top of that, I had just enrolled in my third statistics class of the semester, and the next 4 months already seemed like a headache. Once it was clarified that this was not the case, I began to realize that although we did not have pages and pages of essays to write, I still may be in over my head. What is Networked and Multimedia Composition anyway?
As I spent the next 40 or so minutes listening to what this semester would entail, the “drop course” button began to leave my mind entirely. How DO we communicate with each other outside of words and sentences? I began to think more about the topics we would cover, such as social media memes, audio essays, and podcasts. I was very familiar with some of these topics, but the creation of them was a foreign concept to me, which brings me to the quote I used to introduce my portfolio.
This quote, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, has many personal connections to my life, as well as my experience in this course. The obvious: as a competitive swimmer I understand the connotations of swimming underwater and holding your breath in a literal sense. In the context of Networked and Multimedia, my interpretation of this quote was the sense of uncertainty that comes with new experiences. For entirety of this course, I was exposed to new technologies, techniques, and ways of communication. At many points in the semester I felt as though I was swimming underwater and holding my breath, wondering how everything would come together at the end. This class was something completely different for me, but it taught me more than just how to use Adobe photoshop and what goes into a good podcast. I learned not only to be open to new methods, but also, for the first time, to learn how to swim underwater and hold my breath without touching the pool.
I’m thrilled to share with you all I’ve created this semester.
Our first dive into the unknown began with the visual storytelling of poetry. Although my skills were rusty, I had taken one poetry class in college, and spent a thorough amount of time in High School analyzing poetry. Since we were able to choose our own poem, the aspect of this project that made me hold my breath was the use of Adobe Rush, which I had never used before and quickly found to not be very user friendly. Learning how to use this software alone posed a huge challenge, and we practiced in class by creating an improv video, provided below.
Link to my Improv video: http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/node/415
After I had a little bit of experience using Adobe Rush, we began to make the videos that would accompany the poems we had chosen. The Lanyard, by Billy Collins, has been my favorite poem since high school. It highlights a mother’s love, and after experiencing extreme home sickness after coming to college as a freshman, I could really connect with this tribute to all of our mother’s, as I too feel as though I can never repay her for everything she has done for me. I wanted to evoke a sense of nostalgia with this video, so I chose serene clips for the opening. My original idea was to have a peaceful opening to this video, and when Collins begins to list everything a mother does for a child, switch the visuals to chaos and children misbehaving to play on the sense of irony that Collins weaves into The Lanyard. This just didn't work. The clips were grainy, the music was too dramatic, and it was not giving a sense of irony at all, just confusion. I ended up scratching this ending and employing just the wistful and tranquil sentiment that the opening created. Here are both videos for comparison.
Link to my Draft: http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/video-poems
Link to my Revision: http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/revised-video-poems
The biggest take away from this project was patience and perseverance. I spent hours editing and carefully planning my first draft, and to have to completely scrap the ending to my first draft was so frustrating. But I learned how to use an objective eye. The first draft was obviously not working, and I was so much happier with my revision. Even though I was drowning in revisions, when I finally came up for air, I was satisfied with how far I had come.
Social Media Postings
The next project we tackled was on Social Media. We started with the most basic form of communication that fills all of our timelines everyday- Memes. I never thought of memes as a major form of communication until this course. Although a large portion of memes are silly jokes, we do a significant amount of communication through these seemingly unimportant puns. Creating such a basic means of communication proved way more difficult than anticipated. The amount of creativity that is necessary to take a simple picture, add just a few words, and generate millions of retweets and likes is unimaginable. Although it seems simple, I struggled with finding witty captions for these images. On top of that, creating the photos through photoshop proved to be a huge challenge, as I had never used photoshop. The amount of effort it takes to perfectly cut out an image from one photo and make it seamlessly blend into another (possibly unrelated one) was a challenge I did not expect. We never think about it, but these simple looking memes, that probably took hours to make, induce a few laughs and are then scrolled past, their impact hardly ever thought about agian. But memes can communicate huge ideas, and although mine are hardly groundbreaking, here is what I was able to come up with.
Unfortunately, I edited over the originals, so my revisions cannot be seen, since they were never saved separately. But trust me when I say a lot went into this simple joke about Grayson Allen.
Even more complex in creation, animated gifs can give you quite the headache. As the quote in the beginning suggests, I spent a lot of time when I was making these gifs quite literally holding my breath and hoping the animation would work when I hit the play button. It was however, much easier to make a clever joke using animation, since you have more visuals to work off of. The first one (a clip from this year's Super Bowl) was not hard to think of, but very hard to execute. What is even more impressive is those who can create beautiful pieces of moving art. My artistic meme would hardly ever be compared to a Picasso, but took a lot of effort to create.
In conclusion, social media is more than just an outlet for pictures of nights out and photos captioned “Phone Eats First”. I rarely ever think of it like this, but social media is a place for ideas, education, and art to be brought about, while also allowing for silly jokes and puns. This project taught me about the impact of what we put out there, an important lesson for us who live on twitter until the late hours of the night. I really enjoyed creating something for social media that was well thought out and edited.
Audio Essay
After we had worked so thoroughly on visuals, we moved towards audible communication, without the added visuals that our previous videos had allowed for. What was great about this project was that it built off of what we had already done. The first audio project we did was the audio essay. To create these we had to use audacity, another software I had very little experience with. This was one challenge that we had to overcome to create this project. In order to get some practice, we created an improv video in class to get used to recording our own voices, incorporating clips and music, and editing everything all together.
Link to my Improv: http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/node/241
We then dove into the actual audio essay. The biggest take away of this was editing for an audience. My audio essay was about memes, which almost always have a visual component. It was difficult to speak about them in a way that would allow the audience to understand what I was talking about. Not only that, but creating a hook to engage the audience and a conclusion that would make sense was more difficult than I had thought. That was one of the biggest changeI had to make in my revisions. I also had to tighten up the editing. Making sure the inflection of my voice emphasized specific points was very important to the flow of the audio essay. I learned here how important it was to make sure it didn't just sound like I was reading off a script, while also being very meticulous about every sound the listener was hearing.
Script:
http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/sites/default/files/2019-03/Memes%20Script.docx
Draft:
Revision:
This project forced me to learn how to be concise when discussing my topic. I only had a few minutes to engage the audience, discuss all my points, and relate them to a bigger meaning. This may not seem like a huge task, but it is almost harder to do it in a small amount of time than trying to fill minutes of discussion. Editing was also very important. If I had to do more than one take of a portion of the script, it might sound completely different which would throw the listener off. This project pushed me to be very detail oriented, while also forcing me to be very self-aware while recording.
Podcast
Our latest, and my favorite project, was the podcast. It seemed the most daunting, because although I can talk forever, speaking on one subject for 20 minutes seemed like a huge task. To be completely honest, I think it was the easiest thing we did all semester, partially because it was so enjoyable. The hardest part of it was finding relevant videos, that gave outside opinions on my topic. Since the listener wouldn't be able to see what the original speaker was doing, it was very important to make sure enough context on what was happening was given. The best part about the podcast was that we got a partner who could also give their opinions and perspectives on the topic. Since the podcast was a continuation on our audio essay, there was minimal research I had to do on the topics of memes. My classmates and I each got to build so much on one topic, that we basically all became professionals in one area of this class. Below I have provided my podcast and all of my materials I used to create it.
Links to my materials:
http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/sites/default/files/2019-03/Memes%20Research.docx
http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/sites/default/files/2019-04/Memes%20Brief.docx
Reflection Videos
Another important aspect of these projects was the reflection video that we made after the completion of them. Not only did they test my videography skills, but they allowed me reflect on the importance of each project and what the big take aways were for each assignment. I really enjoyed watching other’s videos in class and seeing what they struggled with and how they tackled each assignment, as most assignments were fairly open ended. In particular, the reflection video on the audio projects was highly useful in exploring the difference between the podcast and the audio essay, and how creating each of them took a different approach. It was a really nice way to end each project and tie up all the loose ends. I felt as though I was able to walk away from each reflection video with a better understanding of what I had created and the new skills I had acquired. Below is my storyboard and reflection videos. The storyboard was used to help quite my narration in the videos and thoughtfully plan out the visuals in order to explain most fully the work that went in to each project.
This is the document I used to create my Behind The Scenes Video.
See my Storyboard here.
BehindTheScenes from Bryanna Cameron on Vimeo.
Podcast Reflection Video from Bryanna Cameron on Vimeo.
Here is a free writing reflection on the difference between the audio essay and the podcasts:
http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/node/364
Website Comments
Throughout the semester we would be assigned small readings, usually to inspire our latest project. There were some videos to watch, small assignments (such as finding a highly visual photo), and instructions to comment on others posts and projects. I found the commenting particularly useful, as it gave me a chance to see how my classmates interpreted the assignments, and get feedback on my own assignments. Below is a folder containing all of my homework assignments for the semester, the comments I wrote on others’ projects, and some daily tasks, such as the improv videos I have included throughout this portfolio. These tasks and assignments helped to enhance our work and allowed us to incorporate what we were learning into other aspects of our lives.
- Readings Comments
-
Visual Strategy- http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/62#comment-62
Photoshop and Memes- http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/137#comment-137
E-Poetry- http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/3#comment-3
Gif- http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/159#comment-159
RIP: A Remix Manifesto- http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/25#comment-25
Word Play- http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/167#comment-167
A Tale of Two Soundscapes- http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/224#comment-224
From Print to Audio- http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/255#comment-255
- Peer Review Comments
-
http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/360#comment-360
http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/366#comment-366
http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/370#comment-370
http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/375#comment-375
http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/61#comment-61
- Daily Tasks
-
3/1- http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/238#comment-238
3/6- http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/265#comment-265
4/5- http://altscholarship.com/makemedia/comment/385#comment-385
In conclusion, this class has really pushed me outside of my comfort zone. Although for a completive swimmer, swimming underwater and holding your breath is not a huge source of discomfort, there were quite a few projects this semester that made me feel as though I would never catch my breath. Many of the tasks we were asked to complete involved softwares I had never used, concepts I hadn't thought about in years, or media I wasn't comfortable manipulating. In fact, diving into these projects often looked like this:
However, my take-aways from this class are as follows:
- A picture is worth a thousand words- After Professor Anderson made his opening joke about writing 100 pages worth of essays, he then went on to say that although we would not do this amount of writing, we would create enough media to provide a comparable amount of communication. After reviewing all my work in order to create this portfolio, I would have to agree.
- Patience is a virtue- Editing these projects sometimes posed as a huge task and seemed as though they would never reach completion. In the end, I always finished editing and was proud of my work. I learned not to be biased by how much time I had put into the project; just because I spend 3 hours on something, doesn't make it done or even good.
- “All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.” New experiences are an opportunity. Even in completing this portfolio, I have learned about CSS coding, and what it takes to make a solid portfolio (I hope you will agree). In reflecting on and explaining my take aways from each assignment, I have learned a great deal about Multimedia Composition and how we communicate everyday.
Thank you for a wonderful semester.