Final Reflection

During this class we have covered a lot more than I thought we would, with each week bringing something entirely new to the table. We covered things such as the beginnings of multimedia, social networking, webware, open source, animation, video and even the transformation of the Internet itself. Each of these things were demonstrated to us via our discussion, reading and most of all our projects. All of which gave me a much broader perspective of how much power there is behind all of these tools that the user can easily grasp, making this class very worthwhile to me.
I organized my portfolio by Social Networking, Weekly Work and Discussion, Other Tools and Projects because those seemed like the logical categories that the work we did as well as the flow of the class took. For me it would start out with what the weekly work was and what the discussion questions were to keep in mind while I did the reading and assignments. We would then use various tools to help us accomplish our tasks for the week. Some weeks involved more in-depth projects that all of the previous helped develop. Then our assignments would also involve some sort of social networking, whether it be setting up a profile or making sure that we blogged the process of our work for others to view and comment on. So therefore I put a short description of the class work for each week along with it's discussion, my links to any of the social networking involved in another section, and the tools I used to get my work done and the links to my projects in each of their own respective sections of my ePortfolio site.
Yet even though each week covered a different topic than the last, I really liked the class because each week still built on top of the last in one way or another. For example tools that we were introduced to one week became useful later on in other assignments. Mindmapping was a tool one week that we learned in-depth about with it's relation to multimedia. It then became a great tool to help us coordinate our thoughts and help creativity flow for other assignments and projects. I believe this flow of being able to build on what was done the week before was one of my strengths in this class. For example I thought some of my best work came out of transferring and evolving my twitter theme between different forms of media. They were all basically the same with minor tweaks to the story each time, but executed differently. The storyboard for the first animation laid out a good foundation for both my animation and my video. The FATP helped me maintain my focus for each as well. With each one I was able to adapt the settings available to me, whether that was one of the pre-defined scenes that limited me on the animation, or the town that that I live in and the people I had available to me at the time.
The most effective techniques for creating my projects had to be the FATP as well as using the flowcharts. I liked using the FATP because sometimes when I am creating things I can go off on a tangent of ideas and eventually stray if I do not keep focused. The FATP helped me stay on task on many occasions helping me achieve my original vision while keeping in the confines of the assignment. The flowcharts helped strengthen those aspects of the FATP because it would help me visualize my assignments in steps and give me a solid path to follow.
I would say one of the most difficult challenges of the portfolio was adapting it to the extended requirements from that over the old one. I already had something that worked so I didn't want to change the site too much or start over, so I had to think about what I could instead add to the site to make it work. I overcame this challenge by stepping back and trying to think about this class as a whole and then seeing if I could see any connections. As you can see in the way my site is set up like I mentioned before, I organized it by how I saw the class flowed which I think worked out quite nicely as it helped me fit things nicely into categories.
Overall this class was a worthwhile experience for me. The ePortfolio helped me really see how all of what I had learned connected to each other and this class has really changed the way I look at the internet. I see it much less in the web 1.0 view of when I first started using the Internet and instead see how empowering it can be too the user, with all the tools it offers the possibilities for creativity seem endless and so are the ways you can share it! Also the most important thing I got out of this was that the Internet is not just the product of developers, but largely by the end user. We are the Internet.

Here is the link to my ePortfolio: http://sites.google.com/site/carmenseportfoliosite/Home

Video: Reflection

This was another fun project. If you saw my last project, this is the live action version of "What's with Twitter?" Being the live action version my FATP was the same and I already had a storyboard for it, so I created a flowchart to help me plan the flow of the movie. For this I used Gliffy once again so there was nothing new for me to learn to create an effective flowchart. Yet creating a video was a new experience for me. I used the video function on my digital camera for all the recording which was easy enough, yet I couldn't get it to record with out some "popping" in the audio, which was disappointing. Windows Movie Maker was another first for me and I wasn't very impressed by it. For a simple movie editor it wasn't so simple to use. First figuring out how to import your clips was tricky because I didn't find anything that just said "Insert video" or "Import". You have to do you videos in collections, and when I did get the hang of that, the program split up my clips without me asking it to which was weird. The more advanced options I thought were made accessible in ways that weren't very self explanatory. Yet once I was able to get everything opened up it was easy to put video, text and music together.

Video: Final Product

Here's my video. It follows very similarly to the animation I made. I go down to visit a friend at a restaurant and I immediately go on a rant about my dislike for twitter. I try to think of something to use to get people to hear of my ideas and I in turn get an ironic solution.

I apologize for the static during the dialog, but there was a problem with my camera that I couldn't figure out.


Music By SackJo22 provided under the creative commons attribution licence.

Video: Flowchart

Here's a diagram on how the movie will flow:

Video: FATP

So for my video I'm basically making a live action version of my animation which is once again, a discussion between two friends about why people use twitter.
Here's my FATP:

Focus: Why do people use twitter?
Audience: The Class
Topic: Twitter
Purpose: To entertain

Animation Reflection

This was a really fun project! At first I was kind of stuck at what kind of story to give it while keeping it related to the class. So I went back to my first post and decided to do something about twitter. I was a little confused at first about what was expected of me for the project, so I ended up with two storyboards)one being a template I used in photoshop and the other being the comic I made. The comic webware I used was Toonlet and it was a breeze to use. The process to make my comic was basically choose a character pack, constuct your own characters(with plenty of options for face, head, body and arms) then add the text. Everything on it was really straight forward and easy to find the link in my blog. The webware I used for my animation was GoAnimate. This one was a little more tricky to use compared to the comic, which didn't come as a surprise to me as an animation is more complicated than a comic. So while I didn't instantly get it, it didn't take long for me to get a hang of it. Yet the process was fairly similar to the comic, except you had to add in the scenes, the duration of each one as well as movement and facial expression. Overall I enjoyed using it though. Definitely a cool project though.

Animation: Final Cartoon

Here's the cartoon! It sticks with the story from the storyboard and the comic. Hope everyone enjoys!
GoAnimate.com: What's With Twitter? by Carmello6769


Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!