Alright, this video is the winner BY FAR. At least in my books. It had tons of information about the DCIM minor, and it even managed to be hilarious in the process. I love how it plays out like some kind of lolz sex-ed video. (Nice music choice.) Another awesome thing about this video is that it bashes the guy’s minor choice and even shows the effect of his bad choices. I loved the video and only had 2 nitpicks that could make it better. At the end, you should include an annotation link to the DCIM website. In addition, you should also have made the music end more neatly, but all in all, this was amazing.

This here is my second favorite video. But, it’s not perfect. I love how the video runs through the DCIM minor while at the same time using skills learned in the DCIM minor. I thought that was a pretty witty idea. I feel like the status updates and stuff will really appeal to the audience, but I’m getting the feeling like it just isn’t enough. Final thoughts: Awesome video, but not fantastic. I also loved the music. I thought it fit in well.

This is my number three choice, meaning it beats out every other video on the playlist, but it wasn’t the best of the best. I felt like the video started out kind of slow. I understand that you were trying to contrast another minor to DCIM, but I don’t think you should’ve spent so much time on it. My favorite part is near the end when we skip from scene to scene by jumping through screens. I found that extremely tasteful and fun. The part I’m talking about starts at around 1:45. If you did the whole video like that, it would have been sweet!

Borrowed from: Know Your Meme

Borrowed from: Know Your Meme

Borrowed from: know Your Meme

I don’t really think memes are part of fan culture. Memes mostly bash on the media that they are portraying. For instance, a Harry Potter meme is probably going to make fun of Harry Potter, and while I can understand that some people have the ability to laugh at their own likes, I’m pretty sure they’d rather not. I think memes are on the outside of fan culture, poking fun at the whole thing. The memes I selected are interesting for various reasons. The Woody meme and the Wonka meme are both funny because they take classic characters captured in odd poses and they give captions/actions to these images that the original characters would never say/do. The completely unexpected aspect of the meme is what makes it funny. In regard to the “Dos Equis” meme, it is made funny by rehashing the slogan from the commercial, but usually in a totally unexpected way.

I suppose memes can help people express themselves by allowing people to create their own content with relative ease. Nowadays, one can simply go to meme generator and input their captions and out pops a meme image of their own without having to do any image editing at all. Memes in today’s culture are just there for comedy relief in my opinion. Sometimes products have memes that spin off of them and their advertising benefits, but I don’t think this is ever done on purpose. For our final project, we didn’t use any memes. We probably could have used some memes to discuss the types of things that are talked about in class, but I think we wanted to lean more towards a professional kind of video.

Borrowed from wizardrock.org

When I first began watching the documentary, I thought the whole thing was going to be about how Harry Potter is turning children into the spawn of the devil. I almost turned it off because I love Harry Potter and this evil woman was just talking complete nonsense. Luckily, though, I stuck with the video because it actually turned out to be a pretty cool documentary on the many aspects of the fan based Harry Potter scene. My favorite part of which was seeing all of the different Harry Potter Bands. At first I found myself wondering who would listen to this sort of music, until I realized that I’m into My Little Pony electronic dance music. That was quite a laugh.

I think the balance between Warner Brothers and the HP fans is in a very delicate situation. The fans are creating their own content based on Warner Bros’ copyrighted content. Watching this video has definitely helped me see how the internet has changed how people consume media. Newer technologies have made it easier and easier to not only consume media, but to create and produce your own media. The internet has been transformed into a haven of user created content for users. In this movie it is important to notice how these people aren’t doing these things for money. They’re making these works to appeal to their fans and to feed their own hunger for creation. I think it’s an awesome way to show you are a fan and I truly hope more content is continued to be released in the future.

Borrowed from stupidfresh.com

Our group started out in a bit of a mess. We had no idea where we were aiming to go with this project. So we all got together and started brainstorming ideas for the project. After a while, Andrew had an awesome idea to make a video through the eyes of a new student. The new student would be first arriving at Rutgers and he would take a tour through the DCIM course list. That was the first big milestone. The second big milestone happened when we had our group meeting with our instructor, Aaron. He told us he really liked our idea but thought it could use a few changes. We really gave Aaron’s ideas some thought and eventually decided to rework our main idea. Instead of having a lengthy video, we’ve decided to cut it down. We will now have a shorter video, more on the order of a quick commercial, to illustrate what the DCIM minor is like.

The first hurdle I think we are going to have is setting up our interviews and getting Professors on track with the video taping. We plan to have quick shots of Professors while they are teaching. The second hurdle will definitely be editing the video together. Since our video is going to be short, we will need to have some seriously awesome editing to spruce it up to DCIM front page status. However, I think if we are able to properly coordinate our group’s actions, we’ll be able to handle everything with no problem at all.

PICTURE

Borrowed from http://images.cdn.fotopedia.com/flickr-2889883615-hd.jpg

This picture of people can be used to illustrate how many people in the world use digital media. We can then segway into the main video and start. In this picture, you can see people using different sorts of digital media. This picture can be helpful because it shows how many people use digital media every day.

SONG

http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/978729/daylight

This here is an awesome song by Teresa called Daylight. It was on the most popular songs list on jamendo, so it must be super popular with people. And since DCIM minors are people, they will like this music too! But on a more serious note, if we explain the importance that this music is free to listen to, that could be an interesting point in our video.
VIDEO

This is a video from youtube that focuses on Digital media. I don’t want us to actually use it in our video, but I think it would be an interesting thing to watch in order to better produce our own video.

Borrowed from wildfangs.altervista.org

I do lots of little home movie projects with my little brother and sister. We usually just record stuff on-the-fly and unprofessionally because we’re just trying to get a laugh. However, for some of our longer videos we have used rough storyboarding before. In class, one of our groups members came up with a great idea to make a video like there is a new student taking a tour through he SC&I building. We all met up and drew the storyboard. I think the storyboard came out very nice. It was rough, but it was still great to see our ideas down on paper. This way, everyone gets a better idea on the direction of the video.

1. http://scrappingfactory.wordpress.com/

I LOVE this blog. Everything about it works. As soon as I first visited the blog, I knew it was a scrap-booking blog. The background works, and the header is so cool because it actually looks like it was a scrap-booking job in and of itself. The second thing I notice is that DYar is really keeping this blog active! It’s clear that she really took the assignment a step further and actually blogged about something she loved. The posts seem like quality material, and the overall feel of the blog is that of professionalism. Good job!

2. http://jtspc.wordpress.com/

It’s quite obvious what this blog is about just from taking a quick look at the title that this is a tech blog. Tech blogs are pretty competitive nowadays, so to make this blog a success, you’ll need to be on top of everything! The header is pretty cool. It clearly highlights the fact that this is a computer blog. In my opinion, though, the theme feels slightly lacking. The gray background is boring and the sidebar doesn’t look all to inviting. Still, the posts seem to be full of information and seem to be coming from someone who cares about what they write.

3. http://rutgersimbasketball.wordpress.com/

Of all the class midterm blogs, this is probably my favorite. It’s my favorite because it serves a purpose bigger than just working for a single individual. This blog works for the entire Rutgers Intramural Basketball Team. The black and white header with the red text works great to grab attention. The posts are nice and the sidebar is filled with information that users might find useful. I also love the fact that this blog is not just a single person writing. It is a combined force of other intramural-loving students. Good work!

4. http://amandaklaboy.wordpress.com/

How to save your Heart has a  very relaxing feel. If that’s the feeling they were aiming for, then I say the owner did a fabulous job! The header works amazingly well to instill a sense of relaxation in the reader. I also love the fact that the header ties in with the background of the blog to make it feel like you’re flying above a city. The blog is about finding inspiration and I think it’s a wonderful theme to pursue.

5. http://anniesguidetocomics.tumblr.com/

This is one of the most fun blogs. It’s a whole blog about comics! While I, myself, am not into reading comics and the like, I DO understand the obsession, because I’m addicted to reading manga. (Yes, there’s a big difference). I like the background of this blog, it really tells you about what it is. However, I have a few problems with this blog. First, there is no header. You need a header to add awesomeness to your blog. Second, the post titles are kind of hard to read in that green color.  Finally, the width of the body of the blog confuses me. Is it a varying width depending on the post? It just looks odd. But still, great job.

I had a lot of fun setting up my blog, and I got really in-depth with it. When I was choosing my theme, I switched multiple times. In fact, I even switched after having decided on a theme that stuck for a whole day. But in the end I found a theme I liked more than any other because of its wide body and its post feature ability. The post feature ability might not sound like much, but seeing it on someone’s blog really boosts the credibility for me.

After finally choosing a theme, I got to work designing the blog. I decided to add a background. I don’t really like tiled backgrounds, but it’s okay for now. I just used a drawing I have made previously and re-sized it and then shifted it around a bit to improve the tiling effect.

The header is a crop of a bigger image which I added the blog title to. I actually centered an entire blog post on Kyuppin about how I made the header. Go and check it out.

After getting all of the graphics out out of the way, I went about setting up my sidebar and pages. They were set up with relative ease compared to the other parts of the blog. I just inserted some borrowed pictures into the pages, and fiddled around with the widgets for the sidebar until I came up with something I liked.

Finally, the hardest part of making my new blog was figuring out how to set up the featured post section. At first, I had no idea how to get it to work, but after a few hours of tutorials and trial and error, I’ve got the technique mastered. The featured post section is a great way to boost the look of your blog and show people how much you care for your blog.

Windows Live Movie Maker in action!!

For our Homework in this class, we needed to make YouTube videos with annotations in them which linked to other YouTube videos. I decided to keep it simple. I made my video very short and only used a single title page with a LOL title. Finally I added some cool effects to try and keep it from being entirely boring. I then exported as a .wmv file and uploaded to YouTube.

Once there, I applied the annotations to the video. It was then that I realized that I accidentally left in a title that said “My Movie.” I blame WLMM. So I had to go and fix my video, reuplaod, and re-apply all of the annotations. Double experience! I couldn’t figure out how to get the “picture in picture” that some videos have, but that may be a pre-upload process. I’ll need to look into it, because it makes video look really professional and slick.

In the video I used annotations to link to two of the videos I’ve already made for the class. The first is the Yoshi video I made with clips of Aaron’s cat. The second is the screencast video I made for last week’s homework assignment.

Over all, not one of my favorite class projects. This one was way too simple, and frankly boring. I mean, look how bland my video is. But it is a pretty cool skill to use. I’ve never actually used annotations before, and I definitely will now. They’re super handy. This could also be used in a tutorial sense to link viewers to the next or previous tutorial in a series. It can even be used creatively to make a “choose your path” adventure game.

A screenshot of Debut in action

So this assignment got off to a bit of a rocky start for me. I’ve done plenty of screen recording before, although not with my voice and not for a while. So, when I went to find my software, I couldn’t remember what it was called. So I decided to install Jing. The thing is, I just didn’t like Jing because .swf format wasn’t working for me. So I went back to searching for my other program. I finally found it after a bit more searching. It’s called Debut, and it works wonderfully.

So with that out of the way, I finally set about doing my homework. Before I started, I jotted down some things I wanted to talk about so that I wouldn’t pause in the middle of the video like a fool. Once I was ready, I found any old random wordpress site and set Debut to record. The whole recording went down without a single problem.

Once the recording was done, I brought the video into Windows Movie Maker and trimmed it up a bi. Then I added a title to give it some extra flare. I decided to also add some audio because it was boring just listening to my voice by itself the whole time. So to make things more interesting, I found some free music over at the Free music Archive and added that to the video. I had to lower its volume a bit so that it wouldn’t overpower my voice.

After that I exported and uploaded to Youtube. I can definitely see myself using these skills in the future for presentations and such. Screen casting is also a great way to give tutorials and reviews.