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AET WK4 Rise Self Evaluation

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WK4 Professionalism: RISE Self-Reflection

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Week 4 Synthesis: Curating Through MCBS

Romney Whitehead’s article, Curation Before Creation, touches on the history of the photograph and it’s decline into mediocrity due to over saturation. Whitehead makes the case that due to the digital age, there has been less of an appreciation for the media in the sense that videos and photographs are quickly taken and forgotten or deleted. It is certainly interesting to compare how much more difficult it must have been before the digital age, having to lug around all of the videos or photos all the time definitely became outdated. 

Phil Spiegel’s article, Not All Digital Media Assets are Equal, focuses on the idea of quality. He uses his experience working at a stock photo company as an example: When he was working there he recalled the enormous volume of images they used to have, followed by a simple thought, “quality over quantity.” Phil understands that sometimes having more options to choose from is worse than having less options that are better refined. He relates this to the curation process, and how oftentimes a digital ton of extra files are saved and backed up that will never be used or looked at again. His point about creating a tiered approach to the curation process is intriguing; curation deals with collections of things, but Phil aims to refine the collection. 

These two articles had plenty of style differences in how they were written, but all in all deliver a very similar message: do more by doing less. The obvious quotable being “quality over quantity,” but it’s nice to see that there is so much interest concerning filler material. They believe that curating quality assets is a better approach because there will be less potential for low quality material. 

Curating assets this month allowed me to create a compact place to assemble utilities for my projects. Using symbaloo gave a professional feel to curation while remaining fun and customizable. The assets I assembled on symbaloo are certainly worth keeping, there are plenty of things I saved on there that I would reuse, such as the free stock video websites. Curating resources enriched my MCBS experience this month because it made me feel like more of a professional. I know how to save websites into the favorites folder or use them on the toolbar, but using a curation tool (which is shareable) gives me greater utilization potential and a universal place to find my content. 

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Week 4 Reflection: RISE Peer Feedback

I knew going into this that when it was time to review Shannon Edwards’ week two project that I would be impressed. Not only was I impressed, but I was shocked at how much we had in common. As a kid, I often found myself lost in a book, or writing whatever story happened to be floating through my mind that day, and those actions translated to me wanting to share my writing and imagination off to the world. It was definitely comforting knowing I’m not alone as I read through Shannon’s blog and watched the video for her project. It wasn’t anything less than I’d expect from her, especially after having worked with her on our week three project. This video was awesome to watch because Shannon conveyed her path to becoming a Full Sail Media Communications Graduate well, the audiovisual experience was concise and the story was captivating. One thing that I noticed, which I’m sure Shannon will only improve on with practice, was that there were points where the narration was pausing because it was read in one shot. As a graphics, audio, and music person for our group, I’m confident in Shannon already understands how to fix things like this because she is always finding ways to improve herself as a media creator. I particularly enjoyed the part about how dedicated Shannon was to finding herself that she spent three years researching the best career path for her to take to bring her imagination to the world. I’m glad Shannon chose Full Sail University to become a media creator, in our short time here together, she has already taught me more than she could know.

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WK3 Project: Digital Storytelling Challenge

From our very first meeting, it was easy to tell that this project was going to be a lot of fun to work on as a group. Early on, the abilities and personalities of each of our members was shining through and the common ground we formed helped us come together as a group. We all have a bit of prior experience, so Linda quickly established herself as program coordinator and got started by contacting each member via email to get a head start on meeting. Once we were set up on Skype and Google Hangouts, we got right to work and delegated the rest of the responsibilities. Our group had several meetings, each of which vital to the success of our group; members worked great together, bringing creativity to the table and by giving each other healthy constructive criticism. Once we committed to working on an ad for Kleenex, we were able to remain focused and stuck to our roles to make sure we created an effective ad that displayed the best of our collective talent.

Writer / Storyboard Creator & Video Editor - Brandon Dennison Program Coordinator & Photographer - Linda Benoit Graphics, Audio & Music - Shannon Edwards

My role on this team was Writer / Storyboard Creator and Video Editor. I contributed by writing for my cut and helping with the other team members and by setting the general progression of the ad. The storyboard as it was written and how the ad needed to be visually displayed were where I felt most comfortable and my teammates felt confident in my ability to do so. What surprised me about this challenge was my ability to deliver despite working 56 hours a week and being a single parent. It was truly a great learning experience for me to know where my abilities are as they relate to delivering within a deadline. I am most proud of my teammates for their work, they were an inspiration to me to work up to their level; they helped to provide a challenging atmosphere throughout the project to have so much done and hit the deadlines our group set for ourselves, so kudos to them. All in all, I had a great experience in this team setting and learned firsthand what the real-world value of communication, roles, and deadlines are.

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WK3 Exploration: Team Org/ Video Examples/Curating 4

After viewing the example videos and their different styles, video production and editing became even more appealing to me. The two that excited me the most were (obviously) the “Farmer” and the “Uber Everywhere” ads. Dodge’s Farmer ad shows that emotionally engaging narration can produce enthralled consumers. For the Digital Storytelling Challenge, I plan to at take on the role of writer/storyboard creator because writing is one of my strong points. Our group has been using Skype to communicate and share files, but we have also considered using Google Hangouts; Oovoo could be a tertiary option. The reason Skype is so effective is because, as a team, we are able to use this application to have a live group video chat session across two different time zones and share files. Skype has truly made the group experience better because it makes effective communication simple. The greatest challenges for this project that any online-only group may face will be scheduling and communication issues, but forming a cohesive plan may also prove to be challenging. 

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Week 2 Project: My Digital Story

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Wk 2 Analysis: Brands and the Human Connection/Curating 3

The 2013 Dove advertisement, featuring 16-year FBI Forensic Sketch Artist Gil Zamora was the impeccably positive and uplifting experience that the world needed to witness. Gil shocked a group of women by making a sketch of each  of them based on each woman’s view of themselves and revealing it to them. What they didn’t realize was that next to their picture would be a more beautiful and real image of themselves based on a stranger’s perception of them. The ad engaged middle-aged women with self-esteem and vanity problems by showing that women who have that in common with them often find they are, like the ad says, much more beautiful than they think. Bit by bit, Dove tried to get that message through to women.  For such a tantalizing subject that is often guilty of rampant over sexualization and setting a high bar for women, the Dove advertisement gently scrubbed away any common semblance of self-esteem or anxiety issues with how we look. 

       The Dove Mission statement is “to ensure that the next generation grows up enjoying a positive relationship with the way they look and to help them reach their full potential in life.” The ad demonstrates its compliance with that statement by targeting middle-aged women, i.e. soccer moms and such, because they need to (rightfully) find the beauty that we all have in and outside of ourselves, and once they do, to pass down the truth that we are all truly more beautiful than we know to the children. The advertisement even keeps it simple by not forcing itself on the consumer, with the logo only appearing once briefly at the end of the clip. Altogether, Dove chose to empower women and stay positive throughout the video without sexualizing or objectifying women and that was a huge bonus for gender relations and gender equality. 

       The audiovisual aspect of the clip was extremely cohesive. There were close ups of the women, as they each described her facial features over the slow, suspenseful background music. The cohesion continued throughout the clip, as the other people shown at the sketch reveals are in shots that widen out to show the expression as anticipation becomes sadness, and then finally joy as people realize the message themselves. There are even brighter shots toward the end of the video clip, which set up the white background behind the message and the Dove logo. The aim for this ad was to subtly show women that they already know that they’re more beautiful than they know.

       After analyzing this project it is easy to see how it attained such staggering numbers:

The Dove campaign was such a captivating ad because it managed to tell a compelling story to an audience overly saturated with sexualized material. This advertisement took a 180 degree approach and set the standard for years to come by having people experience a visualization of what other people see in them. The success of the ad shows that social media is more powerful than ever. 30 times the media exposure of paid-for media space proves that word of mouth, even if it is digital, is still the most reliable and effective form of advertising. 

       As a media communications student, the one take away I have telling a digital story is how quickly content is created and replaced. There is a positive in a negative, however, because it means that with consistent factual journalism, one can quickly become credible in today’s world.

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WK 2 Exploration Story Board/Curating 2

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Week 1 Project: My MCBS Story Expanded

It wasn’t long before I started the MCBS Program at Full Sail University that I got out of the Army and enrolled as a student at Orange County Community College in Middletown, New York. I was doing well, progressing toward a long sought after career as an English Teacher. I wrote a paper early in my first semester that my professor found impressive, weaving together my love of legos and my experiences as a middle schooler on 9/11/01.

                          for the complete story, click here

Since I learned to read, I’ve been interested in literature and the deeper lessons that authors and illustrators embed in their work; thought provoking discussions about the potential meaning of those messages and their relevance in the world remains an intriguing line of work to me. But then one day I realized that telling those stories and embedding those lessons myself sounded more ideal. Some of the hardest, most relevant life lessons I’ve learned came as urgent��supplemental material in the form of Tuesday’s With Morrie and some of the best comedy was simply a Catch-22. Because of that I decided to make the switch from an English major to a more relevant Communications major, but I was not excited about the prospect of remaining at that school. I decided to go to OCCC because it was close to home, but I had enough bad experiences in a short time. So I did some searching and was immediately excited when I came to the Full Sail website because it had a practical design, offered my major, seemed fun, and offered distance learning.

In no time, I made the decision to contact a representative from the school. They were extremely helpful and the process took about as long as writing this piece did. Until finally, I completed the enrollment procedures at Full Sail University. I was so proud of myself for the outside-of-the-box thinking that lead me to become a future Media Communications Graduate! And ever since I became a student at Full Sail University, I’ve never felt my dreams within my grasp more. I’ve been learning about the history of and more advanced perspectives on the art of storytelling, the media, and about how to utilize media as a tool instead of only as food for thought. I’m excited to see, as a media specialist, what the prospective road ahead has to offer!

Stacey Williams Ng told a captivating story of how she came to be who she is, all the while demonstrating her own lesson: “We make deeper connections with people when we reveal our humanity...” I enjoyed listening because I appreciate a good story and a good lesson and she provided both. Observing how she weaved her lesson into her story was every bit as interesting as the story was.

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I’ll Never Forget My Lego Project

Legos have always been a staple in my life since before I could even form long-term memories; everyone in my family, from my mom, Evangeline Dennison (who was born shortly after the introduction of the Lego brick in the USA in 1958), and her five brothers: Kenny, David, Jerry, Tommy, and Joseph on down the line played with them when they were kids and in turn afforded themselves the luxury of playing Legos with their own children. Those tiny little colored bricks provide such a simple, yet rewarding experience spending hours meticulously crafting an infinite amount of sculptures, contraptions and attractions. My uncle Joseph, the youngest, always tells me about how when I was around two and three years old, he'd always build these cities and giant buildings out of Legos and then pull me out of my crib and unleash "Baby Godzilla" on the innocent Lego men and women in the white and the red-blue buildings he'd built just to watch me destroy them, only for him to joyfully rebuild those skyscrapers for the creature from the deep to strike at over andover, every time he babysat me. From those days back in the early 1990's on Legos have remained a mostly cheerful constant, always holding some varying degree of importance in my daily life, and at times has also served to be a painfully nostalgic reminder of the nature of the world. It was a cold, damp Tuesday; right at the end of a short New York summer, and I was two and a half weeks into my first year at Port Jervis Middle School. It had been getting colder for about a week and a half so all the kids had started wearing pants, long sleeves, and sweaters, and they had just come out with these comic book character inspired hoodies you could zip up over your face like a mask (imagine Venom from Spider-Man), although I had never owned one. Strange, but true, the only homework assignment I'd been given so far was in my sixth period art class; we had to use a less traditional medium to portray any scene related to art history. Immediately, I'd decided to use Lego bricks and paint Lego man heads in a Warholesque manner depicting the Marilyn Diptych paintings--which were really just a bunch of Marilyn Monroe faces that were painted in mostly bright, contrasting colors-- on a Lego frame. I was more than happy to do it; I'd grown up with Legos and I was one hundred percent positive I'd come with at least a decent concept. I could visualize what my project would look like completed--a Lego frame about the size of a wide view photo with that famous"multiple colors of the same face" look decorated on the visages implanted in my creation--and that thought blew my excitement up for an opportunity to display a bit of creativity with the help of that years birthday presents. I'd arrived to school that morning enthusiastically looking forward to my sixth period art class in the basement of the building, hoping the morning flew by so I could show off my award winning project and maybe get it displayed in the hallway for everyone to marvel at. First period english with Mr. Lenardo was always a riot; we would laugh and joke and get off topic and talk about sports and what everyone did over the summer often, as opposed to reading, because what we were really there to learn in English class, at least according to Mr. Lenardo, was life. It was a profound concept to me but it was interrupted by the announcement speaker, and several people were being called to the front office from multiple classes all over the school in droves, and I couldn’t help but hope I wasn't one of those people because Mr. Andre, our Vice Principal, had already become notorious for being the guy "you don't want to piss off," so I usually did my best to avoid him. Twenty-five minutes into class and six students had left the room. The bell rang, and everyone shuffled out of their desks in a hurry to file into the hallway to meet up with their friends. That time in between classes was one of the most rewarding parts of being in middle school for me; it was the first opportunity I'd had as a child to go to school with children who weren't exclusively from inner Port Jervis. Now that I'd gotten to seventh grade, there were a larger pool of kids to befriend because they were coming from all over the area; people were coming from Greenville, Sparrow Bush, Hugenot, Cuddebackville, even Montague, New Jersey and over the Hudson River bridge into Matamoras, Pennsylvania. In between classes I run into my friends Ben and Justin, cousins who had recently moved to Port Jervis from Brooklyn, New York and the three of us walk to our lockers to exchange one heavy textbook for one or two other heavier ones. When I opened my locker, they both couldn't help but notice the golden glow of my eccentric modern art masterpiece emanating through the clutter which was the top shelf of my locker, and were exponentially more powerless to stop themselves from commenting on "how dope that shit is bro." We walk to math class together and sit down, but before we had a chance to finish our discussion and pull out our books, there was another announcement over the loudspeaker. Five more kids, including Ben and Justin, were sent to the office and it wasn't until that point that I'd realized none of the original six kids from my first class had ever returned. They had to have gotten in trouble and I was excited to figure out what they'd all done once school was out later on. I joked with Ben and Justin that we'd never see each other again as they walked out of class to the main office but reminded them to keep me in the loop when we ran back into each other on the bus later. "I bet it's some kind of a prank or something," I remember saying to my two best friends (and also my neighbors), Marcus and Anthony, in study hall. We were supposed to be quiet in that class but not knowing where all of these students were going each class, including this one, was plaguing us. The only other thing we were able to come up with was Kevin saying they must have caught head lice and were being sent home, "so that the rest of us wouldn't get infected." "That's not so bad," we joked, because there were so many good video games out that needed to be beaten (The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask had recently come out, along with Resident Evil: Code Veronica, and Final Fantasy X being hot commodities). It had gone and turned into such a big joke throughout the course of class ending that I'd even forgotten about my Lego project momentarily. We laughed until we were envious, saying it was a lucky day for so many people to get head lice. As soon as I made it to my next class, science with Mr. Cunningham, we got right to it and started trying to figure out who was going to win the jackpot and get sent to the office to go home and play video games (or for the girls, go home and sleep). Three more students gone and science was over in a flash. I was in the hallway headed to lunch when another announcement was made over the loudspeaker: "Students of Port Jervis Middle School, this is an emergency muster. If you are on the first floor, go to the gym. If you are on the second floor, head to the assembly room. If you are on the third floor, go to the cafeteria.""There goes lunch," I thought, as I was eating and watched the cafeteria quickly turn into standing room only. Once everyone from the third floor had shown up, Mr. Cunningham had quieted everyone down so that he could finally share whatever the big secret of what was going on with the collective. Once he had achieved silence though, rather than say anything he and the rest of the other adults in the room had begun turning on all the T.V.'s 

                                                           and I was immediately horrified;

the Twin Towers in New York City had been hit by two hijacked airplanes and were crumbling before my eyes on television. The blonde female reporter was in the streets of New York City where everything, including the people, were covered in a thick brown-black cloud of dust, soot, and ashes, and she was trying to force the story through a violent, inaudible sob, but the facts were already written there for everyone to read: "HIJACKED PLANES DESTROY TWIN TOWERS AND HIT PENTAGON IN DAY OF TERROR." After about a half hour or so had passed, the teachers and monitors had lowered the volume and instructed us that we would remain in the school until either our parents had come to get us, or the President had given a message that we were safe. I worried about my mother, a teacher in Middletown High School, and if I would ever see her again. We would come to find out more details about that other plane that hit the Pentagon, that they were hijacked by terrorists from the Al Qaida terrorist sect from the middle east, and another plane had been hijacked and flown in the direction of either Camp David, the Presidential retreat, or quite possibly the White House itself but had crashed in western Pennsylvania. There were also reports of a bombing in the Lincoln Tunnel, somewhere I had been just weeks ago to see the Empire State Building. One of the most truly terrifying parts of it all was watching people jumping from the windows of the upper stories of the Towers because they had to make the difficult decision to be burned alive in a building that had already started to collapse, or to test the grim possibility that they would survive the fall to the ground somehow. Everyone, including the teachers and monitors, was crying there together in the cafeteria and one girl, Ashley Gaid, had a panic attack early on and couldn't breathe so she ended up leaving in an ambulance. Perhaps the most petrifying reality of it all was this: if two skyscrapers in the center of the most populous city in the United States of America wasn't safe, along with the Pentagon and four passenger airplanes, how could we (or anyone else, for that matter) be safe from harm? Faculty members had us performing air raid drills underneath the tables in the cafeteria like they might have done when they were children, and I couldn't stop worrying about my friends, family, and all of the people in New York City and anywhere else who were either directly or indirectly affected by this tragedy. In the end, most of us weren't released from school until around 6:30 that night. Seeing parents pick up their kids was bittersweet; I was happy to see them together, but I still hadn't spoken to anyone in my family so I wasn't able to rest assured they were okay.My mother had come to get me right as the last group of students were leaving and when we saw each other we instantly embraced and cried together in the front office of Port Jervis Middle School like so many other families had probably done that morning as they picked up their children from school in the midst on a national emergency. I threw my Lego project away after about a week of it sitting on a desk in my room, unable to bear the constant reminder of the fragility of life that it came to symbolize to me.

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Wk 1 Analysis: Tool Review Video

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Wk 1 Exploration: Start a Blog and Tell a Story

Before I started the MCBS Program, I was enrolled as a student at Orange County Community College in pursuit of a career as an English Teacher. Since I learned to read, I have been interested in literature and the deeper lessons authors embed in their work; thought provoking discussions about the potential meaning of those messages and their relevance in the world remains an intriguing line of work to me. But then I realized that telling those stories and embedding those lessons myself sounded more ideal for me. Because of that I decided to make the switch from my English major to a more relevant Communications major, but I was not excited about the prospect of remaining at that school. Because of that I did some searching and was immediately excited when I came to the Full Sail website because it had a practical design, offered my major, seemed fun, and offered distance learning. Because of that I made the decision to contact a representative from the school. Until finally, I completed the enrollment process at Full Sail. And ever since I became a student at Full Sail University, I’ve never felt my dreams within my grasp more.