Mission 1; Blog 3

Reflection

I thoroughly enjoyed the broadness of this mission topic as it allowed room for a lot of exploration of the many paths and ideas which could have been taken. This both inspired and encouraged me to explore the mission in a variety of different ways which I appreciated and engaged with as best as I could. I'm glad I chose this as my first mission as it really allowed for some fun and creative ideas and final products.

Going into this mission I honestly did not think I had much of a learning experience ahead of me but throughout the project I found myself researching and learning a lot around the topics of Adaptations, Remixes, and Mashups, most notably some of the laws associated with these topics which I had never really known before.Through my research I learned about the struggles of artists online, especially in relation to artists who make non-profit/protest art that struggle greatly with the unauthorised monetisation of their art.

As I mentioned in my previous posts, I had gone through many different ideas for my final idea before landing on the music video but because I chose to create the music video I in turn learned to video edit using Lightworks, be it very trial and error based and a little unsophisticated but still a new skill. Although none of them actually made the final cut of the mission I really did enjoy experimenting and creating rough mock-ups/prototypes of some of the earlier ideas from the topic and in the brief time I spent testing some of them I did learn a few small skills here and there such as sound editing when testing the Contrasting Songs idea.

A big difficulty for me during this mission was attempting to create something that I was satisfied with with the limited skill-set and resources available to me in the time frame of the mission. Due to it's creative nature the mission inspired me to conjure some very obscure and exciting ideas but once I indulged some of them I quickly began to recognise my limitations of what I could do at the time.

Due to a complete lack of communication from some of the group during the process of this mission our final presentation suffered greatly in it's cohesiveness but I feel that the parts that we did collaborate on held together quite well. I wished that we could've fully collaborated on this mission as it would have allowed for an even more in depth exploration of the potential of this mission.

I'm most proud of the outcome of my music video as although it had quite a lacklustre start and a rocky process, the final product came out quite good in my opinion, for it's circumstances, and I can say that I am quite satisfied with it's final outcome honestly.

Mission 2; Blog 3

Reflection

As a result of this mission I learned a lot about the history of blogging and I also got the chance to learn about the culture surrounding blogging and it's impact throughout the years. I knew that blogging was an old platform but I had never really grasped the full scope of blogging until we did some research on it for the mission. Researching blogging also opened my eyes as to what blogging really is or what it can be and also what constitutes as a blog; my discovery of micro-blogging really opened my eyes as realising that platforms such as Twitter and even Tumblr were considered blogs, be they more modernised forms of the medium, rally opened my eyes to the scope of blogging as an online medium.

I discovered that there is a lot more to running a blog than I thought there was initially. I became a lot more aware of the intricacies of actually running and keeping up with a blog formally or professionally; that blogging is not the archaic platform that I thought it was. I began realising that maintaining a blog takes a lot of hard work and dedication and consistency for it to succeed. Although I came to those realisations while exploring the mission I was also finding that running a more personal blog is a lot more enjoyable than I had originally thought and that my ideal form of personal content creation could actually be blogging. Although the short form content of modern media helps facilitate the more modern lifestyle, I actually personally enjoyed the more detailed, more expanded format of a blog. I enjoyed the freedom that blogging granted in it's post formats and the lack of stigma around what a blog 'needs' to be or what should be on one. I also found the customisation side of blogs immensely enjoyable, it granted me a creative freedom that no social media that I've ever used has allowed.

All in all, I feel like I achieved the goal I had set for myself of creating and adding to my blog and was quite pleased with how much I actually engaged with blogging during the mission. I also feel that I engaged with blogging as a whole a lot during this mission which allowed for a more genuine understanding of the mission. I think that we could have done a lot better on the presentation as due to the lack of communication and cooperation from some members of the group, our presentation felt quite disjointed and didn't feel very cohesive although I do still vehemently believe that the parts of the presentation that were cooperated on would still stand not too badly on their own much like during Mission 1.

Though it was initially made solely for the mission, I actually was quite pleased with my blog and how it turned out overall, so much so that I have actually continued it a little bit past the mission as I genuinely enjoyed engaging with blogging throughout my time wit the mission.

Mission 3; Blog 3

Reflection

If I were to speak completely honestly about this third mission I'd have to say that it really didn't seem worth it. I guess I can only really blame myself for not doing the video correctly but it is just so heart rending to have put such a massive amount of time, effort and stress into something and still come out with the most disappointing grade. Due to the obscurity of the mission the other members in my group struggled to come up with ideas for the mission so I took it upon myself to research the mission as deeply as I could to try and figure something out and on top of that there was the added difficulty of coming up with an idea that I could divide among the members of the group. I don't really mind doing extra work if other people are struggling but it was still quite a complicated task. I then had to think up a presentation for the mission as I, along with my group members, didn't want our video to drown in the monotony of video presentations thus I wanted to make it creative, I wanted our video to at least stand out.

At least during this mission I learned a bit of photo editing on Gimp during the extremely time consuming and difficult process of manipulating and overlaying over fifty images and trying to get them aligned. Although this process involved hours of mind-numbing editing I did end up with a final image that I was extremely proud of, which is unfortunately the only thing I was proud of by the end of this mission.

The process of drafting the actually video wasn't too difficult but actually compiling the aspects of the video that I had planned proved to be quite difficult. Luckily, my group members had their images completed on time and had sent them to me which lifted a little weight off my shoulders but that ease did not linger for long as I quickly ran into problems with recording or collecting audio from my group members which I had to just compensate for as I had no other choice.

The process of having to create impromptu panels or record extra audio was extremely stressful but I compensated as best as I could and had to make due with what I had or what I could muster together.

Due to the nature of our presentation and the time frame that we had to work, our group came to the realisation/agreement that only one member of the group could really edit the video to keep a cohesive project and to keep the process as seamless and uncomplicated as possible. Due to the circumstances of the group members I had to take up this position. I had already edited something before for my second mission but I was still very inexperienced with editing and extremely inexperienced in Premiere Pro but I undertook the task on behalf of my group members.

It was the editing process of the video that really makes the mission feel like it wasn't worth it for me as the editing process was extremely stressful, time consuming and overall unhealthy for me in complete honesty. Due to my lack of software I could not edit the video at home so my only choice was to use the computers in the college and due to our time management I had to spend almost the entirety of Monday editing the video just to get it done in time for the submission the next day. I started Monday morning determined to get the video done during the day so after my almost 2 hour journey into college immediately began editing the video. Due to the immense time pressure I was under, as I only really had Monday to edit the entire video, I fell into an intense time-crunch and I spent over 8 hours straight on Monday just editing, I didn't eat and barely even moved from the CDM lab. This left me completely exhausted and regrettably I can't even say that I even came out of it with much improved editing skills as due to my inexperience with the software and the pressure I was under I had to employ a lot of trial and error and wasn't really absorbing anything I was doing, I was just kind of frantically trying anything and everything until something worked for hours on end. The entire process was extremely stressful and draining and I was left completely and utterly exhausted physically and mentally after it all and even after all of it I wasn't even satisfied with the final product. Even though I personally wasn't completely satisfied with it, my group members were which only really made the extremely disappointing grade even worse because it granted me a sliver of hope.

This project left me on the verge of tears and more exhausted than I have ever been and it was all for nought. I didn't learn much about myself during this project because I was already aware that I'm prone to overexertion but this project did heavily impact me for sure. This mission affected me both physically and mentally and I can't with full honesty say that I have improved much in any way because of it.

Mission 3; Blog 1

 Process

For this mission we decided to undertake Image Visualisation as although all of the topics for this mission were quite abstract, Image Visualisation seemed to be the most accessible choice. 

The next step in our process was to fully decipher the title of the mission which involved reading the suggested material and deciphering a shared theme between the material. During the process of reading the material I became quite fond of many of the ideas in the articles and set out to create somewhat of an amalgamation of some of the ideas I had found. I became enthralled by the idea of presenting a film as a single long exposure image but came to the realisation that I was limited by the hardware I had and that taking a two hour long long exposure on my camera wasn't feasible so I had to abandon that idea. I instead adapted that idea into the more manageable idea of presenting a single popular film scene as a single image comprised of individual frames from that scene. This idea then led me to ponder what else I could overlay in this manner. This led me to think of the overarching theme for our project which was presenting popular/famous images in a way that is distorted but not completely unrecognisable, I wanted to explore the idea of there being a threshold of recognisability. This led me to my final ideas of overlaying unedited photos of popular things to find if there was a point reached where even though the images were unedited, the simple overlaying distorted them enough that they'd become unrecognisable. This overarching theme served very well for dividing the work between the three members of our group by allowing each person to undertake a different sub-topic within the theme, creating a cohesive body of work and also facilitating the ability to help each other through the difficult editing process.

I knew that I would need some sort of image editing software like Adobe Photoshop so I decided to use Gimp. There was then the additional hurdle that I had little to no image editing experience or knowledge and had no experience with Gimp bit through a series of trial and error experimenting while making mock-ups of my ideas I eventually gained an acceptable level of knowledge, enough to complete my task.

The last major problem ahead of me in the process of completing this mission was coming up with an idea for our final video presentation as I felt that the whole mission warranted creativity and I didn't want our video to fade into the possible monotony of some of the other video presentations. Our chosen topic of image visualisation also inspired some creativity and innovation when it came to presenting the visual media that we were creating as a generic presentation would counteract the entire purpose of the mission. These requirements landed me on the idea of presenting our work as a Gameshow due to the nature of the content we were attempting to create, the ambiguity of the images would fit perfectly into the gameshow format.

Mission 3; Blog 2

  Final Video

The process of creating the final product began by collecting the images I needed for my final composition. My idea originated from scrolling through Instagram tags of famous places with #StephensGreenShoppingCentre having the most consistently similar photos but yet holding the most interesting composition so I decided to use it as my source for my images.

This began the long and tedious process of collecting images which involved taking note of the source of each image, screenshotting each image and cropping each image individually. After compiling and editing all my images I then began the process of actually creating my final image by importing all the images into Gimp as individual layers. I then began the intricate and precise process of overlaying all the images by individually changing their opacities and manually aligning each of them within the frame so that the central clocks all lined up to achieve my desired effect. This process involved a lot of trial and error and adjustments due to the precise nature of the task.

I was then asked by one of my fellow members for assistance through the process as they too had little to no experience with image editing. Luckily, due to the cohesive nature of our theme I was able to guide them through the process over Skype Screen sharing.

After compiling all the images from my group members I then began the process of creating the content for the final video. After brainstorming how to actually present the content in a video format I landed on a series of Kahoot-esque panels for the Gameshow which was both an interesting way to present the images but also not too complicated for my limited image and video editing skills. I then had to draw up a rough draft of the entire video so that I knew what style of panels I wanted and also how many I would need for the final video. I initially attempted to create these panels within Gimp but that proved too difficult for the skill set that I had so I resigned to creating the panels using Google Slides as it was the most accessible way for me to do so at the time. I imported all my media into Google Slides and began the process of making each panel using the rough draft of the video as a guideline.

I then had to write up a script for the video which involved all the necessities for the mission such as the outlining of the goal for the mission, including each members' voice over their part, etc. while also creating a narrative to sell the Gameshow aspect of the video.

After recording all the audio for the video, to the best of our abilities, according to the guideline I began the long and difficult editing process using all the content that I had compiled. Although the guideline for the video served me well I did have to create more panels and record more audio during the video editing process to cover any oversights I had before I actually began editing. I then also had to compile any tertiary audio and sound effects for the video.

After a long and complicated editing process we ended up with our finished video which proved unnecessarily difficult to export but after remedying that issue we finally exported and submitted our final video.

Mission 2; Blog 2

Final Product

As our final product we settled on creating and managing a blog each on three separate and different platforms, each focusing on a different topic. After spending some time researching my chosen platform, Tumblr, I decided to create a "Generic" Anime Blog as to emulate the blogging style I had already seen on the platform and to accommodate the social media functionalities of the platform.

As soon as I began creating posts for Tumblr, I encountered it's multiple posting formats which was completely integrated into it's content creation. Unlike other platforms that have a posting function which allow you to create your own format to suit the post, Tumblr has several pre-made formats for a variety of posts which is quite unique to the platform. I set out to explore each format and create at least one post with each.

Text

The first format I tested was the Text Post which was pretty straightforward. This format is just the standard blog post format with the option to embed pictures, videos, or GIFs. I decided to engage this format a little more than the others due to it's simplicity thus I chose to do a review style post in an attempt to test out as many features of the text format as I could.

Photo

When testing the Photo format I found that it was quite similar to the Text format with the minor difference that a photo upload was obviously required for the post and it became the main aspect of the post with the post's dimensions made to fit the photo and the photos quality being preserved.

Quote

Sticking to the anime theme of the blog I decided to use a quote from an anime for my test post in the Quote format. This format was quite unique and very specialised for this specific type of content. It seemed that this format specifically was tailored toward the more Social Media aspect of the platform due to it's concise nature. 

Chat

Similar to the Quote format, the Chat format also seemed very specific and specialised for the Social Media side of the platform due to it's concise nature. Interestingly this format automatically formatted your text to the pre-determined specifications such as the line spacing and bolding of letters. Though it could be used to formally record a conversation I found that it was most commonly used for more casual or meme uses thus I chose to emulate this when testing my own post.

Audio

While testing the Audio format I found that it seemed to be quite interesting and had a lot of potential but had some understandable limitations. Obviously like my other posts, this post was about anime music but that then added the challenge of finding these songs within Tumblr's limited song pool which consisted of a seemingly random assortment of songs from different sources such as Spotify and Soundcloud for Copyright reasons.

Video

The Video format was, in my opinion, the best and most seamless format to use. Similar to the Photo format this format required a video to become the primary aspect of the post but unlike the Audio format it didn't have quite as strict copyright restrictions with the ability to upload either local videos or video links. I found my content had become a little more formal than I intended due to the test nature of the posts so I decided to us a comedy video from the anime community as the test for this format.

Customisation

To fully immerse myself into my blog I decided to pay close attention to the customisation of my blog to really make it my own. Though Tumblr's customisation seems quite simplistic at first it reveals itself to be quite robust if you explore the customisation options such as when I found the experimental Tumblr Labs settings as seen below.

Presentation

With all of my testing completed I then compiled the information I had collected and condensed them as best I could into the slide format that my partner Julia had used as to create a more cohesive presentation. This unfortunately led to me cutting a lot of information and detail from my slides.

Mission 2: Blog 1

Process

For the second mission I decided to do blogging with the intention of learning more about this common but not entirely 'popular' medium of internet content. We set out to both create and manage blogs within the time-frame of the mission while also learning about blogging's long history and culture. 

It was difficult to figure out the logistics of dividing the project up between the three members of the group and we had several ideas such as whether each person should cover a separate aspect of blogging, creating a single blog which we could add to as a collective or each member creating and managing their own blog with each person covering their own blogging style/genre/topic.

In the end we decided to choose the latter idea and we each decided on a separate blogging platform as to expand our knowledge on different blogging platforms and to explore and experiment with each blogging platform to find their limits and restrictions and gain more intricate knowledge of how each platform functions.

The project began with each of us researching blogging platforms to allow us to choose platforms which both functioned well for each of our intended tasks and also differed enough from each other that we could compare and contrast them. Although it was not the central focus of our mission we felt that it would be essential to research the history of blogging to gain a better understanding of it's purpose and culture.

We each then began to personally research blog exposure as to attempt to fully immerse ourselves within blogging culture in an attempt to undertake the task of blogging as professionally as possible. Unfortunately it didn't seem feasible to manage the blog to that high of a standard within the time frame of the mission so we resigned to just critiquing each-others' blogs. During this process we learned about RSS and Aggregators.

We also discussed integrating Google Analytics into our blogs but the process proved too complicated and the system itself didn't really fit the purpose of the relatively short mission so we resigned not to use it.