Narrative storytelling

Currently for my English 370 class we are reading one of Shakespeare's dramas called Hamlet. It's a great example of how to tell a narrative that has an introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and conclusion. These are qualities of a narrative that my brother and I tried to follow and reading Hamlet gave my brother and I some ideas of how to put this kind of storytelling in action. There are multiple kinds of storytelling, but another type of storytelling that was present in some of my classmates projects was something called a non-linear narrative, which is also another way of storytelling. But with a linear narrative, a lot of planning will be involved, but there should always be some sort of planning even with something like a non-linear narrative. I think some people weren't sure of how to tell a narrative, but either way, I enjoyed the projects from my classmates. Something interesting that I remember from a popular film called The Matrix, directed by the Wachowski brothers, and there is a scene half way in the film where the main character Neo, awakens out the mainframe. That scene was shot last because it required him to have his head shaved, which obviously was planned ahead of time. This kind of planning is important in making a film. The scene needed to be shot at a specific time during the film making process and organized in post production to fit the narratives storyline properly and make sense.

Fine Art 435

For Dougs class, our entire class is working on a project that I can't wait to see completed. At the moment, it's still in it's production, but the project is going to be an augmented reality strategy game that is theme like a murder mystery, kinda of like what my brother did for our narrative for project 3. First, Doug broke us up into three groups to come up with potential project ideas. My group came up with an idea involving a murder mystery, another group came up with a river monster phenomenon, and thirdly there was an idea about a radiation experiment gone wrong at Hanford. We all voted for the one to officially do, and that was the idea about the murder mystery augmented reality app. Once we decided, we then divided up the workload about who would do what. Myself, and a few others, will be working on the audio portion. I think my experience with audio editing has greatly increased due to project 3 requiring quite a bit of it. The project is also a bit ambitious, but luckily we have the entire class working on it so that none of us will be overwhelmed with difficulty. It will be an augmented reality game using an application called Aurasma. It's still a work in progress, but it should be completed by December.

Project 3 completion

This project has been my brother and I's most ambitious project yet. We will be completing our video on Final Cut Pro this morning, after staying all day Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. This includes also staying all day on those same days for the past couple of weeks. This project is not something someone could do last minute. Someone could try to do projects like this last minute, but the quality of work will be obvious that not much effort was put into it. The workload was pretty consistent for my brother and I, we pretty much had our hands full managing the project and my other classes. It would be pretty difficult for someone to take on this kind of caliber of work by themselves. I'm pretty sure not many people would want to take on such an ambitious project, but my brother and I like to do something unique, and in spite of extreme difficulty, we persevere all the way to see the project completed. My brother and I, don't like to do something that was obviously procrastinated all the way, to barely meet the projects requirements. The goal for my brother and I, is to go above and beyond, which I think our project attempts to do. My only concern is that when its seems that others aren't working as hard as others (which I know I could be completely wrong about),  get the same grade or higher, that kind of discourages me a little. But either way, I will know how much effort that was put in on our part to create a work that my brother and I are proud of in the end.  

Project 3

I just completed editing all the voice acting using a program called Audacity. I have done audio editing before but not to this extent. It took a while to get up to this point in the project because a lot of pre-planning was needed. First my brother and I had to come up with a script which also took some time. Then we had to decide who the characters were and who was going to voicing them. That's where the fun part began. A small hobby that my brother and I have is that sometimes we voice act with my cousin, and we really get to just joke around and do impressions. Also, I have a good friend name John Go, who is an aspiring voice actor, and he really gave my brother and I some tips on how to record our voices. Once we had the voices from Myself, John, My cousin, and even John's girlfriend Katie, we were able to bring it together and create a story. That was only one side of the project, the other side was the video composing and editing, which my brother and I did together. This involved green screen, which is new to us, but we wanted to try something new. We have done stop motion before and we wanted to dive into unfamiliar waters. So far the video is almost completed, we just got to implement more camera angles and the finished voices which will make the piece function as a short film.

Shanken pg 256-290

On page 256, Shanken discusses artist Myron.W. Krueger and it's interesting to read what he has to say about man-machine interaction. Krueger does say something that got me thinking when he says, "Man -machine interaction is usually limited to a seated man poking at a machine with his fingers or perhaps waving a wand over a data tablet. Seven years ago, I was dissatisfied with a such a restricted dialogue and embarked on research exploring more interesting ways for men and machines to relate (256)." With the release of Windows 10, Microsoft introduced there new speech recognition interface called "Cortana", which allows a person to say what they want to search for instead of typing it using a keyboard/phone. The way that everyone interacts with machines is starting to change. For example, even Apple has there own version of Cortana called "Siri," which has also been quite popular among IPhone users for quite some time. This new type of interaction allows a person to feel like they are talking to someone who responds and assists them in a vocal/audible way.The machine may only do what it's being told, but a person is interacting with a machine, and this type of technology is bound to get better and better as the years go by. I personally still haven't caught on to this interaction using Cortana or Siri, but who knows, someday I will.