Month: December 2017

Project #4: Final Audio Story and Self-Critique Write Up

Here is the final draft of my audio story for Project #4 for my DTC 201 class! You can also find it under the “Portfolio” section of this website.

The person I chose to interview for this project is my mom. The reason I chose to interview her is because she grew up in the 70s and graduated high school in 1981. The novel Ready Player One focuses a lot on technology and culture from the 1980s, so I figured interviewing my mom would be a great way to learn, first hand, about technology from this time. One thing I made sure to ask her was about video games during this time period. This was because Ready Player One is focused mainly on video game culture in the 80s. I thought it was funny when my mom brought up PacMan, because this game is featured in the novel!

After listening to the StoryCorps projects, I knew I wanted my interview to be personal. This is why I chose to include me asking my mom questions within my audio story. I also kept clips of us talking back and forth, including us sharing laughs a few times. Reading about StoryCorps, I really liked the idea of having something that maybe your great great grand kids could listen to one day, then be able to hear first hand what technology was like back then. It also could let them know what their three times great grandma sounded like, how she laughed, and how she told stories. I know I will definitely be able to save this audio story as a keep sake!

As mentioned above, I chose to interview my mom because the time she grew up fit perfectly with the theme of Ready Player One. Another reason I chose to interview her is because she is my mom, so I’m totally comfortable interviewing her and asking her questions. I thought this would give me a good quality recording, and it ended up working out perfectly. The initial interview was about 15 minutes long, which gave me a lot of content to work with and chose from! We sat in our dining room so it was quiet, and I used a recording app on my phone to record our conversation. This was also a good topic for us to talk about because we had never really had this conversation before.

To record the interview with my mom, I used an app on my iPhone called “VoiceRecorder.” I knew this was a reliable app and that I would be able to transfer the audio to Adobe Audition because I had used it previously for projects in my COM 210 class. The audio probably isn’t the highest quality, compared to if I used a high-tech microphone, but it was convenient and was accessible to me at the time.

I used an upbeat instrumental music tune in the background of my interview. I searched it through CretiveCommons, and downloaded it from SoundCloud. The music is under an Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license and credit is given to Twisterium. I wanted to add some upbeat music to my story because I thought it made the story more fun to listen to. The music is catchy, so I thought it would make for a more exciting listening experience. Here is the link to the file: https://soundcloud.com/twisterium/romantic-folk-loop-free-instrumental-background-music-creative-commons

Project #4 Group Critique Write Up for Kathleen Zimmerman

The rough draft of Kathleen’s interview was done very well! She chose to interview her mom, and from what she was saying in the interview, I believe she grew up in the 80s. The theme of Ready Player One is based off of 80s technology and culture, so her interview connected perfectly with the novel. Especially when her mom started talking about PacMan and other video games that they would go play at Pizza Hut. That put me back into some of the scenes of the novel where Parzival was playing the arcade games inside the OASIS

I think Kathleen’s interview was a nice conversation, and didn’t feel like a stiff, formal interview. Many of the StoryCorps projects are exactly like this, just a conversation where you get to hear the opinion or a story of someone you care about. It might be nice to have Kathleen talk a bit, so there is some context about the questions that she asked her mom. Other than that, there was a nice flow to the story. Some transitions might be helpful to step it up to the next level!

As mentioned above, I think adding some transitions to the audio story would be helpful in recognizing its context. The quality of the audio recording is very good and clear. It might be nice to hear Kathleen asking her mom these questions so it feel like a true conversation, which is what StoryCorps stories are like.

There is no intro or supplementary sound yet, but I think adding both of these things to the interview would really set the tone for the story. Have an introduction of Kathleen talking about who she interviewed to give some more context. Then, maybe adding some nice music to keep the story upbeat so it has a positive tone to it. I think with the next draft both of these things will help a lot!

I could definitely imagine this being played on the radio, especially the ending part where her mom is talking about the effects of stress on students at the high school and college level because of technology. I liked the point she made that we need to treat people like humans, we can’t just continue to pile more and more work on people because technology makes it easier to. I could see this on some type of talk show concerning stress of students and how things have changed so drastically so quickly.

Overall I can’t wait to see how the final draft turns out!

Project #3 Personal Critique Write Up

I believe my final web portfolio design is clear and well-organized because each link or option to click on leads to a very specific part of my website. I called the home page “Explore” because it’s a little preview of my website. If the viewer seems something that catches their eye in the preview, they can click directly on that link and see more content or read more about the subject they were interested in. My menu is on the left-hand side of the screen, which I thought was effective because we read left to right. This way the viewer sees their options of what to view before they see the main content. My website is easy to navigate and use because each option that you can click on leads directly to that specific spot on my website. There is no going to an abstract link, and everything is clearly labeled.

I chose the Twenty Fifteen theme to use for my web portfolio because I liked the options it gave you of what you were able to customize. I really liked how you could choose a photo for the left side of the screen where all the menu options are, and that you could pick a solid color to put next to that. I also liked how the solid color acted as a background for all other content displayed on the website. I chose the dark red/burgundy color because I think it catches your eye without being too distracting or taking anything away from my content. I chose to keep the whole color scheme simple by only using black, white, and burgundy. I chose a white texture photo to have as a banner behind my sidebar because it’s simple, yet it still adds an element of design.

As I mentioned above, I chose the Twenty Fifteen theme for my web portfolio because of the layout, how it reads left to right. This relates to hierarchy, as the menu is the most important aspect to navigate my website and the left side is the first thing people will read. Therefore, the hierarchy of my web portfolio will make it easier to navigate. As for design elements, I mentioned above that I chose to use the white banner on the left-hand side because of its texture. I thought it was necessary to add some texture so that my design didn’t seem so flat.

As mentioned earlier, I like how the theme I chose let me manipulate some of the colors. I was able to change the color of the side banner text as well as the main background behind my content just using WordPress’s management system through the customization tool. To change the font such as the headlines for each different category, and the main body text for each page, I played around with manipulating CSS. It was the first time I have done that, and I thought I was pretty successful in changing the little things that I wanted, specifically the color of the text that I was not able to change with the limited customization options.