10A: Written Response to Freak Factor: Discovering Uniqueness by Flaunting Weakness

Click here to read David Rendall’s “FREAK FACTOR: Discovering Uniqueness by Flaunting Weakness”.



Rendall's "Freak Factor" provides the audience with a few rods on how to take their weaknesses and embrace them, and use them to their advantage and turn it into something positive. He tells us that our flaws, the things that make us freaks, are also what can make us successful if we take the right approach. After reading it though, there were three specific suggestions on how to do this that stuck out to me the most:


Point 2--Whats My Problem?
A lot of publications and speakers tell us how we can minimize our weaknesses or turn those weaknesses into strengths. Here, Rendall says that people don’t necessarily have to overcome their supposed weaknesses. He says that he found out that his “apparent flaws were clues to my true strengths”. Creating a list of your “flaws” can cause you to find lifestyles and career choices that won’t make you unsuccessful. Applying this idea to everyone’s life can reveal paths that would’ve otherwise gone unnoticed. For example, I love working in groups, and collaborate well with others and their ideas to make one good final product, so I chose a career path that will help me be creative and also work to my advantage because the media industry relies heavily on teamwork and group production.


Point 4--Forget It: Don’t try to Fix Your Weaknesses
This takes the stance that one should not try and fix their weaknesses, but rather understand that they have limitations. I think that this is an important thing to understand, especially to college students and especially to media students, when we seem to think that we can take on the world. The truth is that we all have limitations and driving too hard to overcome these will lead to issues elsewhere in life. Media is a group-oriented career. It is important to find someone who can compliment you. I am generally a lazy person, pushing things to the last minute, so when I am paired in a group with a go-getter type of person, someone that will push me to get something done by the deadline, I can apply my talents to the project, and at the same time get my stuff done on time. It isn't a matter of me "fixing" myself, it's a matter of finding my place and finding people who can compliment me and draw results from me.


Point 6--Focus: You can't do both
What this piece of advice is saying is be great at something rather than be mediocre at multiple things. He uses WalMart, K Mart and Target to create a very good example for what he means. This piece of advice stuck out in particular to me than all the others. I think that most decisions we make everyday in the world generally come down to this. A perfect example is coming to college, and why I chose mine. We pick a major, which should be what we think we want to pursue a life-long career with. It is not ignoring everything else, it is just an emphasis on what we have to offer the world. The reason this applies to me in particular is because of how I came to be a Digital Media Major. I combined three of my best talents, which were a) being technical savvy and being able to work well with computers, b) my love and talent for art and drawing, and c) my love for videogames and movies (animated and real). When I begin to look for internships and jobs, I am going to have to tell them my passion and talent for all these aspects and how I combined them to become talented in one cohesive aspect of the multimedia industry.

As for my own strengths and weaknesses, their are a few. My weaknesses are for one, I need inspiration for my ideas and creative projects. I am not so good at coming up with an idea randomly and right off-the-bat. Another one of my weaknesses is also that I take my time too much, if thats possible haha. I take too long on tests, projects, pretty much anything u can think of. So sometimes I go over the deadline of things, which is not a very good habit. My strengths, as previously mentioned, are being technical savvy, my talent and love for drawing and art in general, and also my passion for the creation and final results of movies and video-games. I combined all three of those three main strengths and my passion for all three in order to pursue a career in which I will never not love what i'm doing, no matter how tedious and long the work is. If its something I love and am good at, I will do great.

9B: Collapsus Audio Response

Collapsus

^^^Here is the link to the Trans-media project Collapsus!

Collapsus Response (again, podsnack is not letting me post it on my blog, so this is the link to it)

^^^Here is the link to my response to it. Click it yo!

9A: Reflections on Gaming Presentation

To be completely honest, our group never got to meet up as a whole so I think our individual ideas of the plot line weren't well developed or combined to form a cohesive whole. So when we tried to explain it I don't think the audience could really grasp what we didn't even really understand in the first place either. We definitely should have spent more time with that, and developed a better way to explain it.  


Another thing we didn't get across is excitement to play the game.  Once again due to a lack of organization and meeting I think that weren't really able to sell the idea as something that exciting.  Our presentation was too much of stating facts about the game, and not enough salesmanship.  Something that I think we did well is explain the technicalities like rules and mechanics, because the concept of our game was pretty simple to explain and there are enough games that are similar and well-known enough to make comparisons to.


Objectives were fairly difficult to convey to the audience, because once again we were a bit unsure of the specifics of the plot line ourselves. They were the most difficult to explain due to the fact that not even our group clearly understood every small individual objective to end up escaping the room. We had a vague idea of the individual requirements to escape the room, but not well enough to properly convey them to the audience. 

8B: Written Response to Hero/Villain Assignment

                         Hero

                 Villain
          




















Steve Bonahoom's Hero/Villain

There is no more obvious symbol of happiness and cheerfulness than a clown, and so its pretty obvious that the clown character stands as the hero in this situation. The alien is a symbol for an "outsider", something not natural to this earth coming to threaten the inhabitants and promote fear. The contrast between these characters is very obvious visually. The dopey grin on the face of the clown and the drawn, depressed look on the alien's face couldn't be more different. The colors also provide a very obvious contrast. The clown, predictably enough, is comprised of largely saturated colors in various bright hues, making him seem more bright and approachable and, ultimately, good. The alien, however, is muddled with very dark colors. Nothing is very bright, and in fact the only color that really stands out on him is the red that makes up his costume, which is a power of color but also of danger.


William (Jarrett) Blunenschein did not have his Hero/Villain posted.

Brie Donovan's Hero/Villain

Igor is the villain and Glen is the Hero.  Glen is in a wheelchair while Igor has use of his legs.  This gives the two characters both different movement types. Glen uses his wheelchair to get around giving him a more smooth movement.  Igor has more of a normal walk while he uses his legs.  Igor would have more weight in his movements because he is using his muscles rather than a machine to get around. Glen would have a parallel movement because he uses the wheelchair to run on the ground making him a little more parallel to the ground.  He would also would have overlapping movements too because he is using his hands on the wheelchair to get around.  The hands are overlapping the wheel because he has to push the wheels in order to move.  The contrast/affinity between these two characters are very obvious.  We can see affinity between the two with the colors the creators choose. Glen has an all red suit (with some yellow)  and Igor has only red in the 'I' in his shirt.  This gives them affinity because they are the same color making it go together well.  Contrast is also apparent with the color choices.  Again Glen is in a mostly all red suit whereas Igor is in a green one.  Different colors mean contrast within the characters. Another contrast is that Igor has an evil looking mustache while Glen's face is clean.

8A: Audio Response to This American Life

This American Life Listen to act one of this podcast called This American Life which is all about superpowers. Then listen to my audio response below to find out what superpower I would like to have, and what superhero i idolize and want to be. Gambit FTW!



Sorry for not using podsnack either. For some reason it wouldnt work. So i just posted the audio itself straight from itunes on here. Here ya go.


Audio Response on Podsnack that wouldnt let me embed it on my blog
There is the audio response!^^^^ Go listen to it!

Hes a Beast!

7: Reflection of Video Joke Assignment

JOKE ONE


JOKE TWO



My group mainly focused on line and shape more than in the second video. By constraining the view in the first video we were able to focus in more on the line and shape of the people and objects. Matt had a rainbow shirt on, with bright and vibrant colors, making him look more circular. He also has a circular head, which gives the audience the appearance of a happy, jolly child. Jenny was wearing a much more conservative outfit, that shows that she is playing the role of the gentle and kind hearted adult. She wore more neutral, subdued colors than Matt did which helps distinguish between the two characters. The lines of the fireplace and the lines from the washing machine are all directed towards Jenny, showing that she has the power in this movie. They are simple, straight lines, which also reflect the sternness that Jenny exhibits in this movie. In the second movie the shots are much wider leaving more space and allowing for a wider range of motion. There are fewer lines to direct the viewer in this video, aside from the arms of the chairs directing the viewer to look toward the center of the room where I sat.

Text and subtext are also utilized in the second video where it is not in the first. The role of the father in the second movie adds more character development than the first video did. Audiences can literally take my words at face value when I speak politely, not understanding that the only reason that I am speaking politely is because my mom in the video told me to. Audiences have to understand the subtext in order to get the entire joke itself. There is a lot of affinity between the two movies and not very much contrast. Our movies ended up having similar genres; situational/family comedy. They were both shot in the living room; however, the first video also provided another location to break up the monotony. A bit of contrast came from the different reactions of Charlie and Billy – Charlie was a better-behaved child while Billy was quite the little asshole.