134 Group 4

This week, I presented my interactive analysis presentation. I learned that in order to create an effective storytelling project, we must utilize media other than words, and it needs to be displayed in a way that is easy for the user to navigate. I really was drawn to my website because of the way all of the information was organized. I liked how each section was broken up as you scrolled through the webpage. It made the website easy to navigate. I also liked how it included motion graphics to display the data. I think sometimes percentages can get lost in text, and displaying data on its own in an eye-catching way helps get important information to the user. The tone of the website was set right away when the user enters the webpage, which I think is important for the user’s understanding of the webpage. The interactive photo reels were a good touch and I think that would be cool to incorporate into my website. This week, we discussed our strategy for our interviews which will be on Friday. We came up with some questions to ask our interviewees and we discussed which equipment we will be using and who will be bringing what. Tomorrow we will begin our interviews and diving into stories, so I am hopeful everything goes well.

Something I learned this week from watching other classmate’s presentations that less is more. Being able to effectively get your point across in a matter of seconds is critical in today’s day and age. People very rarely read entire articles anymore. I believe this is due to social media and other technologies that have shifted our thinking and the way we do things. I think having interactive graphics throughout an article allows for better comprehension of the article and also makes it more interesting for the reader. I wish I would have done a better job when making my presentation and I wish I would have provided a PowerPoint for the class so that the information I shared would have been more organized.

This week we continued to develop our project and create a plan of what needs to be accomplished. Last week, we attended an “Olli” fitness class and we took pictures and some B-roll. I think we are moving along really well! This week we plan to try and conduct some interviews of the people involved in “Olli”. I continue to think that our group communication is good and I think we still have a good project and I am excited to keep working on it!

This week with the interactive analysis presentations I noticed the good and the bad.  I will definitely want to have a lot of interesting material that is factual, fun to look at and interesting all with varying degrees of interactive capabilities. I will need to make sure I make the 7 minute length and I want to personally ask some open ended questions to the whole class when I present. I notice that you need to have interactivity in the presentation. That will be key! I think some of the problems with the presentations is confidence and how they come across with how knowledgeable they are on the subjects. On to my contribution. This week I helped discuss how we are going to capture content when we go and interview the older people in this class. We planned about getting the cameras, the lights, and how we want to interview these people. Challenges we face are still trying to get people motivated and excited to get our project. I think in the future when we finally start getting content done we will have a lot more fun and our discussions will be more productive. We will have fun when we finally start seeing our project coming together. It will be great.

With the interactive projects I saw this week, I took the most from Stephanie’s presentation. I liked how she explained the website before showing it. After explaining it, she walked us through the different features and went into great detail (even the font). In these projects, there is a lot of interactive media and features. My favorite part of the Heathers website was the graph of short clips that rated how “dark” or “feel-good” the movie was. Something that might be good for us to use in our project over OLLI is the photo and video aspects that were shown today. On the second website, I thought it was cool how it had a voice aspect to it, but I’m not sure how we would be able to incorporate something like that in ours. This week, we met quickly to discuss what our plan was for tomorrow morning because we are going to an OLLI fitness class to shoot some b-roll and get a feel for how we wanted to do things. We will be attending three of these classes, so hopefully we can get all of the information and media we need during these three times. We also discussed what equipment we were going to use tomorrow.

I really enjoyed the interactive analysis presentations today. I think the websites chosen were very neat and had a lot of really cool interactive media. I really liked the first website over air pollution and how it highlighted the different body parts that are affected by it. It helped the viewer physically see what was damaged and not just read about it. I think that the website over Heathers had the most applicable media for our semester projects. The photo album and auto-play videos are something that I think would be interesting on our website and make the information clearer. I thought that the websites everyone chose were all very advanced, especially the one about the indigenous language in Australia. I don’t think our websites will need to be that advanced, but it was interesting to look at how creative people can be. All of the websites told a story about something I did not know much about. They all were aesthetically pleasing with easy to read fonts as well. I think the only problem I saw was that without a PowerPoint some of the content is missed and unclear. I will utilize a slideshow of some kind when I present. This week we made our plan for meeting at our OLLI class tomorrow. I also completed my group member evaluation. We will go to our first OLLI class tomorrow to gather videos and pictures. 

Something that I learned through presenting is that your information should be well presented and practiced. I think having some visuals that break down the information from actual articles is really beneficial to the audience. That is something I wish I would have used and I think my presentation would have been better and been able to easily reach 7 minutes. I think having a passion for what you are talking about is important and that is something that I thought I had during the presentation since I enjoy learning about the human body.

This week we discussed what date we would go and meet with “Olli”. It is still hard to plan a time that all works for us but we decided to go on Friday to an exercise class. We plan on checking out video, photo, and audio equipment for our visit tommorow, so we can effectively capture the exercise class. We are excited to begin our project and we all think we have a good topic that will be fun to share with the class. I think our group communication is good and we don’t have any problems suggesting ideas with each other. I am excited to begin working on the project!

So this week we got together and made our schedule. We put together dates of when we are gonna shoot all of our material and planned out when we would have time to edit and hand things in. Our plan for capturing media is to take a couple of cameras, lights, audio recorders, and set up interviews style questions and capture B-roll. I don’t think any of the equipment we’re gonna need to capture with will become an issue. We are all pretty well rounded in the use of the equipment so it should be good! I think in order for us to ensure that we get the best quality we need to have good camera angles everytime, good audio levels on our mics, and lighting. A big part of our specific topic is gonna be a compelling story so we need to be able to understand and clearly hear what our subjects are saying. The challenges we faced this week were figuring out who was gonna be in charge of what when we shoot our media. I helped build the schedule along with the other members of the team and we set in motion when we’re gonna get it all planned. I think in the future we will keep our plans clearly set and stick to them.

This week, we made a lot of progress in what our plan is for the semester. We made a solid schedule and decided to meet on Wednesday nights. We also decided that we would be attending the OLLI Friday morning fitness classes. This is where we will interview people and get the content we need. To capture the media we need, we will check out a JVC camera, DSLR camera, microphones, and other equipment. We discussed how Ben and Devin would be the best on the cameras, and we can collectively figure out how to use them in the best, most effective way. To ensure that our media is the highest quality possible, we will need to plan what we are going to capture, check out the equipment in advance, make sure that we know how to set it up correctly and have it ready to go before the OLLI class begins. We also decided that asking questions that are open is the best way to go about the interviews so we can get them talking about things they’re passionate about. We don’t want the conversation to be forced or lead them in one way or another. Everyone in our group knows what they’re specifically in charge of, but we will all work together to come up with the best project possible.

We decided to attend a fitness class to gather media for our website. We thought out of all of the options, this would give us the most interesting photos. For our project, we will need a DSLR camera, a JVC, and microphones. We have three opportunities to go the OLLI class. At our first class, we will be gathering B-Roll, getting some photos, and talking to some people to see who would be interested in an interview. Then we will set up interviews for after the next class. Our team is a little unsure of using JVC’s and microphones. We all discussed how we struggled with them in our 131 class. A checklist for gathering our media would be to; have a plan on what type of content we want to get that day, check out the appropriate devices, understand how the device works before we go to the OLLI class that day and have it set up before class begins, properly use the devices, import media properly from device to computer. This week we figured out which class we will be attending for gathering media. We also created a semester schedule. We were struggling to understand the bias we will be focusing on during this project, but we believe we can go into the project with an open mind and uncover whatever bias we find while talking to participants of OLLI.