Brogan's Blog

Overview  This semester we focused on convergence media. It was really interesting to see how it all works and to create convergence pieces of our own. Here is some of my work from this semester. Advanced Feature Story For this project, we had to make a feature news piece that was timely and relevant to ONW. My group chose to do our video about finals. We interviewed three students and asked them their opinions on finals. This project took about two weeks to complete. One of the challenges we faced was to adjust all the audio clips so they weren't too loud or too quiet. One of the most important things we learned is that the use of nat noise can make a huge difference in a feature news piece. Some of the feedback we got was the lack of transitions, so we went back and added video, and audio transitions to make the video seem smoother. Overall I was really impressed with the outcome of this project and thought me and my group did a really good job.    ...

Infographic We are currently working on an infographic project in graphic design. I chose to do my infographic over Destin, Florida. We started off by sketching our infographics and graphics. This was a little challenging for me since I am awful at drawing. After sketching everything out we made color swatches in Illustrator. We then started working on creating our graphics in illustrator. We used several tools such as the pen tool to trace images. Mrs Beaudoin gave me many tips to perfect the pen tool and work efficiently with it. So far I have only finished my graphics which took about three weeks including all the planning and sketching, but I think they have turned out pretty well. Overall I think this is a very good project to get us more comfortable with illustrator. Collage      For this project we had to take a bunch of images and blend them together to make a collage. I chose to use some picture I took while in South Dakota. I learned how to use he erase...

For my groups ONW Now video we had to make a news piece. We chose to do our piece on the underclassmen play "And Then There Were None"; a very interesting murder mystery. We started by brain storming questions to ask some of the cast members. Then we interviewed them and collected B-roll of the play. After that we started editing the piece. We use the lower thirds specific to ONW Now for consistency. We also had to change the audio levels to make sure certain parts weren't too loud or too quite. I was responsible for creating the voice over for video. I also played a big part in editing. Overall I thought this project was a success and went pretty well, but I do think if we had more time we could have made it a lot better. I thought this was a great project to get us introduced to one of the several strands of video next year .

News Story: https://docs.google.com/a/students.olatheschools.com/document/d/1eD0dNKpxJI-cJORjMyw6UNbOCLkzu_Zxcv9TVVMs2xs/edit For my news story I chose to convert my finals feature piece into a news piece. I used the inverted pyramid by putting the most important info towards the top and extra info at the bottom. I also used the interview clips in a way that they seem more factual. I didn't really like writing a news piece a much as I thought I would. In my opinion a feature piece allows for  more freedom. I still need to work on staying away from opinions and making the piece more factual. What I would do the same next is put all the important information at the beginning. Overall I thought this was a good writing assignment to introduce us to News

For this feature piece we chose to talk about finals, because they are coming up which makes it a very timely topic. We fist started of writing a script to follow so we would have an idea of what we were doing. We then found a couple people that would be willing to get interviewed and scheduled dates to film then. After that we filmed B-Roll and interviewed the students. My role in this process was to direct the group and schedule deadlines. I made sure everyone was working together to get work done on time. I thought I did an okay job of directing my group, but felt that I could have stepped in and helped more in certain areas. I approached this assignment differently by collecting more B-Roll, and using mics for interviews. I definitely collected more B-Roll then my last piece, but I still thought there could have been more. We also used mics for our interviews which made a huge difference in audio quality. What I learned from this is always collect more B-Roll thank you think ...

For the Procedure video my group came up with the idea of how to get the elevator key in case you ever get injured or would need to use the elevator for whatever reason. We started of creating a storyboard for our video, not the most entertaining thing but definitely necessary. Once we had a clear plan of what we were going to do we gave ourselves group roles, my job was editing and  actor. We then started filming which was a difficult because we had to get permission from the the nurse and she is usually busy. We used a variety of shots especially close ups to show detain in our process. We also used a variety of shots of us walking to make it look like we traveled a long distance in a short period of time. Once we finished filming we moved on to editing. I put the close ups one after another and cut them very quick to give an interesting effect. I also used transition such as fade to white to show time change. I even had to reverse a clip because of our lack of footage....

I chose my pop art project as the image I would use for my transfer print. I printed a colored version and a black and white version. I then water colored two pieces of card stock for my prints. My first water color for the black and white print I stuck to a cool color theme. The second water color for the colored image I did a rainbow splatter design. I then took Mod Podge and spread it all over my print. After that I laid the print face down on water color paper and squeegeed any air bubbles out. After that dried over night I used water to rub the paper off the print. The ink was left behind on the water color paper letting the colors shine though our print giving it a interesting and unique look. One thing I would have done different is giving my black and white print more white than black so more colors would come through. Overall I thought this was a really fun project that I would do again to get a better result.