The Cape House Script + Design Rationale

The Cape House By: Anna McDavitt

Cape Cod is where my family goes every summer to meet up with our other family and friends. We only get to see everyone in my family once a year and some years not everyone can attend what we call “Beach Week”. To say my family is ridiculous would be an understatement. We are all hicks to say the least, and when we are together the pranks are never ending but unfortunately, we all live in the opposite direction of one another, as hours separate some and full day trips separate others. During the year even my direct family is constantly on different schedules, we rarely see each other until very late at night where homework, work and other events separate us from spending much family time together at all. Going to the Cape is always the most relaxing time of the year; full of barbecues, bonfires, camping, and since our condo is right on the beach, the water is just outside our sliding glass door. Going to our condo in Provence Town, Cape Cod Massachusetts is the time of year where we all get to finally reconnect and recover from our hectic lives to catch up with each other and for a little fun in the sun.

I have been to Cape Cod every summer since I was born for Fourth of July to the following weekend. Over the years family members of mine have passed away but we have also gained others, things have changed dramatically but there’s one thing that always stays the same and that’s the Cape house. The McDavitt family Beach Week is always the reflecting time of each year. When you get into the condo you can’t help but realize how fast time is passing, it always seems just like yesterday we were all together, but in reality, it has already been a year. Every time we are all together our family can’t help but remember the family in our lives who have passed and the time we have had at the Cape house with them. My twin sister, Katherine and I always reflect on just this every time we are there, it’s a simple reminder to all of us to appreciate the people that mean the most to you and to understand how fast time is passing. Beach week, as much as it is relaxing and fun is reminder to be thankful for the good things in our lives and to appreciate how far we have come. In life some of the most important things are the simplest and our Cape cottage is just this for my family. It is important to take out every once in a while to appreciate life and reflect on the past year.

Now a day’s the world does not allow us to have even one day off away from work, school or technology and it is important to take a break and relax for a few days. Beach week for my family is our get-a-way from all the chaos surrounding everyone’s life but eventually it is time for us to get back to reality and embark upon another year. To have a stress free week of fun is exactly what every person needs in order to be happy, everyone needs a break every now and then and the cape cottage is ours.

The Cape House Design Rationale

My rationale consisted of gathering pictures I had of my summers at Cape Cod and ordering them appropriately with my script. I tried to match up some of the funnier pictures with the beginning of my script because the beginning of the script mentioned pranks we pulled and how silly my family all is. Then I new I was going to add the sound of the ocean so I went to Newport Beach with my friends one weekend to a secluded area and got really low to the ground to record the waves, I had to get really low to the ground to avoid as much of the wind as possible but I think it came out well. This was a plan and I think I followed my ideas and my rationale perfectly and the overall product came out great.

"The Cape House" FINAL

At first, I was extremely stressed out by this assignment. I felt very worried about the time line and I was concerned that with my other classes I would not be able to gather enough pictures and record my voice in enough time. It turned out to be one of my favorite assignments. Once I got going on this project it went rather smoothly. I choose to do this project on my Cape Cod cottage in Provence Town, MA. I choose this to base my project on because I think it is important for everyone to take time out of their daily hassles and take a break to really take life in. We all need to be a little more appreciative of life and the beauty surrounding us. The Cape cottage is just this for me and my family and I really enjoyed gathering photos from previous years at the Cape. It was fun for me too look back and remember what I was like then, the things I was interested in or even the drama going on in my life at the time. It's really ironic how fast we all grow up and this was something that struck me rather hard while doing this project. The slide show came together smoothly and I recorded my voice easily. Although I did have to re-read and re-record my voice reading my essay over a few more times than I would have liked to have to have done, but I'm a perfectionist and I really wanted my voice to come out well. Plus, it took me a few times to get used to recording myself. In class I was told to re-record my voice and talk slower. I am a fast talker, I've always been that way. However, I am always willing to change especially when it comes to becoming more professional. I re-recorded my voice and tried to cut down specific parts of the narrative but, I found that I could not slow myself down no matter how much I tried. This came as a surprise to me because when I try to change something I am usually successful in doing so. I did not change the recording on my sound slide because every time I tried to re-record it I would either mess up the words or would somehow manage to speak faster. I like how my sound slide came out and I feel that compared to the other recordings I could not get the narrative to be much better. Although I have taken speech class I have never had my fast paced talking be brought to my attention. Now that it has been pointed out I am trying to make the adjustments in order to be more professional because what I have to say is important. If I am talking to0 fast people can't pick up on what important things I am saying. Therefore, I want to try and continue to slow my speech down. However, I could not get this recording to come out much better regardless of my many, many attempts. Other than that the project came together very quickly. Once I had all the pieces I saved them and added them along with my song files I made in Audacity to the Soundslides program. I then edited the file names, credits and captions at which point I saved and exported the project and then launched and imported my project onto Filezilla. Soon enough, I was done! I can't believe how much I learned this year about these programs and what really surprised me is how much I learned about myself along the way. I wouldn't expect to do so from only a class but by choosing topics that interest me and pushing through my problems I really learned a lot about myself, Mac's and the various software we used throughout the year. This project exceeded my expectations and I am very proud of my work.

The project is embedded above.
If you wish to open it in a new page click the link below for my final presentation.
"The Cape House" By: Anna McDavitt
Enjoy!

Website: Adopting A Dog?? What You Need To Know

Click the link below to view my website:
Adopting a Dog?? What You Need To Know...

When the website assignment was announced I was excited to see what we were going to do. As the class was being taught how to run the Adobe Dreamweaver I realized that everything seemed really familiar and that's when it struck me. In Maine when I was in middle school our state gave every middle school student a Mac Book computer. In our computer class we had to do numerous assignments using Dreamweaver. Although this was over seven years ago it was very ironic to me how much the Adobe Dreamweaver software had not changed. It was almost exactly the same and in seven years I feel that the software should have changed dramatically. Therefore, creating a website was not a terribly challenging task. However, I really wanted to devote more time to this project and really create a strong website with a easy to use interface but we did not have time. I know it was extra credit to make the website more colorful and creative, something that I would have liked to do but I just do not have the time. Creating the links and making the headers were interesting but I would have liked to have been able to put more time into the project. I am now beginning to work on the final and with only a week left before finals I am extremely anxious to finish it in time but because of the circumstances I have only met the guidelines given for this assignment, and although I really would like to go above and beyond with this assignment to create a website there is just not enough time. I am satisfied with my work and look forward to applying my skills I have learned thus far from Dreamweaver in the future.

QuarkXPress BiBi Card

The BiBi card was not really challenging just time consuming, I spent about twelve hours working on it. This project challenged me to figure out how to use the tools in QuarkXPress. I had a rough idea and could use specific tools that we had learned how to use in previous classes but this project really forced me to try other tools and play around a little more. I really did not enjoy this project at all and was really focused on just getting through it to the best of my ability. It was really hard because I feel like we did not really have a lot of class time to go over things, although, everyone's BiBi card was different so I feel like there would be too little time to go over questions in just one class alone. I got through it and I really pushed myself to the best of my ability. I am very proud of my work and I feel like although it was a frustrating process I learned a lot by the end of the project. I feel like my BiBi card is pretty similar to that of the original. It was really hard because there were some specific fonts that were not on the computer so after searching for an hour or so and trying different idea's I think I found the right one. It is as close to the original I could get. Other than that I really did not have any more hardships throughout this assignment I just felt like it was very tedious. All and all, I learned a lot by taking this class and learned my way around QuarkXPress even more by doing this project.

InDesign BiBi Card

Using the InDesign program was much easier than QuarkXPress. I was not too excited about having to do both BiBi cards again in a different program however, when I began using the tools in InDesign I realized that they are much easier to use once you understand the program. Before I knew how to use the program I was trying to look for similar tools that were in QuarkXPress that were familiar to me in order to re-create the assignment but everything was different. I was very confused but as I began to pick the BiBi card apart I found out that there were ruler tools that we much different that QuarkXPress. This ruler tool was a neon green line that appeared when moving text boxes. This tool was much more helpful then that on QuarkXPress because you could see where your text boxes were lining up in relation to the surrounding fonts and their text boxes. After I completed matching up the texts I began to add the corresponding colors on the newly created BiBi card. I had to look up how to do these colors but once I figured it out I found a color pallet and that was it, the card was finished. InDesign was a much faster program to use than QuarkXPress and although QuarkXPress maybe more user friendly InDesign was much more efficient. After this project was completed I'm glad I had the opportunity to recreate the BiBi card in a different program because it helped me learn how to use another program as well as apply what I learned in QuarkXPress to help me figure out the most efficient tools to use when recreating the BiBi card in a different program.

Brochure: "Adopting a Dog??"

I enjoyed making this brochure. I choose to do a brochure on how to adopt a dog. In my brochure I included topics such has what supplies you will need to antiquity take care of your newly adopted dog, the medical care and cost that monthly and yearly checkups cost, training tips and adjustments/homecoming for a newly adopted dog. This assignment really let me open the doors of my imagination. Since we could pick any topic we wanted I enjoyed trying to find a variety of different topics that interest me, but at the end of the day I am a dog person and since I would love to adopt or buy a dog right out of college I thought it would be informative for me to do some research on the topic. Using Quark Express was much easier for me this time around. Now that we have done other projects in the program I am becoming much more comfortable with the program. After making by boarders and rulers to create an appropriate space for the information for my brochure I went to work. I searched the information all of which I retrieved from the following websites: http://www.paw-rescue.org/before.html and http://www.parl.org/ . The information was pretty self explanatory. I then searched Google Images for some fun pictures and thoughtfully placed them in the most aesthetically pleasuring places. After it was a simple print and I was done. Although the project was relatively easy once I got going on it, the brochure took a lot of time and effort. This week was a busy one for me and although I enjoyed this project it definitely put my Quark Express knowledge and time management skills to the test.

Poster: Carrie Underwood

At first I was really confused at how to work this program. But after continuing to see how it worked in class and listening to the lecture we had both days I began to understand how it worked. I really liked creating a poster because it brought everything that I had been working on in the slide show and sound slides to life. Carrie Underwood is my favortie country singer. I just saw her live in Maine over spring break and it was unbelievable. I really wanted to do this project to the best of my abilities and for my first time working with this program I think I did just that. I used a combination of colors from Underwood's third album "Play On" such as green and the attention grabbing yellow. I also used other colors that I thought would really grab someones eye but make the poster aesthetically pleasing at the same time. I did not really need much help with this project like I did others and once I got going on it I finished it rather quickly. Making a draft of what we wanted the poster to look like helped too because it helped me bring my ideas to life and know exactly what I wanted on the poster. I used my mock-up as a guide to help me create the poster but my poster did turn out differently then I originally planned. My poster was going to have a green background with yellow font but as I began creating the poster I realized that it was not as aesthetically appealing as I would have liked so I changed it up, played with colors and fonts and the result was this piece. I added a picture to the bottom left side of Underwood playing the piano that I took myself at her show a few weeks back. I enjoyed this piece of the project very much.