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.

Powerpoint: Carrie Underwood

I have always known how to use the Power Point program, but I have never used it without using the common themes. This part of our project really allowed me to stretch out my power point capabilities and learn different ways of using the program. I really liked this part of the project more than the sound slide and poster. It was easy for me to bring up knowledge about Carrie and show some interesting facts about her career. I really like her music so most of the information I found for the slide show was no surprise to me but how to add sounds, transitions, times and effects were a complete learning experience. In my abnormal psychology class we focus on creating projects for our class and I actually have recently made a project using the Mac Lab and earned the highest grade in the class on my presentation. What I learned during the power point lectures I am actually already using outside of class. This is a really exciting part of this project for me because finding all the information about Underwood took such little time that I had more time to learn more about the program and now am applying what I learned in my everyday life. I think my actual power point came out very well. I really liked it and found myself desiring to put extra work and hours on it because it really interested me. Each slide I did applies to the next and every picture and effect that is on a particular slide matches what is on the same pertaining to that information exactly. For example, my second slide is information about Carrie Underwood, a short bio if you will. The picture I put of Underwood is of her in a simple pose facing the information. This really draws the reader into paying attention to what the art is referring to, Underwood's bio. My overall slide show is a minute long and the song ends perfectly after the chorus. This was really important to me as well because without listening to atleast the first minute of a song the listener can never judge weather they like the song or not. I am a public relations major in communications and this project really represented similar projects that I may be doing after college, this project helped me to remember why I am working toward my communications degree and reinforced my confidence that PR is really what I want to do.

Soundslide: Carrie Underwood

This part of the project was the easiest in my opinion. We took two days to do less than we usually do and in doing so it let me move fast enough to keep up with what is being taught as well as taking notes. As our class was taught I followed along with each step with my own project then helped people around me. By repeating the steps over and over again I began to understand how to create a sound slide better and the information stuck with me. I also began to grasp the importance of the sound slide much better because I was not worried about the deadline, timing, how to work the program etc.. Sound slides are created for the soul purpose to catch peoples attention for their full attention span, about two minutes. Sound slides are an informative and interesting way to teach, explain and make pictures come to life with sounds and pictures. Since I did not create the song I could only legally use thirty seconds of the song. I took the beginning of the song and used the chords up until the songs beginning then looped the under 30 second cut three times to create a pleasant repeated sound throughout the slides.

Illegal Music Downloading

Downloading MP3 and MP4 music content has been a controversial topic for as long as I can remember. As a twenty year old college student I download music because of its convenience. It is easy to hop on the computer, open up a program and download a song. Having to get in the car and drive to the closest Wal-mart or CD outlet store is a tremendous hassle only to buy one song. These days there is a wide variety of programs that allow users to download music, movies and other media all from one program. However, these programs are illegal. Although they give users the opportunity to pay for their product the money that should go to the band usually does not. Programs such as Limewire, BearShare and Frostwire do just this. Like most people, I do not pay for the music I download. I use Limewire and although I am given the option to pay monthy for the program I do not buy any music I download. However I do buy my favorite musicians CD's to show my support for the group or soloist. Although I am breaking the law by not paying for most music I own I still do it anyways. I feel as though these musicians are being paid enough money as it is and if I added up all the music I've ever illegally downloaded I'd have spent easily $9,000. Some programs like iTunes allow users to pay per download instead of a monthly fee. Although 99 cents seems like it is a great deal the average media library will be worth more than expected. This concept is certainly a double edged sword. Although the artists are not loosing a lot of money from songs being leaked, they still loose a piece of their income and more money has to come out of their pocket to pay producers and studios to make their tracks. Only a percentage of each song goes to the artist or artists and the other goes to their labels, recording studios etc. But, if we all paid for every song we owned for the minuscule price of 99 cents our music libraries would quickly become worth more than a car. My proposition is that the monthly or yearly fee's for such programs are a better idea to secure that everybody gets their money and that every song is appropriately paid for. The money should go to the same people it would go to if one would buy a CD from the store. Everyone gets paid and everyone's happy. Although users would still be frustrated that they have to pay a monthly or yearly fee people who download massive amounts of music do not have to worry about spending thousands of dollars and people who download less are paying a fair amount without robbing the musicians.

Animated Corpse/Carrie Underwood Poem

I did not really find this a challeging part of the project. All I did was at the frames, add my poem choose morph and I was done. At first I morphed my poem the wrong way but then once I realized this it took a simple edit and I was done. I did not have any problems with this project really. The FileZilla part was challenging just because I had never done this before but once we opened Filezilla and choose "File" then "New Site", change student name choose general and follow directions for the host name by adding your RWU e-mail login account information. After following these steps I set FileZilla to choose my GIF on the desktop. After I chose this I went to http://students.rwu.edu/amcdavitt265/movieee1.gif and found my file. I then chose to add a picture in blogger and uploaded the website, the picture worked and after numerous tries using different blogger help tools and HTML codes it worked. My movie appeared and I chose the size to be a medium so it could appropriately be seen and I was done. Once I straightened out the directions and followed each step I played around with blogger (as earlier explained) and I was done. It was all fairly simple. I'm excited to move on to our future project where we will be adding sound to our movies.

Corpse

My project entitled "Corpse" was an interesting project to create. I slowly gained more knowledge about Photoshop as I discovered different methods of cropping, scaling and mashing numerous images together. I picked different background images involving nature. I choose such images because I felt they fit the lyrics appropriately. The lyrics are all about not letting your life pass you by and how to not spend anymore time "wasted". This can be looked at from may different perspectives and applied to many different situations in life, the same goes for different poetic scenery and times of the day. I think that by adding all of the pictures together and combining them in this fashion gives the lyrics more meaning. I did not really struggle with this project although it did take a lot of time to get used to but once I played around with the different features and got a hang of things time flew by and before I knew it I was finished.