It's the Final Countdown

 The Final Countdown

And so we are heading into the final week of our portfolio project. I am happy with where we are at right now. I am currently editing a lot of the content we have curated through our interviews and the intro we want to do. I think I am about 40% done with the excerpt. I really have been working on the meat of the project, the middle of the excerpt because I felt like that was the best place to start with all the footage I had to go through and stuff like that. 

I think are on track to finish by Friday which is my goal. Shreya sent me her recordings for the intro today and I recorded mine as well. The clip I have right now is at 2:15 and with the intro we will probably end up at around 4 minutes maybe less than that. I really think that we won't be able to include more than one more subject (I have two edited together right now) maaaayyyybbbeee we can squeeze another one but it would be hard to keep it under time. 

Shreya is working on the instagram and we need 20 posts. She is using canva to complete it and she is making great progress. We haven't posted anything yet but I think I might start promoting the account on my personal instagram account to give it more visibility and followers. 

Stop!(motion) In the Name of Love

 Bringing back my (nonexistent) stop motion skills just like I'm bringing it way back with this reference to a Supremes song. I used to be quite adept at using different apps on my phone for stop motion since I did several projects in that style for Film class in middle school, and let's just say its been a hot second since I have used this technique. Shreya and I wanted to ensure that our docuseries would be visually engaging, and because some of the subjects talk about abstract ideas like religion, we wanted to visualize what they were describing. We decided to use stop motion because we found it would be a cool and fun way to spice up the doc but it is not exceedingly simple. 

The hardest part about this stop motion for me was finding the right space to do it. I really wanted to find a space in my house that had a plain background but it just wasn't working out. I tried to create my own with blankets and that didn't look good at all. Also the baseboards on the walls made the floor less of an option to me. I ended up using a book shelf and honestly I might redo the stop motion I completed just because i want to make a better background. 

In the interview, Dani spoke about how christianity and catholicism were bug parts of her parents way of maintaining their hispanic heritage. I visualized that with some things I had around my house and I will include the short clip below. 

C'mon VOGUE

 Let your body move to the music, move to the music

ok ok i'm done 

This might be a stretch for the title but I am going to make it work anyways. Basically I am trying to say that we have finished the magazine article component of the project. How does this relate to Madonna's 1990 smash hit you ask? Well it is quite simple really, Vogue just also happens to be a very famous arts and entertainment magazine, precisely the kind of medium our article would appear in to be marketed. Does that all make sense? Ok maybe I took it too far with this one 😂.

Our teacher gave us some feedback on the article and I was able to complete all the subsequent edits Shreya and I came up with. I will include it below. 

magazine article

Check On It by Beyoncé feat. Bun B, Slim Thug

Ooo Boy you lookin' like you like what you see

Won't you come over check up on it, I might let you work up on it
Ladies let em check up on it, watch he while he check up on it
Dip it, pop it, twerk it, stop it, check on me tonight

^this has been playing in my head recently because Shreya is going to check on my work on the magazine article haha

Anyways Shreya and I met yesterday and I was able to send her a zoom link so we could share our screens and show each other our progress on what we have been respectively been working on. She said she felt bad because she felt like I was doing work and then she was just criticizing what I had done but that really wasn't the case because her critiques will make the final product better. Her suggestions weren't condescending at all and I really appreciated her taking the time to thoroughly digest what I had accomplished and offer suggestions. 

Shreya said that I should reorganize the flow of the questions which is something I had mentioned in my blog post about making the questions. She also suggested that I remove one question and replace it with a question about our subjects to show our gratitude and talk about our reasons for choosing who we chose. I will include the updated article below, however there are some placeholders because I want to include a screen grab of the doc itself and we aren't far enough along for that yet but we will be soon!

EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT

 Breaking news!

I think I am 90% done with the magazine article component because I decided to make it just one of the creators of the docuseries being interviewed. I have some placeholders for photos that I will update later but the meat and potatoes are done. I just answered the questions I had created myself because I felt like I was the person who knew what I was looking for in an answer. 

Shreya and I will meet tomorrow to discuss the project and moving forward and I will show her the component and ask for feedback to see what she says. I will post an update soon with what she says about the component. 

Second Semester Seniors Part 3

 Today we had another round of group meetings although the were much shorter than usual because we had instructional time the first half of class. It was really helpful to visualize what the critical reflection essay should look like because I was apprehensive about how to approach that process. In the group meetings we actually spoke a bit about how comforting it was to have some examples and ideas of what the final product should look like.

I mostly spoke to Jen for the rest of the period and it was cool since we are both working on the documentary option of the portfolio project. She seemed receptive to our _____American idea which was a relief because it is nice to see someone who hasn't interacted with our project before almost instantaneously understand what we are trying to accomplish with minimal explanation. Similarly, Jen's documentary about the University of Miami dance team sounds amazing! I can't wait to see it. She mentioned some problems she was struggling with but I wasn't able to offer a solution beyond what she had already tried. I did make some suggestions about other components of the project like using Canva to create the magazine article. 

Canva: Baby I'm Back by Popular Demand, ***** I'm Back by Popular Demand

 Soooooo yeah, I am using Canva again BUT after it burned me while I was attempting to make the title sequence I was worried it wouldn't be as useful. I decided to give Canva another chance since there is no other platform that I know how to use that has extensive templates and media resources. 

Part of the documentary option of the portfolio project requires you to create a magazine article to promote the documentary. Now, to me this was kind of vague and I wasn't sure how to create it at first, that's why Shreya and I asked our teacher awhile ago about what it should look like (that is pretty much where we got the q&a idea from) and I also made a blog post about the questions I wanted to use in said q&a. 

Originally I got carried away and was thinking we might need to create some sort of interview video but then I remembered it specifically said magazine, so immediately I thought of Adobe InDesign and I tried looking for templates on there but there wasn't anything that was really sparking my imagination which is why I came crawling back to Canva.  I will insert some of the different templates I am considering using for the project below.