www.iConi.com

For the final project, I decided to work in a group with Kristen, Macie, Martina, and Olivia. and to showcase the knowledge we’re taking away from this class, we decided to make a complex video incorporating audio production and design. Our project centers around our course characters in a reality tv show. The Real Housewives of Cyber Manhattan shows 5 past and present wives of rich businessmen in a technoir world. The 5 women are friends but for every good moment they have, there’s a big fight to go along with it. Our project’s episode centers around Veronica Malone. Her husband’s stock crashed and they’re losing their money. She confides this secret into her friends but the story gets leaked. Who leaked it is what everyone is trying to figure out.

I had more fun with this project than I’ve had with any other project in college. I am so proud of my group’s work and how the project turned out. We all worked together to brainstorm the idea and script, but separately edited the clips. The clips I edited were the fight scene, the phone call scene, and the SupremeSkillShare commercial. The SupremeSkillShare helps build the world around the real housewives. We didn’t have the money or the time to make our live action scenes look like they take place in a technoir world, so we relied on lines in the script and outside commercials. SupremeSkillShare is the result of advancement and laziness. If everyone can gain any skill, hobbies and talents become meaningless which mirrors technoir’s advanced technology coupled with a decaying future. I mixed audio from a voiceover and music to engage listeners and make the commercial sound more lively. I also added a lot of flashy animations to keep viewers interested in the commercial. The phone scene was a challenge because the dialogue isn’t as interesting and it looked weird to make cuts. I tried to make the scene as visually interesting as possible by adding bright colors and cyber designs. Another problem I ran into was that the audio from the two clips would overlap because we didn’t record them together. As a solution, I had to freeze frame certain moment of the scene for the audio to align. My favorite clip to edit was the fight scene. It was a long process of editing, adding sound effects, and visuals, but I am very proud of the scene and I learned a lot. I wanted to replicate the classic reality tv fights from Vanderpump Rules and Dance Moms, so one thing I was really focused on were the sound effects. The music was hard to find but I eventually landed on a song called ‘This is Not IDM’ because it has a dramatic tone but the song has tech themes. I also used sound effects such as an orchestral stab and a bowed cymbal to emphasize tension and dramatic moments in the scene. One thing that I learned how to do for the scene was keyframe animation. I wanted to add a symbol over Olivia’s mouth to bleep out her cursing but in order to get the image to stay on her face. Adding keyframes to her mouth keeps the symbol following her mouth. Keyframes are always something that intimidated me, but they ended up being really easy. All in all, I feel like I did a good job of incorporating what I learned from this class into the project, and I am very proud of the work I did.

My goals for this course were picking up new skills, enhancing the skills I already had, and bettering myself as a CDS student. I am very proud of myself because I believe that I have achieved all those goals. The Daily Creates taught me that art does not have to be perfect in every aspect. This lesson helped me in the final project with smaller details. For example, the old me would have added a lot of detail to the sign that covered Veronica’s mouth for the bleep, but those are time-consuming, unimportant details that would waste time. I also learned how to tell stories through audio, when before I only knew how to convey them visually. I have bettered myself in so many ways through practice. When I started this class, I knew how to use Adobe Premiere Pro but I basically only knew how to put clips together. I now know how to use keyframes, how to add transitions, to flip a video, and so much more; I even piece together the videos better than I used to. Lastly, I have definetly bettered myself as a CDS student. Taking Intro to Digital Studies taught me the basics of the major, but all my projects were surface level. For this project, I poured so much of my time and energy into it until I was thrilled with it. I think that my newfound love for digital storytelling will take me far in this major and I am excited to see how I will continue to better myself for my second half of college.

Here is our final project, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.