Thats it! I hope you enjoyed the process over the past eight weeks, and my growth over these two years. This class has taught me so many valuable lessons, not just in the classroom but during the creation of the projects. It was a challenge a lot of the time but it helped me grow so much as a creator and as a person. I hope that future students can look at my process and see what to do and what not to do (DOWNLOAD YOUR INTERVIEW ON A HARD DRIVE). It is bittersweet for me to say that this is the last media studies blog, but without further ado, here's my final project:
First Place the docuseries is an episodic documentary in which the lives of five high school students are highlighted. A poet, mathlete, thespian, athlete, and an engineer. On the surface, It may seem as though the individuals do not have anything in common, however, this docuseries proves that we are all the same in one aspect: competition. The series is made for students, by students, which is a very important element to the series as I myself relate to all of the subjects in my own way, and many other students would relate to them in their own. This made it easy to establish my target audience of competitive, overachieving, high school students from a middle to high social class.
Because this topic is so close to me, I find the representation of teenagers in the film industry as rowdy, unintelligent, and ungrateful personally offensive. Therefore, I wanted to combat this stereotype. This task wasn't hard because teens are very capable of expressing their thoughts in an eloquent manner and demonstrating expertise in their niche when asked about it. The quotes on the social media component and Parker Astley’s interview from the first five minutes of the second episode of the series show the teens’ deep thoughts. Additionally, I received a lot of pushback from people when I mentioned I would be highlighting the story of a mathlete as it could be “boring” (read more on why I chose the mathlete here). The excerpt from the series proves that you do not have to be the best at math to understand how Parker feels about the competition. The actual topic discussed isn't boring because we are all so similar in the sense that we all strive for success in our own ways.
In addition to my theory on why high school students would find this topic interesting, I attempted to create a more engaging brand for the series by implementing a cohesive physique. I did this by tying the series together as if the episodes were a video game. The intro to the series is formatted like the loading screen of a game, and in the “soft launch” era of my social media, the subjects are presented as “players”. The reason I chose this was because there are a lot of similarities between playing a video game and competing in high school. Particularly, it makes the audience wonder why. Why do we compete? Why does it matter? In a video game, you beat your high score and get a non existant trophy. In high school, you compete, win, and get a plaque that says “first place”. So what? We beat ourselves up over competitiveness and I thought the video game idea would be a very visually pleasing metaphor to incorporate.
Unfortunately, I do not think I succeeded in weaving this metaphor smoothly into the piece as I felt it was missing some of those elements in my print component. I had also hoped to incorporate more pixel art and video game B-roll throughout the episode, not just in the intro. While I was somewhat disappointed by the turnout of the video game idea, the color scheme was my favorite part of the aesthetic elements as it cohesively tied all the episodes together. I loved how each subject had their color but when looking at the bigger picture the colors worked well together. This can be seen in the loading screen as the bar goes up, in the social media where each post is highlighted one color, and even unintentionally with the background of my blog I chose last year (click here to read my blog on the creation of the social media.
The Magazine component was where I got to be the most expressive of my own experience. This magazine called “Teen Creators” was also targeted towards the same demographic as the docuseries. For that reason, I included a special section called “Think about it!” to promote audience engagement. At the bottom, I simultaneously advertised the Instagram page by saying “Visit @firstplace_thedocuseries to answer the poll”. This will prompt readers to engage in the provided Q&A under the instagram’s highlights. Now, if I had all the time in the world, could easily learn how to code, or knew someone who could code, the dream engagement practice would be to create a small video game that would promote the series but that may have to be an eight week project on its own,
Creating this piece felt very near to me as I am a senior about to graduate who spent so much time stressing over competitions and being “the best”. Making this made me contemplate whether all those hours were worth it. At the end of the day, those trophies and medals are going to stay in a box collecting dust for years after I go to college. Are we all just seeking validation from adults at this age? Maybe, but I realized that it has never been about the title “First Place”, it's about knowing that I have room for improvement. That room for improvement is motivation, and that motivation is what gives us passion whether it's towards poetry, math, theatre, a sport, engineering, TV production, or... you can fill in the blank on what you’re passionate about.
I was about to start editing but I had to stop immediately. Please let me know how I'm just now realizing this shot is disgusting.
There are outlets, wires, and the light can be seen. I'm starting to question if I need glasses because I do not remember the shot looking like that when I filmed.
I love generative fill and AI
However, this is nothing to stress about because I just so happened to stumble upon an Instagram reel about the brand new generative fill tool on Photoshop. In theory, I can remove or create any object I want to, and since the subject isn't moving around It works perfectly.
That's so much better but now that I'm thinking about it I could totally add items to the shelves, I just don't know if generative fill will do the best job so I had an idea. I will pick 3-5 items that I'd like to place on the shelves and learn how to animate them like pixel art. I know it's a stretch but it would look super cool and tie back to the whole video game aspect of the piece. I found this YouTube video that taught me the basics of animating pixel art, and it was actually very useful. Since I already did the pixelated pictures for social media, I also have that second method of creating pixel art, the hard part will be animating them but I can do it.
That's something I will get into at a later time because I'm going to need a full brain to do it. I will say that I did not think Photoshop would come in clutch as much as it did.
Even though the computer is still not working I got the footage on my Google Drive! I don't think anyone will understand how much stress I went through to get it to download. It crashed a total of 7 times and the upload took 3 hours but it was 100% worth it because this means I can start the line edit. I forgot to mention the one bad news is that I had two interview shots and I am still trying to download the second one but that's not a problem because as long as I have one I can edit.
The prayers were answered
And if that isn't already amazing news, I filmed B-roll with Parker today! I haven't looked through the footage yet but don't worry I downloaded it to two different drives. I am not losing that footage under any circumstances! I followed the b-roll list I created a few blogs ago and I am very happy with how a lot of the shots turned out. Here's a sneak peek of some of my favorites
The only things I wasn't able to get were trophies or certificates because I forgot to remind Parker to bring them with him but for 5 minutes, I have a lot to work with and I can still film next week during school IF it's necessary but I don't think it will be.
Pause. I need to rewind for a second because I am so proud of how that first shot turned out. It is exactly what I envisioned and I want to explain how I did it because It was way simpler than I thought It would be, it just took a little thinking outside the box.
Step one was going to Lowes and buying plexiglass. My dad already had some from a garage project so that step was more about cleaning the dirty plexiglass.
Step two includes being a genius and moving the two tallest chairs I have back to back so I can place the plexiglass on top.
Step three was sitting under the plexiglass and filming as Parker wrote.
I may not be a mathlete but that shot takes some major creativity skills.
This break has actually been a lot more busy than I anticipated but I hope to start editing soon. Ill keep the blog updated because we are still quite a bit behind schedule.
I was supposed to have locked in yesterday (spoiler alert I didn't) so today I worked on the print component. I hadn't looked into the layouts before today, but I found a few online that I thought to incorporate into my layout. The color scheme from the social media is definitely staying.
You know, I recently realized that the colors I chose are the same as the colors from this blog which was completely unintentional but kind of cool. Anywho these were some of my inspiration. I have one magazine that I saw on my Pinterest feed a couple days ago and I cannot find it for the life of me but I recreated a vision I had of it while combining a few elements from other magazines.
I think this layout really fits the aesthetic but once. I have the writing down I'd like to incorporate more of the "video game" aspects. Maybe some pixels at the bottom or making the quote the video game font.
To be completely honest, I thought writing would be a lot easier but it feels weird to write in the third person. I decided to write the article on the wonderful Google doc because if I wrote it directly on the layout, I would simply be trying to fill space not writing real meaningful content. This method worked really well but I didn't finish it all the way because I want to hear some feedback from people on what they would like to read about if they saw this magazine but here is what I've done so far.
I'm really happy with how this component is turning out so far but I will probably come back to it in a couple of days. I'm kind of having writers block.
While I am stuck in this technological pickle of not having my interview footage (see my last post for more context), I am going to start something that I am very behind on: social media.
I did the research already so now I just have to execute my idea. I definitely want to do a grid where each frame has an element of an episode but the feed looks like one picture. Each episode will have an assigned color and all the posts pertaining to that topic will be with that color.
After posting that "hard launch" I plan on posting quotes from each of the hypothetical episodes. That will facilitate the process since it takes no time to ask someone questions through a phone call and get their responses.
I also strategically chose soccer as one of the other episodes because I was the videographer for the boys soccer team this year, therefore I have tons of footage of them playing in addition to them winning their district finals, celebrating, scoring, and much more. That b-roll will most likely be used in a post, maybe with some voice over in the background or music.
Another idea I had is to include a reel of a singular line from the interview, I think that will be very engaging for the audience since it shows what will be in the final piece.
I made a short reference to what I was thinking on Procreate. I know it's not very descriptive but I get the gist of it and that's all that matters.
First Draft
When I was creating the first grid post, it took me a while. I made it on canvas using stock images at first and it did not look good at all, but the images were mainly placeholders. I later went and got the items to create it with my own pictures, but something still looked off. The edges on each of the colors made it look not uniform so I moved the project to Procreate and colored the background. Big improvement but the trophy felt out of place so I took that out. Then the best idea crossed my mind; to make the items pixelated. I found the following YouTube video which changed everything for the better.
The last thing I changed was the font because I hated it. I kid you not I have never gone through so many fonts but I found the perfect one. Lastly, I added the "player #" and their names as a little easter egg, and here's the final result:
I have yet to develop the other posts but I have officially created the account!
Guys... we have a problem. Please keep me in your prayers because I've lost the interview footage.
Ok, I'm being dramatic it's not lost but it's been super difficult to get it. When I finished the interview I downloaded the footage to my home computer. I have now learned the hard way to ALWAYS upload the footage to a hard drive or Google Drive because the computer decided to stop working and I am left without the footage. Every time I try downloading it to my hard drive I'll get hopeful that it's about to work and then the computer restarts. It has been awful!
My dad said he's getting it fixed this week but I had been planning on going through the interview as soon as I got back and unfortunately, I can't do that until I actually have the footage. This is such an annoying setback, but it's not game over. I have a lot of other things to work on in the meantime, let's just hope that the footage is back by spring break!
