Author: katiesquier

Katie Squier

It honestly doesn’t seem real that the semester has flown by this fast. I have really enjoyed this class and the hands on learning that I was able to experience through this project. I think our group did a phenomenal job, especially considering the circumstances and having to pivot our entire project so late in the game. Though there were a couple conflicting opinions along the way, overall my group was awesome. I never felt like anyone was leading the pack or falling behind and we all did a really good job of staying on top of our responsibilities. I also really appreciated that our whole group felt comfortable enough to give and receive feedback on their respective projects. Sometimes that can be super vulnerable and hard to take but I think in the end, our final project was better because of it! I was super happy with how our final presentation went and thought it went as smoothly as possible. Before out practice presentation and the final, our group met separately on our own Zoom call and practiced, which I thought helped a TON. I honestly wouldn’t change anything about our project in the end. I think that the Quarantine Crew ended up being a really fun and creative route to take and though ice skating could have been fun too, I liked how many different activities we were able to incorporate into one site.

Katie Squier

*Queue and giant sigh of relief*

This week we had our practice presentations. Each of the group members polished up our own pages and Ranya and I worked on making some final changes to home page. Our group had a Zoom call an hour before our practice presentation time. During this call we split up who was going to talk about what. I volunteered to share my screen during the practice and final presentations.

During the practice, I thought it went really well. Only a couple minor hiccups on some things that we missed polishing but overall it went really well. I am glad we took the time to practice beforehand just because you said we were the most prepared group and we really didn’t have a whole lot to change. On my end, I just need to fiddle around with my video to make sure I can have the sound 1. work during the presentation and 2. make the background sound of my video royalty free. My group member each have a couple minor things to touch up but I think we are in an overall really great spot.

Katie Squier

This week things got a little bit more stressful. In the midst of editing 30+ videos for my job, my video for this project disappeared. I still have all of my clips but I need to work quickly to put my video back together. I did work on creating a logo, and starting to flush out the website.

There is more information on there now that is actually about our group and I think once each member starts to put their media on the site, it will start to look really good. I think we are still not sure how to make it interactive so that will definitely be our next step. We plan on meeting as a group on Zoom in the next couple of days so we can get on the same page before we have to present for the first time. I am quite sure that the next few days will be a grind and a little bit stressful as we would like to have the site as closed to finished as possible before our practice presentation on Tuesday. Can the semester slow down a little bit?

Katie Squier

I think my team is struggling just in the fact that we had to throw this together so quickly since we changed our topic so late in the game. I am beginning to feel the pressure of the end of the semester and I assume my group members are as well. I believe we still need to schedule a final presentation time ASAP and get that out of the way. I think for the most part, our individual things are coming together nicely, now we just need to bring them together for one cohesive site. We need to discuss the logistics of presentation more this week and figure out who will be presenting what, but I would assume that since each of us did something different, we could easily just talk about what we personally did.

This week I worked on editing my media together. I plan on adding it to the website as soon as I button some things up. I also created a logo for “Quarantine Crew” and if this is what we decide to use, I think this can help the creative design of the website and how we want to put everything else together.

Katie Squier

I feel much better after this week. I was able to make my cooking show and I feel like I have most, if not all of my media. I think other members of my group had planned on working on their media this week as well. I think we really made a quick turnaround after everything that has happened in the last few weeks and I really couldn’t have asked for better group members. I think through this I have seen how flexible and cooperative we all have been and I think that is a really important skill to have.

Moving forward I am excited to finish editing my media and uploading it to the website. I will be interested to see how we pull all of these different moving parts and pull it all together for one cohesive storytelling website. If I am being honest, I would love to use this site and look back a couple years from now just to think about what this time was like and what kinds of things we had to do to entertain ourselves.

Katie Squier

This week has been a little bit of a whirlwind. After our call on Tuesday our group decided to scratch the ice skating idea. It was a bummer to have to make that decision but I just think that with everything going on it would have been nearly impossible to get the media we needed to be successful in this project. We decided on making an interactive website about quarantine. We thought we all are pretty experienced in this field at this point and each of us will have something different to share. Each activity will be something that we learned to do during quarantine or just something that we enjoy that has been keeping us busy. Right now we are all brain storming some of our best ideas and what could be the most interesting to watch. I haven’t talked to my group yet about this but I think it would be funny to come up with a name like Quarantine Crew or a silly name and we can kind of brand out website around that idea.

I am hoping we can get rolling on this rather quickly since our time is running out faster than we would like. By Tuesday I hope we at least have decided on our different activities and perhaps have started gathering some media that can be used for our site.

Katie Squier

Wow. What a time to be alive. Honestly our project has been at a standstill. With some of our group members moving out of the state we have just kind of put our project on hold, which I guess the university is on a break until after spring break. One thing that we did get accomplished is agreeing on a time to chat each week about what is going on. We (I think) are in agreeance that we will get on a Zoom, or Facetime, or something else each Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. I think this will be a good time to go over what we have done and what we still need to do. I honestly am stressed out about how exactly we plan to finish this project especially because Dylan had the most experience skating but is back home in Chicago now. I am pretty there are at least two of us who are in Lincoln but the ice rink is closed until April 1- assuming things get better I guess. I don’t even know what to do next. I am hoping our meetings will help but I guess only time will tell. There are definitely some aspects of our site that we can do without photos and videos but I am not sure if our site will give the same effect without the photos and videos.

Moral of the story… I HATE CORONAVIRUS.

Katie Squier

This week I really loved the presentation about London. I thought that site was really interesting. I liked how you rode the subway through the city and as you travel, you can click on different tourist attractions. In that presentation it would be cool if my group could somehow incorporate a figure skater or hockey player skating down on the bottom of the site. I don’t know that this would necessarily fit the aesthetic of the site that our group is creating. I also liked the sound effects that the Santa site had. I think an audio aspect adds a new level to a site and I think it will be important to incorporate this into our site.

This week we briefly talked about the layout of the website. We had planned to skate again today but due to a class conflict that I had, we decided to move the next skating session to next week. I really appreciate my group being flexible with me and allowing us to reschedule for next week. Though we did not gather more media, working on the website together proved to be helpful with our ideas. Talking through the different pages that we wanted to add allowed us to continue to expand on our ideas and looking forward to next week, we can have a better idea of really specific media that we will want to gather.

Katie Squier

This week has proved to be the mid semester week from…heck…? All my classes seem to be picking up and my group has been phenomenal in being understanding with my group contribution this week. In class we designated different roles for the Preliminary Project Submission assignment. I took on the into portion. I think that after we got on the ice last week, our overall vision has changed a little bit so I plan to talk about the direction we are taking going forward.

I think we still have a lot of media to gather for our project. We took headshots for each other last week which will serve as a profile section for our team website. Now that we have more information about how to use the Osmo, I anticipate that we will use that and get so really great media, the next time we are on the ice. I think that we could also benefit from media outside the actual rink. Taking photos, or conducting interviews outside the Breslow arena would be beneficial. We also had a issue with out photos from the first trip as they were in a weird format and I had to change them all to .jpg so that I was able to upload the files to Box. At this point I just worry about how everything is going to come together. I feel like we have a good start and vision but when I compare what we have to some of the finished example projects, I am not so confident. I don’t know how to fix that issue or if it will fix itself as we edit and bring everything together, but I guess we will see.

Cheers to Week 9!

Katie Squier

This week in class the interactive analysis presentations were great! I really loved the one that Macrae presented on the bikes. I think they did a really great job showing how the bike is really customizable. We touched on this in class but that was the only presentation of the day that didn’t have a sound aspect. In creating our own website I think that incorporating sound is really important and just puts the extra cherry on top of the site.

For our own project this week we went ice skating! It was a lot of fun and I can tell that my group is really fun because we got a chance to be ourselves outside of class. The first part of our trip to Breslow was spent trying to figure out how to work the Osmo. This was pretty frustrating and we never did figure out how to use it. After returning it we asked how to use it, and plan on getting this footage the next time we go skating. While we were there our ideas really started to flow. We decided that our website will kind of resemble a hockey team website. We will create logos, and create player biographies just like a real hockey team. I think this project will be really funny and I cannot wait to see the finished product. Next week I think we will have to go skating again jsut to get more video using the Osmo and gear more of our media around the idea of a hockey team rather than just taking videos and photos of each other just skating, which we found got boring a lot faster than we expected.