Team 2 Blog

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?

Ranya Aribi

This week was similar to last week. We had our weekly meeting with Kaci. We talked about our progress so far individually, and as a team.

Personally, I am having a lot of trouble with this. I recorded at first with my sister’s DSLR camera, but the shots did not come out clear like I wanted. And to top it off, my Macbook model did not come with a SD card slot. So I can’t put my images and videos on my laptop. So instead, I decided to record with an Iphone, which still had good camera quality. I had to redo all my shots, but they actually came out really good. I obviously did not have a specific microphone, so I used my airpods, which gave me closer, more clear sound quality. I edited as much as I could of those, and I am waiting for the rest of my teammates to have their content done so we can figure out how we can have it all come together.

For the team as a whole, we set up strict deadlines so we can ensure everyone will be done and ready for the practice presentation next week. And once everyone is completely done, we will give each person their responsibilities for the presentation.

This week during our meeting we just briefly discussed our extra credit opportunity which will be pretty nice to have all around. Then we went into detail about the project as well and we have all gotten our feet wet with the content and media which is a big step in the process. I am still needed to shoot just a little bit more media to make sure that I can get the right steps into showing the best content for our website. The lighting down in my basement isn’t the best and I’m just using my IPhone to shoot the footage so it isn’t the best picture but I’m slowly trying to find ways to make it look a little better. It’s a slow process trying to figure out the best way for the media to be produced with limited equipment but this is part of the process that needs to get done so it will just have to be something I find a solution for. But other than that everything is going over very well and it is all coming together nicely, I just need to upload it to the website which I am hoping to do on Sunday so we can be prepared for our practice presentation on Tuesday.  

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.

Ranya Aribi

This week, most, if not all of my teammates finished capturing their media. We are all currently working on uploading it to our website. I think we are struggling to finish all of it. It seems like we are not all at the same place, which makes sense, but it is getting difficult to equally balance our work when we are not all doing it at the same pace, and that is due to a lot of reasons we can’t fully control.

We still have a large portion of our project that needs to be finished. Because honestly, it seems the only thing we have done is everyone’s individual media. The website design is not thoroughly concrete, the theme of our website is changed and “designed”, but the website needs a lot of work.

From my team, I want some more communication and a sense of schedule. I want us all to be on the same page with where we are at, and I also want equal help from each person. I think we had a really big challenge by having to change our whole project and website so late into the semester, but it just means we have to work harder to finish it. My group has also been very flexible with the change, so I do appreciate that, and I know we are all working with what we have, and to our best abilities.

For this week, I captured my own media, we started working on our logo for the website, and I am setting up the home page to set up a sense of similarity between all five of our activities.

With practice presentations coming up next week the only thing I could see our group struggling with is having all of our content completely captured and edited into the website the way we want it to be. Also, in my case it has been very difficult to capture my content at points because the weather has not been so great, but luckily it looks like there should be some nice days coming up ahead. Once our content is all captured, which most most of it is, all we really will have to do for our project is plug in everything to our site and customize everything the way that we would like it to be.

Ultimately what I would like to achieve through our practice presentation is completely understanding where we need to shift our focus for the remainder our time. I believe that once we know exactly what needs the most work, we will be able to make our project the best that it can be. Additionally from where we were at two weeks ago, I would say that were are in pretty good shape considering we basically had to start our project all over. I am very happy with how quickly my group and I have been able to switch gears and get our work done during these very weird times.

With the weather looking nice tomorrow I will be able to capture all my content, be able to edit it all, and finally put all that I have into the website. Although I do not have all the equipment that I wish I could use, I know that I will be able to make something pretty cool with what I have. I am very excited to see what I come up with, I think that plan that I have is pretty solid and I know that whatever comes with it is going to be really cool.

I am dumb and forgot to the blog last week and then I wasn’t able to get on the Zoom call tuesday because of some technical issues. This past week was not too hot for me. Anyway though, the assignment is starting to come more and more together as each of us has found what we want to specialize in. I am going to give beginner tips on how to shoot a bow, equipment needed and I am thinking of providing interviews with my brother who is an avid bowhunter. That was what I was going to ask about in the call but failed to get on, so if anyone has an opinion on that let me know. I just thought of it because he would be able to give some more technical terms and knowledge. Otherwise, I can have him teach me and I can give video lessons or do an interactive aspect that way.

I do have actual content now which is a step in the right direction. I capture some images of the bow and it’s accessories using my brothers camera. I plan to use these picture to show a visual of what one would need instead of just telling them. I really wish I could have joined that call, but the group has done a great job of communicating with me about everything. I showed them by pictures as well and they seemed to like them.

Finally our group has a way cooler name now I think because before we were just “Ice Skate Group”. We are the Quarantine Crew now and he have a pretty legit looking logo to go on the site that Katei put together.

This week was a little hectic for me. I did miss our zoom meeting due to some conflicts that took place at work that I couldn’t control. However I did get a little bit of my project done and taken care of. I have slowly started created a video to get my pool game kicked off for this project. It is going nicely it really pays off to have the pool table in my basement so it is very easy to access it whenever I feel the need to work on it. This will be a very good thing when it gets down to crunch time and when we need to fix some things after our practice presentation. After looking at some of my groups work it is easy to see that we are making pretty good progress on this project and we can tell that things are going to be nice and smooth once we get to the practice presentation stage. Making the change on our topic really made things a lot easier on us as well. It gave us a little more room of what we can talk about allowing us to do something that were comfortable with as well. It will be good to see what we come up with.

On Tuesday after talking with Kaci we really decided to brainstorm our ideas about what we were going to talk about for our project. And considering of my situation with Self Quarantine I decided that since I have a pool table in the basement of my house that it would be the best idea to kind of discuss the different game of pool and how to play the game. Some people don’t know the exact rules of the game or that there are many different kinds of games you can play. This will be easy considering I don’t have to go anywhere besides my basement. However, I’m still trying to figure out exactly what kind of media I am going to use in this situation as well. But a lot of the will come into mind as I start brainstorming the project. I think the project for our group will go good even though we decided to switch our topic because of the situation we were in. I believe some of my team members have already completed their projects so I plan on getting mine all taken care of next week so we can begin on the website and practice for our final presentation which is taking play during Finals Week.

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.