Team 2 Blog

After switching our project idea I am finally in a place where I am very comfortable with where I am. I have decided to switch my subject from video games to Bags and I am very excited for this. I play Bags a lot and it is one of my favorite summer activities. I have a great plan for what I will be capturing for my content and I plan on completing this by the end of this weekend. I think that I will be able to make it pretty interesting and I will be able to give valuable insight on the game for the people who may not know so much about it.

This week my group and I all talked about what we had going on with our own individual activities during our weekly meeting and we all gave advice and suggestions to each other. Coming up this next week is the most important week for us because we all need to have our content captured and begin to finish up our website. This could either go very well or not so great, but I believe that with the work effort my group has shown throughout the semester, we will have nothing to worry about. I am excited to see what everyone comes up with because I know it will be great.

Ranya Aribi

For our project, since we changed it and are essentially doing “individual” activities, we are each capturing our own media. For me personally, my older sister owns a DSLR camera, so I am thankful for that, as it has made capturing my media significantly easier.

My activity that I chose to do, I have already planned my media in advance, and that has, and will continue to, help me complete the media content efficiently. I planned to capture video content, pictures, and some voice overs. I am also planning on adding animations, which are taking some time to create, which has proved a little challenging.

Other than the animation and creation part, the content capturing is relatively easy. I have had to split it over a couple of days due to lighting, and time, and availability of my sister to help assist in recording and taking picture shots.

For our project as a team, we all finally finalized our activity ideas, and the weekly meeting with Kaci helped a lot for my other team members to get where they need to be. I have continued to assist my team members in ways they need help, and have kept up the communication through our group chat.

I finally got to present my interactive website this week. It was not in front of the whole class though since we no longer have any more in-person meetings. The rest of the students, as well as myself, were presented to get our credit had to do so through Zoom. I had a little bit of an issue figuring mine out so I missed pretty much the entire meeting. I am sure the sites were cool and could have given some more great ideas to use. I did mine on The Boat. It is an interactive website about refugees traveling across the ocean and the struggles they faced. The part I liked most about the site was the 3D aspect of it. The appearance of images and objects looking as if they were hanging in the air looked cool to me. The sound was also a very neat part of the website.

This week my group-mates and I were able to connect as well as our professor via Zoom as well. This made trying to coordinate everything a lot easier since we had just been mainly using our group-chat. Our call started by getting some minor details cleared up about how the rest of the class and project will go. This discussion leads us to want to change what our project was focused on altogether. Instead of learning to ice skate we are going to play off this quarantine life and put a fun spin on it by providing ways to beat the boredom we are facing. I want to do my part in learning to shoot a bow. I have great resources here in my dad and brother so it should go smoothly and be fun as well.

Ranya Aribi

For our website, we have brainstormed a lot of ideas we want to include in our website. Our goal is to make it as interactive and fun as possible, in the least complicated way. A lot of interactive websites seem to get carried away and can become complicated. I am hoping for a cute/eye appealing website as well, as I believe the look of the website is just, if not more important than the content. We have yet to think about how our website will look on mobile compared to desktop, but that is something we will definitely look into during this week.

After our meeting with Kaci, we decided to completely scratch the ice skating theme. Honestly, I wanted to do that from the day I found out about the shutdown. I knew it would become too complicated, and I sort of regret that we waited this long to officially decide to do it because now it means we essentially have four weeks to complete a fifteen week project, but I have hope. I am really counting on my teammates, and they are counting on me as well. As long as we support each other and keep each other accountable, I am confident we will get it done, and it will be done well.

In terms to my contribution to our project this week, we decided on changing the topic, so I gave everyone some time to decide on their individual project ,and starting tomorrow, we will be setting up a daily/weekly plan for each person to keep them on track to complete their media/part on time.

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.

It has been a fairly stressful couple of days between becoming self-quarantined, having classes start back up again, and lastly deciding to start over on our project due to the circumstances with COVID. We have decided to change our project to things you can do with under this self quarantine/ during the COVID. With me being absolutely quarantined at the moment it is difficult for me to decided what it is I will talk about, whether it is Netflix shows or maybe being a movie critic about movies that have recently came out. It is tough for me to decided at the moment but I will think about it throughly this weekend to see what will be the best option for out team to ensure that we get this project done to its full extent. Going forward I believe that these zoom meetings with Kaci will be very productive in giving us our options about what we will be looking at in the final weeks of this semester which is actually kind of crazy. But as a team we are keeping in touch and making sure that we are doing everything to the best of our abilities.

This week has been very different from all the others. We decided as a group to switch our project up do to the fact that we are not able to go ice skating anymore and capture content. We all decided that due to the times that we are in currently to make our website about activities you can do to help with the boredom that comes with a quarantine. I am very excited for this because we will all get the chance to do something that is very interesting and fun.

When it comes to our website I think something that needs to be incorporated is the ease of accessibility that comes to it. I believe, especially after all of the presentations we have seen, that a website that is able to flow nicely for the viewer is always the best. Also, I think the “story” that would be good to portray on our site is one that is showing a light at the end of the tunnel. Many people are starting to lose their minds in quarantine and I think it would be cool to be able to show them that there are many things that can be done at home to help make the time more enjoyable.

My contribution to the group this week was helping everyone decide on what our new topic should be and also picking my subtopic for our website. I will be doing a section on video games where I will be including this like: gameplay, interviews, recommendations, and where you can watch other stream video games. I am very excited for this because I love to play videogames.

Overall I am excited to see how everything turns out. It is going to be a lot of work getting everything set up, but I believe that we are moving in the right direction.

Ranya Aribi

So, weird week, and an even weirder blog. Everything is unclear at this point. I don’t know where I stand with my classes, even this one. Everything happened out of nowhere and very quickly. I am still shocked.

In terms of our project, it seems like a rollercoaster of a mess at the moment. We had planned to go ice skating the week of classes being cancelled, and that got cancelled right away as well.

The first thing I did when I found the news about classes being cancelled was going to our group group chat and trying to set up a time and plan as our whole project is based on doing an activity together. We tried to find a time, but that did not work out, as some members of our team told us they are travelling back home because of the situation. So that part is unclear.

We also tried to come up with a time to meet up with an application like zoom to try to mimic in person meetings. I really hope that is just as effective since we have no other choice.

I do have hope though, I don’t want the fact that we can’t meet in person to negatively affect our project. I am still determined to finish the project and semester off strong. I do think the weekly check ins with the instructor, as well as with each other are really going to help keep it going smoothly.

I am not sure how to exactly write this one or what to say. Everything still feels pretty surreal. It all feels like a movie and makes me realize I took my normal day-to-day life for granted, that’s for sure.

When the news got to my group about classes now being online and that classes this week were canceled, we all immediately started talking in our group chat. Some members of the group are now having to go home by parental request, so not everyone will have as much camera time now. That will still be okay though as they can still contribute to the website and the editing process. As of right now, I plan to stay in Lincoln since I have a job here. A lot of businesses have been shutting down as of late though. If mine were to do so, my parents want me to go home too. This is a tricky time to be alive.

A lot fo my contribution to the group this week just came from trying to help allocate specific duties to people, but that is pretty much what everyone else did as well. These blogs carry more weight now with all that is going on, and it will be interesting to see where this goes.

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.