My DMA Blog

I chose to express the emotion of happiness in my final project. A few weeks ago I went to South Bend, Indiana and visited my sister at the University of Notre Dame. I grew up loving Notre Dame, so being on the campus brings nothing but happiness. I separated the video up into the different sections of my trip. The beginning of the video shows the tailgate party and some of the student body having fun before the game. The middle portion of the video shows the excitement of the football game. I incorporated and outside shot of the stadium to tie the middle of the video into the end portion. The end of the video is from the second day I was at school and my sister giving me a campus tour. I featured my favorite spot on campus, including the inside of the iconic golden dome. 

The most challenging part of this project was putting all of the short clips together and exporting them from my phone to Adobe Premiere. Once the clips were together, I enjoyed adding transitions and creating music. 

I made two separate tracks on garage band. The track for the video surrounding the football game was intended to relate to a marching band- hence the heavy drums. The track for the campus tour was intended to mimmic my footsteps as I walked around campus. I enjoyed creating this video and wish I could have more time to incorporate my other clips from around campus. I feel that I displayed the happiness this school brings me and I hope all viewers experience the same feeling. 

While creating this project, I reflected on the article “ Don’t Worry About The End of Film”. The article mentioned that the beauty of film is the imperfections it holds. I acknowledged that the clips could have been smoother, or maybe the music could have been better; but what makes my video perfect and unique is the imperfection it holds.

I enjoyed creating this video game. I found the software to be very interesting and would like to work more in the gaming field. My favorite part was watching my creation come to life each time I made a revision to my work. 

The most challenging part was getting the coin and particles to align, and be able to be captured by the player. I somehow had the coin and particles below the y axis, but couldn’t tell from my view of the game as I was creating it. I struggled to get sound to work as well. I was able to get the sounds to play at the beginning of the game, but the software wouldn’t allow me to insert a sound at the end when the coin was collected. 

The most frustrating part was how slow the game became when more items were added to the game. I had too many trees surrounding my maze which made the game load slow, in addition to the player moving slow. 

I had a fun time choosing different materials and adding new items to the game board. Working with 3D objects is lots of fun and more relatable after playing lots of video games growing up. Working on this project has helped me develop a greater appreciation for the people who develop massive video games such as Fortnite, where so many items are constantly being added and removed, in addition to the visuals being amazing.

I wish more people outside of those who take this class could experience this game making. I think Canisius should offer a class such as “Intro to Video Game Design” that gets students interacting and experiencing first band what it takes to develop a game. I think there would be a great turn out and many people would be interested in participating. I know that I certainly would take a class like that.

I found this project to be lots of fun. I was surprised with how easy it is to create a new web page. This is a very helpful tool, especially for someone who has a resume that is constantly evolving. 

My favorite part was finding a color scheme on coolers. I have never heard of this website until this project, so using it was lots of fun and very addictive.

The hardest part was linking the logo into the code, and arranging all of the folders to properly be pulled in from the code. I spent lots of time trying to organize my folders and make sure I was obtaining information from the correct locations.

The easiest part was filling in the “chicken beaks”.  I felt as if this could have been made more challenging. Navigating the HTML code was easy as well.

I would have liked to learn more about HTML. Instead of only filling in the brackets, I would have enjoyed learning how to write actual code. I have some previous knowledge of HTML from internship experience and from codeacademy.org, so I would like to go more in depth with the language.

Overall I enjoyed this project and would like to learn more about web design in the future. I am starting to explore different internship opportunities that allow me to be more creative and have more of a design role, instead of basic development and testing. If I had more time, I would like to change the layout of the website. I would create more distinct sections and do something different with the skills and awards section on the right hand side. I would like to know how to make a menu or various tabs that would direct the reader to various areas of my resume that would allow me to expand on certain experiences I have had.

This card was challenging, yet fun, to make. I first made the background of the front cover, and followed with the skeleton to put as the foreground. I struggled to remove the background from the skeleton picture, as there are many details and intricate pieces. I used the magic lasso tool, but it still was not able to get rid of the background within the skeleton body. I downloaded the font on the front cover from google fonts, and put it on a unique path that I created using various vectors.

On the back cover I inserted a picture from the internet that already had a transparent background. The inside of the card holds a message to my little sister, that has a back shadow to tie into the front cover as well as the ghost I created using the pen tool. I used less hardness on the ghost to give it a softer/ spooky feel. The tomb stone was created using the same hardness as the ghost, but I increased hardness to make the writing more legible. This was the fun and easy part of the project.The bat and the mummy were both images from google with transparent backgrounds.

After reading Fakes Frauds and Forgeries- How to Detect Image Manipulation (Link) ,I tried my hardest to make my front cover look as realistic as possible. This took a lot of time using the painting tool, as I kept adding and removing backgrounds around and in the body of the skeleton. Overall, I feel like the picture looks very realistic and like it was meant to be in a dark night sky.

Overall, I enjoyed creating this card. It was fun to draw with the pen tool and was interesting to place an image on a totally new background like professional companies do. I would have liked to place a background on the inside of the card, but I didn’t want it to take away from the images, drawing, and text. I think the professor did a good job of explaining the assignment to students and that the guidelines were very straightforward. In future assignments or work scenarios, I can most definitely see myself importing new fonts as well as removing backgrounds from various images. These are good skills to have and I am happy to have learned them.