Tag Archives: Sp-P5 Final Project

City Lights: A Psyon Story by Gordon Johnson

This is a highly trimmed down section of a first chapter of a novel I’ve been working on for the better part of two years. It takes place in a world where super powers are a reflection of the mental condition of those who have them. These super powered people are known as Psyons. The Psyons featured in this story are the narrator, Rand Allen Drake, and his girlfriend, Angel. Their powers both stem from depression but express themselves in very different ways. His powers come from feeling like he can’t trust others and has to do things on his own, with the weight of the world on his shoulders he has powers of super strength, durability and increased density. Angels power are an expression of wanting to disappear into life. Be unnoticed and untouched. Her powers are levitation, decreased density, phasing through objects and invisibility.

I wanted to try to use sound effects to complement the narration in creating an atmosphere of frustration and unease. Audactiy was a bit of a frustrating program to use and I’ll likely try Adobe Audition in the future.

The electric hum that builds throughout the piece is to help visualize how bight lights can trigger cluster headaches and heighten anxieties. I wish I could have found free sound effects for windshield cracking or metal crumpling to give the narrator more visceral strength.

Please Wash Your Hands!

I wanted to get the point across to my viewers that washing your hands is very essential. I didn’t go much in depth on exactly how effective it is because time restraints, but I tried to get in as much as possible within a minute to show that washing your hands is a good thing and why you should be doing it. I also wanted to make a point that washing your hands is a good thing even without a reason to do so. Everyone having clean hands is my goal! I take a jab at people who don’t wash their hands in the bathroom but for a good reason – it is very disgusting and can potentially be harmful.

I tried to make it a little humorous as well but I think it came across more as cringey than funny. I also don’t necessarily like the sound quality that I got from my phone while recording it. I would much rather use my nice mic that I would need to bust out again. It’s gathering dust somewhere in my house! All in all, I tried to make it an engaging minute and I hope I achieved that without sounding like an idiot.

Here’s the link for you guys to listen to is: Soundcloud Link

The Adventures of Mr. Tidley, by Alex Starke

Eight wild and crazy short stories

I took a little while to mull over what to do with this project. I wanted to do something whimsical and fun, so either a crazy commercial for my book, Short Tales, or create a new little audio short story using a couple of characters from my book. In the end, I opted for the small vignette of Mr. Tidley, a dog-like being who resembles a large, upright walking and talking Jack Russell terrier, and Sivid Zwaak, a reprehensible reptilian creature. The story is centered around a bar scene on the planet Odious Plott a frontier world in the outer territories. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

As always in a project like this, I developed a script for the various parts, including the narrator, and noted what kind of sounds I wanted for the whole thing. Having the script ready, it was now time to record the parts in Adobe Audition. In this case, I did all of the parts and then modified the voices with the tools within Audition. That aspect is always fun! Next was to find the various sounds and music foto add increased ambience and power to the story. YouTube royalty free library is always my first stop for background/soundtrack music, and also some sound effects. I also recorded a good few of the Foley effects myself and worked with them in the effects rack in Audition.

After collecting everything I thought I would need (and a lot more, just in case) I put together the tracks. Each character in this story have their own track, as does the music. Normally I would have separate tracks for most all of the special sounds and effects, but for this little vignette I grouped many together on two tracks. Having taken AUD120 I have been taught the absolute importance of keeping characters, narration, music, and your special effects–door slams, breaking glass, walking sounds, etc.–on separate tracks, it makes it much more easier to work on a project, especially those that have a huge amount of everything, from characters, a slew of different sounds, varying music tracks, and so forth. Imagine trying to find and edit a specific sound or part of a character’s dialogue if you had everything on just one long track!

This was a very fun assignment and I look forward to the video project, where I think I will do that crazy commercial for my short stories.

Caroline Thompson

By Ian G. Howerton

Caroline Thompson graduated college intending to go into writing novels, but when her novel was brought up to be adapted into a feature film, she was asked to write a screenplay and discovered a secret love of them. She went on to write many famous screenplays, including Edward Scissorhands, and The Nightmare Before Christmas.

My report can be found here.

F20-P3-Roadtrip Nation Report

Zaria Forman: Illuminating Climate Change Through Art

By:Darlene Waters

For this report, I chose Zaria Forman. She is an Artist and Climate Change Activist. I decided to write about her because this is an issue I have been increasingly interested in. And what could I possibly do about it to help out? Though she does paintings with pastels and I lean more towards photography, I was drawn to her experiences of traveling and seeing the world as it is and what things are changing in nature and puts in a form from her perspective. She is expressing our need to heed the warnings. Her career started when she was very young traveling the globe with her mother but, ultimately her trip to Greenland and seeing the damage. It got her moving in this direction of getting the word out about Climate Change with her larger-than-life pieces of artwork. She shows the beauty of what we have, and it’s something we do not want to lose.

Here is a link to my report: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fSgnPwG7kfs9MlR0yYCYL4cLlTXj1ULfuhj03iJhCH8/edit?usp=sharing

Road Trip Nation

For my report I decided to use Matt Otero. Matt is a filmmaker, he spends a lot of his time coming up with stories and filming them. I picked Matt because I went through and read his page and I am really interested in what he does for a living.

Matt’s milestone talks about that if you want to be a filmmaker you should start taking classes early and work on making your own shorts.

RoadTrip Nation

Pete Denman is a UX Designer at Intel.

He had difficulties at school because of dyslexia.

At age 20, he broke his neck and became paralyzed for the rest of his life.

A couple of years later, Pete started college with an art history class, using help from people who read and write for him because he couldn’t move his hands. He didn’t tell anyone in college he has dyslexia. His success with the first test inspired him, and Pete accomplished a degree in graphic design.

He applied for a job at Intel as a designer.

One of his biggest projects was redesigning the user interface for Stephen Hawkings’ computer that he used to speak.

Source:

https://roadtripnation.com/leader/pete-denman

By: Lyu Gremli

P-3 RTN Blog Post By: Daniel Parrish

For my report, I thought Craig Robinson would be a good selection. Craig Robinson is an actor, comedian, and former music teacher. I have been watching TV shows and movies with Craig before the age of 10. I have known that I wanted to go into the film industry before I knew how to multiply. Robinson likes to spread himself between interests and careers which I can relate to.

Craig started out as a music teacher after he finished college and quickly moved to comedy and acting, where he won a comedy festival and gained other kinds of recognition for his stand-up and comedy.