Essential Question #14

First, I did a lot of research on teenage depression to gets facts and statistics. When looking for photos, I had a bit of difficulty because it's kind of hard to find photographs that represent an emotion/mindset. I added the photos to iMovie and recorded my script on Audacity. I imported my Audacity files to iTunes and then applied them to iMovie. I fiddled with transitions and slide times until I had 60 seconds then added a sources slide at the end.

Essential Question #13

In this class, I'm thankful for having more time to bring my grade up because I'm currently failing. In my family, I'm thankful for my cousin coming home from the hospital for the holiday. I'm thankful for my best friend Kate because I took her shopping and she got me the set list from the concert of a band I like. In the community, I'm thankful for the old brick playhouse and all of the employees who are like my family because they've changed my life.

Essential Question #12

My Flash story is about a girl named Bæ who was cursed to be boring. She gets fed up with being uninteresting so she sets off to find the witch that cursed her. Along the way, she becomes close with a boy the same curse. The curse is broken from both of them at the same time and they live happily ever after. I've mainly used the deco tool because I can add trees and flowers and buildings. For my characters, I've saved pictures from Google and traced them in Photoshop before importing them to the Flash stage.

My Flash Movie

Essential Question #11 (?) 11/8/13

My business is a zoo/aquarium and our business plan explains everything. We have 3 main employees and many secondary employees. The 3 main employees look over different regions of the zoo and the secondaries that work there. We offer fun for everyone, with kiddie areas, cyber cafes for teens, and different animals for the adults to enjoy as well as everybody else. We're far superior as a zoo, which is why we appeal to all ages. Our competitors are 2 zoos within 3 hours, because they've been established for longer and already have a larger popularity.

Essential Question #10

2 things I learned from the Army recruiters:
The National Guard will pay you more for in state college tuition than the Army/Army Reserves will.
In the National Guard, you only have to work one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer. (Or maybe it's Army/Army Reserves...or both. I've forgotten.)

Would I like to join the Army/Army Reserves or the National Guard?
I'd love to. I want the strength and discipline that comes with being in the military. Despite all of that, I refuse to. You can't join the military with self harm scars. I'm not going to join up to something like that. It's a really dumb way to evaluate the mental health of somebody. What if they used to self harm and they're better now and they still have scars? What if they're mentally damaged and DON'T have scars? I fully understand and respect not letting mentally damaged people yield large weapons but just because they have scars doesn't mean they're STILL broken. My best friends step father was in the military and he was sociopathic but hid it well and he had no scars. That's terrifying. Scars are just a bad way to identify the current mental health of a person.

Essential Question #9

Flash is used to create animated movies. Flash has a lot of terms and effects that Photoshop and Illustrator don't. Obviously, all of the animation effects aren't included in the other two programs because those are just for photos. Some of the terms are different as well, such as stage (where the work is created), keyframe (where an animation changes), and tween (the way one animation changes to another). I like Flash for its designed purpose but I dislike it in the way I dislike most computer programs, there are too many features and I'm just not tech savvy.

Essential Question #8

• What have you liked about this class so far?

I like working with these nice computers. Whatever I have to do is smooth and simple. I liked the trace face a lot and that was super easy. I liked the abstract effects in Illustrator.

• What do you still want to learn?

I know it's not great to say this but I'm not too eager to learn much of anything. My profession has nothing to do with digital imaging of any sort, but I really needed a computer class. It's a great class but I have no idea what I'm doing or what I need to do in the future.

• What has been a weakness of this class?

I'm not very computer literate. I took a summer course on computer languages (Basic and C++) and failed those miserably. I'm really good at operating word documents, I can do that like a pro. The most impressive thing I've done is probably making a really really awful movie with Alice. I'm simply not that great with computers. I'm also not very imaginative/creative. I can learn arty things, I just can't create them.

• What has been a strength of this class?

I'm also not very sure on that one. I'm a bit of a perfectionist so in a relaxed setting, I can tweak and tweak things until they look really nice. Is that a strength?

Essential Question #7

Scrapbook and magazine pages are usually very busy but with a common theme from page to page and within the page. The setup (like the background, font, and framing) should be about the same per page. To set up said pages, you'll need an 8.5 by 11 background and then you'll have to make a design thats not too busy with roughly matching framework and font that accents the theme.

Essential Question #6

I'm pretty sure Trace Face is STILL my favorite project. I just like how clean it turned out. I didn't feel compelled to make it busy with effects and Photoshop. It was just tracing.

Essential Question #5

We set up two templates for cards because we need landscape and portrait cards. Landscapes are horizontal and portraits are vertical.

Essential Question #4

Photoshop is more of a photo editing software and Illustrator is more of a graphic design program. I like Illustrator more because I really like abstract things. Photoshop is just too many effects.

Essential Question #3

I really only think it's important to learn Photoshop if you plan on pursuing a career in graphic design. I aspire to be a psychologist and while Photoshop is really fun, it's not essential to my future job. If you do plan on being a graphic designer, Photoshop is really helpful. You can change colors of things, move shapes around, edit images against each other, and generally change up everything on your base image. You can also design your own image, logo, or text. For any career in graphics, Photoshop is essential.

Essential Question #2

I really liked the Face Trace project that we worked on. I don't enjoy playing with effects because I want a lot of effects and very few at the same time and I want it to be gaudy but simple...I don't know. I disliked the effects. So Face Trace was my favorite because all I had to do was zoom with the magnifier tool, make a layer for each facial feature, and trace it. I enjoyed it much more.

Harassment

According to the news article I read, in the 6 weeks before Mayor Bob Filner resigned, more than a dozen women came forth with tales of alleged sexual harassment and unwanted sexual advances. Mayor Filner did admit to intimidating women, saying he needed help. I think his resignation is the correct thing to do. I won't say it's awful what he's done, simply because I don't know the extent of what he did (and I know women must have a tolerance for a level of these things because of past events), but I will say he doesn't deserve a high government position if he's abusing his power and status. I can't have too much of an opinion on this because I don't get worked up over these sorts of things, but I suppose its good, for the women he harassed, that he's resigning.

Essential Questions #1

"What do you expect to learn in this class?"

I'm not quite sure what I expect to learn in this class. I am excited for the bit where we change shirt colors and design the MSFF bookmarks. I suppose we'll learn about textures, colors, and techniques but aside from intricate photo effects, I've got no clue.