AFC Championship: Ravens vs. Patriots

    As a die-hard Patriots fan, even I had to admit by the end of tonight’s game that we did not deserve to win. After dominating most of the first half of the game, the Pats came back after halftime and completely shut down. People can say that we were missing Gronkowski, but the truth is that nobody stood up and made plays in the second half of the game. By the middle of the fourth quarter, it was obvious by the looks on all the player’s faces that they had as much faith in themselves as the fan’s did back home. All in all, this was the worst second half performance by the Patriots that I’ve ever seen. Better luck next year hopefully.

    On another note, Bernard Pollard a.k.a “The Patriot Killer” was at it again tonight. After putting Brady, Welker and Gronk out with injuries over the years, he put a particularly vicious hit on Stephen Ridley in the fourth quarter. Ridley then left the game with a head injury, but in my opinion it could have been a lot worse.

Now we all get to hear “Harbaugh Bowl” for the next two weeks. Torture.

*Final Project*

I was really happy with that way that my final project turned out, even though I had to make some changes to it. I had a lot of problems putting my ideas down on paper, because I was a little limited with what I could do on Photoshop. I quickly found out what types of things I was capable of, and then applied them to my project. Although it was a little annoying and time-consuming, I like that I was challenged by this project. I loved that I could be as creative as I wanted in doing this project.

I’ve learned so much from taking this class over the past few months. It has been by far my most informative class here at Elon, and even though it was a lot of work, I feel so accomplished after doing everything that we’ve done. I feel a lot more prepared for my more advanced classes and I can’t wait to build on the skills I’ve learned in Digital Media Convergence. I think the most important thing I learned while taking COM 220, was what it takes to work with other people. In the real world, the majority of huge projects in the Communications field require many people, and working on a team is an invaluable skill. I’ve learned that it takes patience and compromise in order to get something done. Everyone has different opinions and views, and it’s important to listen to everyone, and decide what it best for your project.

*Project #8*

This project was extremely interesting, and a little more complicated than I expected. Thankfully, we had really good actors who wanted to get all the shooting done right the first time. If we had had someone who didn’t want to be there, it would have been a lot worse. It was a little difficult at times to direct our actors to do certain things, but overall I’d say it was a good shoot.

I really enjoyed doing this project because it was interesting to listen to someone talk about something he loves so much. Interviewing someone was a little awkward at the beginning, but after a while, it got more and more comfortable. I really like that our interview isn’t really dry and that it contains a lot of humor. I think that was one of the things that we set out to accomplish at the beginning, and we were successful.

I thought that this project was really interesting but it was really difficult to get everything together. A couple of my friends are roommates and they are *always* fighting over the thermostat so I thought it would be really authentic to make my movie about one of their fights. I decided that my friend Lauren would be the protagonist because usually I side with her during their fights. I made her the protagonist through a couple of different ways. One way I did this was by having her doing homework in the movie, while her roommate Katie is watching TV. Also, when Lauren was changing the thermostat, she kept changing it to the same temperature, while Katie kept increasing it just to make Lauren mad. In the end, I showed the viewers that Lauren was the protagonist by having her win the fight and locking Katie outside the apartment.

*Project #5*

This was by far my favorite project so far because I was able to be as creative as I wanted and I was able to use my family as my subject for the website. Although we only had to make three different pages, I had four ideas, so I decided to just make all four pages. I spent a lot of time in the computer lab making sure that everything that I wanted included on the website was there and that everything looked perfect to me. Although I like how my website is right now, in the future I was thinking about adding pages for each separate family member with links on both the names on the home page, as well as on the family tree. I think that by doing this, the website would be greatly improved.

*Project #4*

I really enjoyed this project because it gave me the opportunity to not only make an ad for something that I love, but also to be as creative as I wanted. When trying to decide what I would make an advertisement on, I thought about using one of the pictures from our product shoot for Project #3, but I decided that I would rather choose something different. I decided to do my project on the Boston Red Sox, simply because it’s something I love and it’s the organization or product that I have the most pictures of. I used two of my own pictures for this advertisement, one of the Red Sox mascot, Wally, and one of all of the broadcasting booths and the Fenway Park sign.

The three Photoshop tools that I used the most in this project were the magnetic magic wand, the eyedropper, and the random shape. I had to use the magnetic magic wand in order to cut the body of Wally out of the picture that he was in so that I could copy and paste him into the advertisement. I was happy with the final product, but I wish that the cutout of him looked a little smoother. I used the eyedropper a lot in this project because I wanted to ensure that all the colors in the picture were the same. The background, the text, and the logo are all colored with the same shades of blue and red, the Red Sox colors. Lastly, I used the random shape tool a few times during this project in order to make the new Red Sox logo.

While I’m happy with the way this advertisement came out, there are some things that I wish I could have fixed, like the color of the sky in the Fenway Park picture. I saturated the color of the sky slightly, but when I tried to do more, the sky became unreal looking, so I had to stop. I tried a few other things, but nothing worked the way I wanted, so I decided to keep it the way it was. All in all, I enjoyed working on this project and getting to know the Photoshop basics.

*Project #3*

This was my favorite project so far because shooting a product seems a lot easier to do than shooting a person, and we got to be really creative. We chose to use one of the Bath & Body Works products that I already had, and this one was my favorite. Before shooting, I went to the store and bought a few things that I thought would complement the lotion and ended up with these flowers and marbles. I think the white of the flowers and the green/blue of the marbles works really well against the product. Because the lotion was a shimmer lotion, I also brought a can of shimmer mist to the shoot and we used that to spray down all the flowers, the marbles, and the product.

The toughest part about this project was finding all the equipment that we would need. We had a hard time finding a camera and we couldn’t get a hold of a lighting kit, so we had to improvise. We ended up buying 150 Watt light bulbs and then putting them in lights that we had in our dorm rooms. We also started out using a high-powered flood light, but we didn’t like the orange tint that it gave to the picture, so we just used the 150 Watt bulbs. We had one light on the left of the product and one on the right. We played around with them until we found a picture that we liked. This picture was the best out of about 100 pictures, and I’m really proud of it.

*Project #2*

Out of all of the photos that my group took for this project, this one was by far my favorite lighting scenario. This picture was taken at dawn, and I really like how soft the light is. Although the light is not very harsh or dramatic, I think that it does an excellent job of highlighting Kelly’s features and profile, without giving off a glare. This project was harder than the first one because you had to think about so many more factors than in the first project, but once we got the hang of it, it was a lot more fun than the first project as well.

*Project #1*

          While shooting photos for our first project in Digital Media Convergence, I encountered several problems, but I was able to overcome these and I believe I ended up with some pictures that I’m very proud of.

          One of the main problems that came up while shooting for this project was the weather. I first rented a camera on Tuesday morning, but shortly after I started taking pictures, it started raining, and I had to return the camera. I decided to try again on Thursday morning, and thankfully, the weather was decent enough to work with.

          The next issue that presented itself was the issue of lighting. When taking pictures on Thursday, the sun was shining, and many of my earlier photos had some exposure problems. It was hard to judge which settings I should use on the camera in such a small amount of time, so I had to adjust for that. Some of my pictures were too light, and some were too dark, but the majority of them came out well. While the lighting being too bright was the problem most of the time I was shooting, in some instances, I also had a problem with the lighting being too dark. One of the shots that I really liked was too dark no matter what I changed the settings too, but in the end, the photo came out really well, and the darkness worked for it.

          Another major problem for me while shooting was that I didn’t feel comfortable asking people that I didn’t know to pose for me, so most of my shots ended up being from a distance. While this didn’t give me much variety in my photos, I was really happy with it. Because the pictures were taken from afar, I got a good amount of landscape in all of the shots, and landscapes are my favorite subjects to shoot.

          All in all, I was extremely happy with the photos that I took for this first project. I look forward to learning more about good photography and to improving in the future.