Reflection on Mission 3: Methodology

Digital Journalism

Out of all the missions this semester, in terms of teamwork, I'd say we have excelled the most in this last one. Unlike the last two missions, Wiktoria Livia and I would spends hours together after labs and lectures in F036 (aside from that one time where I caught the flu - what a perfect timing) We'd stay until the shuttle at 5pm or 6pm and although we were hungry and wrecked, there was a sense of pride and satisfaction that we have a little bit more in project each day. 

Created using GIF Maker-Editor

I felt more at ease working in this mission because our goals were clear - we scribbled any potential thoughts and ideas, and if something didn't work out we'd discuss it and look for an alternative. For instance, at some point we knew we had to drop the idea of having the small animated sketch gifs of each character's viewpoint in the video because it simply took away too much time. Even when we were seconds short from the 5 minute mark, we managed to include the actual footage of the road incident in America which is a bonus because it really gives that shock factor to the audience. Therefore there was always some form of progression made in our work throughout. 

Just when I thought I knew enough about Abobe Premier Pro, I learn a few neat tricks that would definitely benefit me in future modules. The main one is being able to separate the video footage from the audio of a video recording from phone. I simply assumed it wasn't possible. However, all it takes is a right click on the timeline and simply clicking on 'unlink' and voila, they split!

Another effect of Premier Pro that I was oblivious to was the ability of inserting special effects on the audio track. One I particularly remember observing how the'fade-out' effect was added at the end of the video. This allowed for the music to gradually disappear rather coming to an abrupt halt.

Made using Canva.com

An aspect of creating something deceivingly simple as an info-graphic is that sometimes elements such as the color, illustrations, and fonts we use can sometimes be overlooked. While we were messing around with these elements in the beginning, I began to realize how important it is to be cautious about these little details because just like words, they can really have an opposing impact to the audience than you you originally hoped to convey.  

I'd say the part where we were the least successful was making sure the video had a flow between the different elements of our project. From the start until the end of the interview, there was a smooth enough transition. However,there wasn't too much flow after  we talked about the end product in our video. The footage we included entered abruptly - and although that came as a surprise to the audience on the day  it didn't feel consistent enough with the rest of the video. The same could be said about the music entering during the credits. 

Despite it all I am quite happy with our output and that we even managed to pull something like this. 

Mission 3: Methodology Research

Creating the Story Map

Using the article :  Woman Crashes Into Drunk Driver’s Car, Preventing A Couple With Baby From Being Hit  as well as using  the Facebook post by the City of Phoenix Police Department as our main resources; we explained a little bit about  the journey of the Betancourt family prior to the road incident as well as the incident itself. There were other interviews, events and witnesses (some not even mentioned in the article). However, we really wanted to condense it down to the important parts and people involved:

•  The Betancourt family (victim)
•  Ernesto Otanez Oveso ( drunk driver)
• Shannon Vivar  (the woman crashing into Ernesto's car).  

Here's a snippet of the story-map:

In addition to that,  we included screenshots of google maps around the general area of where the accident occurred. We also wanted to make sure that the story map was mainly factual and the information was true. Our group included a bibliography underneath the summary  of all the articles we used during our research. Although, we couldn't help but notice that in two different articles about the incident, the age of the child was different. This shows how accuracy of information is sometimes overlooked for the means of getting the content out in the open as soon as possible. 

For our adaption we weren't concerned with referencing because the story is our own. We obviously changed a lot of aspects of the story, but the message of bravery remains. The location, time, characters and the event itself is not the same.  Here's a summary of our idea: 

Location: Cavan, Ireland
Time: Early in the morning
Characters involved in the accident:

• Sherlin O'Reilly (Livia): 18 years old, student
• Christina Murphy (Wiktoria): 40 years old, bartender
• Megan O'Sullivan (Me): 32 years old, unemployed (fired)

Incident: Sherlin distractedly crosses the street on Main Street Cavan, Megan, being a few meters behind her notices a car travelling over speed limit. Fearing, Sherlin would get hit, Megan pushes sherlin out of the road. The car abruptly stops and Christina comes out. 

Below you'll find the full story-map for our end-product: 

Click here to open the story-map on a new tab. 

Creating the Info-graphic

Initially we created a few drafts of the Info-graphic using Adobe spark. Below you'll see two samples testing  out the application and experimenting with layout, color, font and other elements to achieve our desired result: a serious factual info-graphic on road incidents.

Attempt #1: Experimenting with Abobe Spark. Although with the figure on the left, it feels like we're promoting drunk driving 😆

Attempt #2: Progress made with delivery of mood and information.

Attempt #3: Final Outcome

For the last info-graphic we used an online graphic editor Canva. The information was collected on a Portuguese website known as Pordata. 

Creating the Video

Out of the entire project, the video naturally took the longest to make. 

Adding scenes with titles, text with information on digital journalism and images with the logos was the easy part.  

Recording the interview was the largest piece of the cake. Before we could even begin filming we needed to have some questions and answers already written. We individually made up our own questions and answers, that way it would be easier for us to look straight at the camera and avoid taking peeks at our copies - aloowing us to act the scene out naturally. 

The interview was recorded using Wiktoria's phone. Her phone was placed on a mini - tripod to avoid camera shake. The interview was taken in three separate videos between each of us. That way, most mistakes/pauses would be easily avoided or cut out.  

Seperating the audio from the video recording itself was a tricky but necessary step. It took a while for us to surf Youtube until we found out how it was done. This gave us the freedom to manipulate the audio sounds and add special effects such as fade ins/ fade outs to complement the music that would come up next. The background music selected is Sneeky Creeky - Press the Lounge Button on Yummy Sounds. When everything was tied to gether and transitions were added, we were still 20 seconds short from 5 minutes. Thankfully we managed to add the real footage of the road incident by copying the link of the Facebook and pasting  it in getfvid.com. With the bibliography running at the end, we managed to finish at exactly 5 minutes!

Mission 3: Methodology

Digital Journalism

For the last mission of the semester, Wiktoria, Lívia and I formed a group - however we were stuck choosing between the topic of Image Visualization and Digital Journalism.Personally, I was hoping to do Image Visualization, mainly because there was idea already written on paper that I was eager to try out. However I understood that it was somewhat of a difficult topic to get your head around when looking at the resources section of the website. We spent the rest of the day reading over both pages of the website in order get a better understanding of both topics. The three of us met up the next day and after a bit of discussion we decided to settle our project on the topic of Digital Journalism as we all felt we had a better understanding of digital journalism the most. 

medium.com

We brainstormed some potential avenues that we could explore with digital journalism, such as the Vaping related death toll in America, Interviewing the life of a senior and exploring related topics such as ageism. Infoplease is a good online source to gather bite-sized information of events that occurred this year that we could potentially explore for our project. 

Video of the accident posted on Facebook by the City of Phoenix Police Department.

Eventually, we discovered the following article: Woman Crashes Into Drunk Driver’s Car, Preventing A Couple With Baby From Being Hit

Inspired by what took place we decided to create an adaption of the real event and follow a sort of investigative route. 

The Main Reasons for this is:

To  exercise caution and make others aware of the dangers of drunk driving and road incidents in general. 

Our original idea was to replicate a similar incident using our phone's camera and editing the video using special effects on Adobe Premier Pro. We were inspired by the Youtube video below (see 00:00 - 01:39 for car crash).



It can be something comical but still have journalism aspects to it. Then we can also set up an interview. Unfortunately, we realized that replicating a similar incident will not only take up a lot of time but it would also take away time for our 5 minutes where we would need to showcase more important aspects of the project e.g showcasing our end product.

In the end, our group settled on the following:

theplanner.co.uk

Plan For Adaption:

• There will be 3 roles - the driver, the victim, the witness. Through an unbiased spin of the  Wheel of Names the roles where selected are as follows:
• The Driver: Wiktoria , The Victim: Lívia and The Witness ( aka the hero): yours truly
• Props and costumes will be selected accordingly
• Using our phones we will video a set of questions and answers for the interview. 
• Each character will relay their point of view of the incident 

 www.canva.com

adobespark.zendesk.com

Plan For End Product

• Create an info-graphic using either Adobe Spark or  a free graphic-design tool known as Canva. In the infographic we want to show general statistics and facts about road incidents over the years. 
• Create a story map using Storymap JS detailing facts about the real road incident we took inspiration from and comparing it with our adaption of the story. 

sonyxperiaz1.com

Plan For Video

• Introduction: Project Title, Our Names and Student Numbers
• Research: Less than a minute of research related to Digital Journalism
• Interview 1 Clip: Teenager - Livia (The Victim)
• Interview 2 Clip:  Adult - Julia ( The Witness) 
• Interview 3 Clip: Adult - Wiktoria (Drunk Driver)
• After the interview we'll relay a short summary of the consequences of the incident
• End Product: A series of screenshots of the story map with a narration running through 
• End Product: Clip showing process of creating the info-graphic (using QuickTime on Mac) with the final outcome at the end.
• Footage of the true event caught on traffic camera  
• CDM & TUD Logo
• Bibliography

Reflection on Mission 2: Culture

Looking back at this mission there were various interesting facts I came across. For instance, I was surprised to learn that platforms such as twitter and pinterest are in fact a form of blogging known as microblogging. Originally, in my mind, a blog would have always been mainly a website detailing a persons life and interest, without acknowledging too much that it has developed into much more.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

Reading about RSS somewhat resonated with me because I used to be like the average person and bookmark websites I was interested in the hopes of checking for updates but as the favorites list grew I would very rarely come back  to it because the process of checking for updates was tedious. Email subscriptions where a bit more useful, however, my inbox would always be cluttered and that also discouraged me from trying to actually check the notifications. Discovering about rss feeders such as feedly, piqued my interest as now I’m considering installing it on my computer once I’m confident that I know enough about it.

lifewire.com

I found out that wordpress.com and wordpress.org were in fact two different platforms that provided different features to the author.  

kinsta.com

The major difference between them is that with wordpress.org you need to download the free wordpress software which you will use in conjunction with to host your own blog or website. So that’s where the expenditure kicks in. Plugins are another feature I did some exploration about, although I wasn’t able to use them (as they were only accessible using wordpress.org) it was interesting to read about what they are and how they add a layer of depth and analysis to your existing wordpress site.

On the contrary, wordpress.com is self hosted, so you don’t need to worry about back ups and updates. It’s completely free but quite limited in terms of:

• Website customizations
• Cannot install plugins
• You don’t get paid for the ads that appear on your site/blog and you cannot remove them either (unless you pay for one of the premium plans)
• Your blog/site will eventually run out of space and you will need to opt for one of the premium plans when it exceeds 3GB
• The integrated analytics is very limited and you cannot install external custom ones such as google analytics

nature.com

Nonetheless, for a beginner like myself who wanted to experiment with a post or two, it was sufficient. The post where I introduced myself didn’t receive too many views or likes. I’ve come to realize  it was because it was just a post with plain text. Perhaps, I should’ve added more spice to it. Due to it being a blog based on art/illustration, I understood that people wanted to first see what you do before they want to know who you are.

So when I uploaded some pictures of my work with some explanations. It got more likes and views as well as a few follows. 
Unfortunately, our blogs were not successful enough for a significant comparison.

 Despite there being many faults throughout this mission, I can say that it was a good learning experience.

Mission 2: Culture Research

As with most projects, I began with steady research on the topic - starting from the origin's of blogging. However, before I delved any further, I stopped and decided to make a list of exactly what information I wanted to put into the slides. The following was a small guide that would point me in the right direction:

sharepoint.handsontek.net

• Definition - What is blogging?
• Variations - What types of blogging exist nowadays?
• Origin - How did blogging begin? 
• Notable Events - How did blogging rise to popularity? How were blogs used? Who was involved?
• Early Blogging Platforms
• RSS & Blogging
• How RSS works
• Roman's blogging experience - Weebly and Wix vs Blogger
• Analytics and its contribution to blogging
• Blogs of the Future
• Vince's blogging experience - Tumblr pros & cons
• Tumblr's Unique Features
• Graph - Blogging's Popularity
• Graph - Comparing Popularity between the platforms we used
• My Blogging Experience – Wordpress Pros & Cons
• Wordpress’s Unique Features

alzheimer-riese.it

Although the guide was useful, the process of attempting to condense that information in way that is both concise and not monotonous/boring to the audience was difficult. There were various times when I thought that nobody wanted to hear this as I read over the presentation. I figured bullet points was a more effective approach in delivering information. This would (hopefully) be easy for me to take occasional peeks to stay on point. In addition, the audience wouldn’t have to stare at a board with a mountain of words they probably wouldn’t even read. Messing around with themes and color as well as squeezing in images where possible made a great difference. We also included a bibliography slide at the end with links we used throughout our research. During the process of creating our presentation 

Creating my blog

Using wordpress.com, I went through - a registration process when creating my website. Wordpress could be used to create other types of sites such as an online store, so I had to ensure to select the 'Blog' category. The next step was selecting the category of the blog in order for worpress to provide me (the author) with relevant content. Coming up with a name for the blog was probably the most difficult step. I knew if I didn't have a good name I wouldn't be too proud of the work I'd post in it. So after researching some words for inspiration, I finally stuck with Espial Art. The name seemed fitting to me since it was essentially about the process of discovery through illustrations.  The first thing I immediately noticed when setting up my blog is that: compared to blogger, the themes and customizations are somewhat limited. There were not many that really stood out to me. I decided to stick with a minimalist type of look. 

What I liked about wordpress is that it provides you some tips as you begin your blogging experience - which I have not yet seen anywhere else in my early blogging experience.  This can be in the form of notification giving advice e.g tags such as zerotohero are useful for new authors to get noticed and support each other. 

You can also recieve emails with tips and reminders. Although it your mailbox tends to get cluttered pretty quick. However because I used a Google account specifically for this the purpose of this blog, it didn't bother me too much. 

Posting

I tried to be consistent but I ended up doing two posts overall. Similar to what I did with this blog, I started with an introduction post -- talking a little bit about myself. The next post was about a discovery phase of a project I was working on. It was after the second post that my blog began to get noticed. Strangely enough, the wordpress statistics were quite inaccurate as it did not show me the correct amount of page views and likes I have recieved as it shows on the actual posts. 

Inaccurate Statistics

Actual amount of likes

In the end, our group did not have enough to go on when it came to comparing each other's blogs. Instead we decided to mainly focus on how effective the platform itself is based on our experience of using it. 

Click here to view presentation.

Mission 2: Culture

Blogging

For this mission Roman, Vince and I came together to research blogging and it's impact on digital culture. Initially found this exciting as I enjoyed writing, and blogging was an entire new and untouched territory for me. 

On the day we formed our groups, we scrolled through the suggested tasks and decided to settle with the following: 

introdm.cdmonline.ie

We believed blogging had unlimited potential in terms of the freedom and flexibility in choosing a topic as well as developing a writer's voice. 

Each of us chose different platforms so that in the end we can: 

critique each  other's blogs, compare the advantages and disadvantages of each, and possibly select a successful blog out of the three in terms of it's spread. 

To keep track of the spread, we could either set up Google Analytics or use an existing analytics integrates in the platform of our choice. Afterwards, if there was the need for it, we could also compare which platform had the most in depth analytics that was most useful to the author. 

The three of use wanted to make sure that the content we'd post is different and unique enough including the manner in which we'd present it - either formal or informal. This would give us a general idea of what kind of content people would be attracted to the most. It would also give us an insight as to which platform is the most successful in allowing a rookie to climb the ladder in the blogosphere. 

Writer's Voice

Vince wanted to do a blog about anime using Tumblr. Roman chose to stick with Blogger and talk about his personal holiday experience in Barcelona. I decided to work with Wordpress presenting a series of  sketches and doodles I've made and describe the process. 

All three blogs are in it's subject matter. Although all our blogs are quite informal, there's enough of a diversity between them to see what kind of content people tend to read the most.

Photospecialist.com

Another tool that I would personally need to use is a Canon Sx430 IS camera I have at home in order to take pictures of my drawings. It's nothing fancy compared to the DLSRs we use in college but it should do the trick. I will also need to think about the lighting where to est present the sketches in. So this is where those photography lab sessions start to hopefully pay off!

In addition, I will use a free online photo editor - LunaPic to add a watermark to my pictures for extra measure. 

g2.com

Of course, our group made sure to take in consideration the goals set out for the blogging mission. We agreed to carry out our own research on the history of blogging and it's progression into the present day. This would help use gather a big picture understanding of the topic to which we can afterwards condense and combine what we gathered using Google Slides. We were actually introduced to Google Slides by Vince. I think it's a very useful tool as it allows each of us to add and edit slides simultaneously, anywhere. This would be a tool I would definitley use  in future group work. 

Reflection on Mission 1: Creativity

To start off, I am relieved to say that we have passed the mission! However, I have come to realize that there are many aspects of the missions that I need to work on.

Let's get started with the more technical side of things...

One of the biggest mistakes when marking up the HTML and CSS was not keeping them in to separate files. I mixed up HTML tags with bits of CSS. I had no idea about indenting the elements so what was written in the file was understandable. Overall, it was a messy and frustrating experience. And oh boy, if I knew the comments option existed in brackets it would have made my life much easier sorting out different aspects of the document. 

I'll show you an example of how my document looks like before and after using the comments to get an idea of what I'm talking about.

This is the document without comments.

Here's the document with comments. 

 Also, if I understood how beneficial the <div> tag  is when it comes to the layout of a web-page, it would have greatly benefited us in creating a more interesting website rather than having a simple text box in the middle.  Despite that, that simple text box was enough to get our message across. 

Although there has been hard work put into our project, I feel like our main mistake was that we were too focused on the end-product (the website).  This resulted in us somewhat neglecting the  discovery phase of the project which is why I believe we struggled to showcase our efforts during the presentation. I have failed to consider that in the end it was more about what we learned and to share that with the rest of the group rather than making the HTML and CSS work out.

Our presentation skills could also use some practice. Looking back, we were kinda tense when explaining our project to the class. We spent a lot of time trying to create an interesting website we overlooked the fact that the end product is only as interesting as the presenter and how it's delivered to the audience.
 Our mistake there was not discussing how we were to approach this aspect of the mission beforehand. Therefore in a way, it was difficult to speak about the process of our work. I know if I were given another chance to present I would have  wanted to put an emphasis on  the tags and CSS that we used to showcase our efforts more throughout this project. 

Something else that was brought to our attention that ties in with what I've mentioned above is how there was an inconsistent theme throughout the project. We focused too much on our own individual work and attempted to tie the entire project together, which is why the presentation didn't have too much of a flow. 
This is mostly evident on how different the three web pages looked like, in terms of elements such as: color scheme, layout, typography etc. This explains why there was a lack of a unified approach. The main reason behind this being that we have not met up nearly enough times as we should have. We briefly met a few times,  and although we kept in touch through social media, I don't think it was enough. However if we had found some time at some point to work on the product in the same room for an hour or two, that unified approach would have shined through more during the presentation.

Home Page of our website introducing our project.

Poem Page of our website. Lusine managed to pull off a good navigation bar for her page. 

Gallery page of our website. The blue circle is the animation that travels clockwise around the page. 

As you can see there is a lack of consistency in the theme.  Yet it does add a uniqueness to each page. Despite that. Seeing as it's our very first website, I am proud of what we managed to pull off!