Time flies, huh?

Surprisingly, this semester has gone by pretty quickly for me.  After spring break, I thought it would drag on and on.  Luckily, the past four weeks have been very busy for me, so the time has passed quickly.  I can’t believe it’s already time for finals!

When I enrolled in electronic communications, I didn’t know what to expect.  All I knew from past classmates was that it involved blogging.  And obviously, that part was true.  I learned about so much more than that, though.  Before taking this class, I barely knew how to use Garage Band, and I own a Mac Book.  Basically, all I knew was how to record.  I’d never played around with editing or the Garage Band sounds or anything like that.  After doing the Cinema Scoop podcast with Greta, I learned how to put in sound effects and edit the podcast to make it sound somewhat professional.  So much more work went into podcasts than I ever imagined.

Personally, I found the podcast to be the most difficult project of the semester.  Making my soundslide and video projects was a lot of work, but putting it all together was so simple, thanks to the Soundslides and iMovie applications.  I’m really glad I got to learn how to use iMovie because I think it will be very helpful in the future, whether it be with school, my career or just everyday life.

Our final project was to make a mockup of a portfolio website.  As this was the last project, I was a little scared.  The projects had seemed to get more complicated throughout the semester, and making a website sounded hard.  But thanks to Adobe Fireworks, it was simple.  Hyperlinks, pictures and layouts were unbelievably easy with Fireworks.

We worked a little bit with PhotoShop as well in class, which I thought was fun.  I’m far from being an expert, but I’d eventually like to save up to buy Creative Suite while I’m still a student (discount!) and I look forward to using other programs like this when I take a graphic design class in the fall.

Overall, electronic communications was a very worthwhile class and I’m so glad I took it.  The projects were a lot of work, but in the end, I definitely think working as hard as I did on them is worth it.  I know I’ve learned a lot that will be able to be applied to my future…whatever that may be.

Soundslide project

When we were assigned to make a sound slideshow about three weeks ago, I was clueless.  I understood the idea of the sound slide, but I could not for the life of me think of anything to do that would tell an interesting story while being visually appealing.  I was  After discussing the project with some friends, my good friend Brian suggested the graffiti contest.  At first, I wasn’t too hot on the idea, but when I thought about it more, I fell in love with it.  I knew a graffiti contest would turn out some great pictures while still being entertaining, and I was right!

The process of putting the sound slide together wasn’t hard at all.  The application we used (conveniently called Soundslides) basically put everything together for me; all I had to do was put the pictures in the order I wanted and adjust the time limits.  The only things I wish I’d done differently were simple rookie mistakes that set me back a few days.  Luckily, I was pretty ahead of schedule and still got my slideshow done with plenty of time.

Overall, I had a lot of fun interviewing and taking pictures and putting it all together into one finished product.  I definitely wouldn’t mind doing it again!  Check out my slideshow in the post below. 🙂

 

Graffiti contest winner Kaleb Nimz with his final art!