Digital Media

Chakras and the Avatar State

Jess


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Chakras and the Avatar State is an electronic literature (elit), hypertext adaptation of the Avatar the Last Airbender episode entitled “The Guru.” from Book 2: Earth, Chapter 19. This project was prompted by the University of Mary Washington’s course English 376VV: Electronic Literature. The adaptation has almost exact dialogue from the transcript of the episode, but does change how the dialogue is perceived by readers. While the transcript and the episode shows Guru Pathik solely talking to Aang, the elit adaptation leaves Guru Pathik’s dialogue undefined and open-ended to create an atmosphere that allows for the reader to be in the scenes themselves. I wanted to allow readers to go a spiritual journey with Aang and the guru instead of just watching Aang’s journey like it’s presented in the television show. This elit adaptation features HTML5 code, HTML and CSS editing, an image map, and was made with Twine 2.0,  SugarCube (v1.0.17), Easy Imagemap Generator and iMovie.

Works Used
Transcript of Book 2, Chapter 19: “The Guru” (slightly adaptated)
Book 2, Chapter 19,”The Guru,” and Book 3, Chapter 21, “Sozin’s Comet, Part 4: Avatar Aang.” Created by Michael Dante DiMartino, and Bryan Konietzko. Avatar: The Last Airbender. Nickelodeon. Animation, Action, Adventure, 2005-2008.
“Peace/Harmony” By Jeremy Zuckerman and Benjamin Wyn on Avatar: The Last Airbender Soundtrack

No copyright infringement intended.

Monsters Calling Home

Jess


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Monsters Calling Home is an electronic literature (elit), hypertext adaptation of the play Monsters Calling Home written by Andrew Reid, featured in George Mason University’s Annual Ten-Minute Play Festival in 2014. This project was prompted by the University of Mary Washington’s course English 376VV: Electronic Literature. The adaptation has the exact dialogue from the original play script, but does change the order in which the characters are presented. While the play has the characters’ story lines jumping back and forth, the elit adaptation forces readers to follow the various characters’ stories in a specific and defined path. This elit adaptation features HTML5 code, HTML and CSS editing, and was made with Twine 2.0 & SugarCube (v1.0.17).

Music
Monsters Calling Home by Run River North

*In no way is the content of the story reflect the artist’s meaning behind the song.

Images
Remixed
“I wanna hold your hand.” Josep Ma. Rosell. Flickr. Creative Commons License 2.0.

“Sadness.” Juan Pablo Bravo. The Noun Project. Creative Commons License 3.0.

“Knight.” Juan Pablo Bravo. The Noun Project. Creative Commons License 3.0.

Original
“From Inside Closet.” Jessica Reingold. Personal Collection of Jessica Reingold.

Life at UMW

Jess

Life at UMW from Jessica Reingold on Vimeo.

For the course Communications 310: Social Media, I worked on a viral video project called “Life at UMW.” The goal for this project was to work with a group to create a video about life at the University of Mary Washington and try to spread it around the internet as much as we could. The project also included a point system where we got points for shares/retweets/reblogs, likes, and views that way we could compare our success with our classmates’ groups. For this project I filmed parts of the video, interviewed students for sound bites, and edited the video.

2015 UMW Multicultural Fair Teaser

Jess

For the course Communications 310: Social Media, I worked on the social media campaign for UMW’s Multicultural Center’s event, the UMW Multicultural Fair. UMW’s Annual Multicultural Fair is one of spring semester’s highlights on campus and in the Fredericksburg community. 2015 marks the 25th annual Multicultural Fair, and so along with a team, I wanted to get everyone on campus and in the community excited about the fair. I made this teaser video as part of the social media campaign for the fair, and we shared it across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Sexuality in Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou GIF Set

Jess
  • Ju Dou GIF 1
  • Ju Dou GIF 2
  • Ju Dou GIF 3
  • Ju Dou GIF 4

In History 300AA: Chinese History Through Cinema, we had to create a GIF set to accompany an analysis of two Chinese films we had watched in class. I chose to analyze, and compare and contrast the theme of sexuality in the 1987 film Red Sorghum and the 1990 film Ju Dou. The GIF set is a scene in Ju Dou where Ju Dou persuades Tianqing to have an affair with her. To create the GIF set, I imported film into Adobe Premiere to trim it down to that one scene. After that, I imported the various video clips into Adobe Photoshop as layers, changed the speed of the frames, and saved the segments as GIFs.

The following is a PDF of my thesis paper that corresponds with the GIF set above.

The Theme of Sexuality: Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum and Ju Dou

 

Now You’re in the Game GIF Set

Jess

For the GIF assignment, for Computer Science 106: Digital Storytelling, I summarized Season 1, Episode 10: The Cost of The Wire. I picked five scenes that had what I felt were either crucial moments, and/or crucial lines. To create the GIF set, I imported the episode into Adobe Premiere to trim down the episodes into the scenes I wanted to use to to make GIFs. I also added in the lines as text on the video clips. After that, I imported the various video clips into Adobe Photoshop as layers, changed the speed of the frames, and saved the segments as GIFs.

Views Are My Own: Digital Identity

Jess

For the final project for the course History 471D: History of the Information Age, my group and I  decided to make a documentary about digital identities. We interviewed UMW students and staff in order to see what people at UMW think a digital identity is and how their digital identity may differ from their “offline” identity. We conducted twelve interviews that involved about eight questions:

  1. What is a digital identity?
  2. How many different digital identities do you have? [if more than 1 continue to question [if only 1, go to question 5.]
  1. Which digital identity is your least favorite?
  2. Which digital identity is your favorite?
  3. What is your digital identity (your favorite one) like? How would you describe it/them?
  4. On a scale of 1-5, 5 being the same person to your real identity(personality) how similar is your digital identity to you?
  5. Why do you make your digital identity this way?
  6. Which do you prefer? Your digital identity or your in person identity?

Our questions turned out to be more like guide lines instead of strict questions, however, since the interviewees tended to answer more than question (without knowing) within their answers. Once we had conducted our interviews, we edited the documentary together using iMovie and Final Cut Pro in the Media Lab in the ITCC (Information & Technology Convergence Center) at UMW. Since we had twelve interviews to go through, we could not use everyone’s answer for every question, so we picked the most unique or common answers for the final version of the documentary. We took on quite an ambitious task, and after about seven to eight hours of editing, it turned out great! We are very happy with the final product, and although the video is already sixteen minutes long, it could have been much longer.

We want to also thank Andy Rush in DTLT (Division of Teaching and Learning Technology) very much for letting us use all of the production equipment including a light kit, a lapel microphone, a camcorder, a DSLR camera, and a green screen.

Tools Used

iMovie

Final Cut Pro

QuickTime

YouTube

Google Drive-Google Doc, Google Spreadsheet

Doodle Poll

Canon HD Camcorder

Canon EOS Rebel T5 DSLR Camera

2 Tripods

Green Screen

3 LED Film Production Lights

Sennheiser Lapel Microphone

BenSound Royalty Free Music

Incompetech Royalty Free Music

 

The Divergent Games

Jess

This video was created for the Computer Science 106: Digital Storytelling course assignment Movie Trailer Mashup. I decided to mashup the Divergent trailer and the Hunger Games trailer because both movies take place in a dystopian future world and both have lead female characters.

To make this mashup trailer, I dowloaded both the Divergent and Hunger Games trailers from Youtube and imported them into iMovie. Next, I broke up the trailers into the scenes they featured from the movies, and tried to find similar scenes between the two trailers. I put the similar scenes together and carefully ordered them to make sure a plot line somewhat flowed through the new mashup trailer. I also wanted some of the dialogue so I made sure to increase the volume on the scenes with dialogue I thought was relevant to the mashup and mute the scenes that did not have relevant dialogue. I found a royalty free song on Incompetech to add to almost the entire trailer. In the very beginning I simply copied part of the background music from the Divergent trailer and added it to the Hunger Games scene before bringing in my royalty free track. I kept the black transitions from the original trailers and added in transitions between the scenes that did not have them. I also added in a fake release date scene and a mashup logo for my movie, The Divergent Games.

 

Haunted House

Jess

In the course Computer Science 106: Digital Storytelling, I creates an assignment, called Spooky Sounds. For this assignment you have to make an audio track using found sounds or your own recordings that is creepy, spooky, scary, basically Halloween inspired.

I started this assignment by collecting some sounds from FreeSound that I thought would sound right in a haunted house. This included bats, squeaky rocking chairs, footsteps, thunder, wind howling, etc. I took the sounds I found and imported them into Audacity. I slowed down the egg timer and the footsteps in order to build suspense with them. I softened the rocking chair and the bats to make them blend better with the wind howling and the wind chimes. For the wind howling, I wanted it to come in twice, but I didn’t want to repeat the same noise so I split the wind howling track into two parts and simply dragged the second part into a different section of the audio track. The door creaking was surprisingly the most difficult sound to find because I had a very specific creaking in mind, and most of the creaking doors I found were either the wrong material or the wrong pitch.

Sounds from FreeSound.org

Sounds Used:
1. timer with ding.wav by keweldog (www.freesound.org/people/keweldog/sounds/181148/)
2. bonitoWindchime.wav by plagasul (www.freesound.org/people/plagasul/sounds/602/)
3. footsteps on wood by Mydo1 (www.freesound.org/people/Mydo1/sounds/198962/)
4. bats1.aif by sofie (www.freesound.org/people/sofie/sounds/9721/)
5. wind_howl2_mono.wav by swiftoid (www.freesound.org/people/swiftoid/sounds/117610/)
6. Door – Creak 02.wav by JarredGibb (www.freesound.org/people/JarredGibb/sounds/219492/)
7. Thunder » Dry Thunder3.wav by juskiddink (www.freesound.org/people/juskiddink/sounds/101948/)

Image:
Haunted House by Open Clips (http://pixabay.com/p-151505/?no_redirect)

DS106 Radio Bumper

Jess

This is a radio bumper created for the audio assignment, “Create a DS106 Radio Bumper,” in Computer Science 106: Digital Storytelling (DS106). I first found the kind of sound I wanted for the radio bumper on SoundCloud by searching for Creative Commons EDM mixes. After I found the EDM buildup I was hoping to find, I went to Freesound and searched for sounds that resembled wires running electricity  since the course was also known as Wire106 since the television show The Wire was incorporating into our weekly assignments. Lastly, I needed someone to say “DS106 Radio.” I knew I definitely did not want to record myself, so I searched for free online text to speech computer generated voices that also allowed me to download the audio. I came across YAKiToMe! and used the “Audrey” voice to say “DS1O6 Radio.”

After I downloaded the three various audio clips, I imported them into Audacity and put them together to make the radio bumper.

Sources:

1. COMMERCIAL EDM MIX JAN 6TH 2014 by djsn1 on SoundCloud (Djsn1 – Commercial-edm-mix-jan-6th)

2. Electricity.wav by da_maestro on Freesound.org www.freesound.org/people/da_maestro/sounds/42983/

3. Audrey voice from YAKiToMe! www.yakitome.com/tts?a=T&b=1082481&c=86YxLxdZ&d=T

Radio Logo:
Remixed version of the DS106 logo found here: ds106.us/