Here are the Daily Creates I completed:

#tdc2290 I’m floating along, having fun, but also I have no clue what I’m doing pic.twitter.com/BBoE7XSOSI

— Katie Hartraft (@KatieHartraft) April 17, 2018

’nuff said

#tdc2296 I can’t limit myself to one person so here’s Checkers, who’s been with me for over half my life (ft. @simpsonlibrary) pic.twitter.com/uPl7rtHQ6P

— Katie Hartraft (@KatieHartraft) April 24, 2018

I found out that drawing with a picture for reference is crazy hard, also nothing can be as cute as my dog was 11 years ago!

Here’s my first attempt at putting a GIF into a picture using GIMP- my ice cream flavors are all 4 states of matter (liquid, gas, plasma, solid). If I had another hour I’d clean it up and make all of them GIFS #tdc2297 #ds106 #theend106 pic.twitter.com/sRZgotHZxH

— Katie Hartraft (@KatieHartraft) April 25, 2018

It took me a long time to figure out how to insert just part of a GIF into a different picture, and even then the final product wasn’t gorgeous. BUT, I forced myself to leave it and not spend hours working on it.

#BeastsOfTheSouthernWild touches on natural disasters/climate change and humanity both as a whole and individually and it’s so beautiful please just watch it #tdc2300 pic.twitter.com/dKY2MKPeAl

— Katie Hartraft (@KatieHartraft) April 27, 2018

Such a great movie. Also, the fantasy/fiction aspect was what really drew me in. Actually, what made me first watch the movie was listening to the AMAZING film score on Spotify.

Chiphog? Hogmunk? #tds2301 pic.twitter.com/CUayk7e6Pd

— Katie Hartraft (@KatieHartraft) April 28, 2018

When you mix a chipmunk and a hog, what do you get? Something that looks more like a brown skunk than anything.

My word was “affinity” and I have an affinity toward playing with words (thanks, Riverby Books) #tdc2303 pic.twitter.com/ixQSbd4Lcg

— Katie Hartraft (@KatieHartraft) April 30, 2018

I could have stayed there all day making sentences out of these magnetic words.

The Culmination of Our Entire Semester

For our final project, my group and I decided to make a video attempting to explain all of the crazy stuff that’s happened this semester. It’s a compilation of evidence, analysis, images, and found footage that together tries to solve the DS106 mystery. It’s pretty crazy what we found, check it out:

We created the video using various tools. Initially, we made the timeline of all the evidence, and from there we wanted to dive deeper.

All of us together wrote a script using (what else?) Google Docs, expanding and combing through until we finally landed on three solid theories to use in our video. Our goal was to make a video much like this one that took evidence, analyzed it, and gave possible explanations. We didn’t want to give a fool-proof, 100% confident answer, so we decided to leave it open ended.

Cypherpunk recorded some dialogue and Chris did an AMAZING job editing the piece of audio that we found in one of Martha’s video. I personally created some images (like the rate my professor reviews) and dug through a few hours worth of videos to find the good bits to use in ours. Finally, Cypherpunk did most of the (really well-done) editing and brought it all together.

I couldn’t have asked for a better team, I’m so happy with everything we accomplished! I think we worked really well together, even if there were both times when we were working and times when we were just going insane (but at least going insane together).

Thank you to everyone who worked with me and helped me this semester, you know who you are. Digital Storytelling has been an amazing experience and the skills I learned here will help me immensely in no matter where I go next!

I flipped through my copy of World War Z, trying to find the best setting to use (and there are so many to choose from!). At one point, I remembered the man blinded by a bomb in his youth who, as a man, fled from the apocalypse in Japanese civilization to be in the wild on a mountain.

Sensei Tomonaga Ijiro survived using all his senses but his sight, which I though lent very well to “Creating A Place” using only audio. He mentions hearing helicopters in the distance in the beginning, and later he comes in contact with a bear that serves not as a threat but as a warning. In the scene, Sensei Ijiro makes noises like weeping and shouting, but I decided to leave those parts out. The only part of him I left was footsteps at the very end.

I got all of my sounds from Freesound and used Audacity to edit it all together. It was fun playing with layering sounds, not just creating ambiance but also putting multiple sounds over top of each other to create one sound (for instance: I got audio of a person falling on a wooden floor and layered the sound of a dirt footstep over it to make it sound like the zombie fell onto the forest floor).

Lastly, if you are interested, here are the parts out of World War Z that I based my soundscape on:

I left civilization and trekked into the Hiddaka Mountains.
…

I had no way of knowing what was happening to the rest of my country. I could
hear distant sounds, helicopters, fighter planes, the steady, high-altitude whine of
civilian jetliners.
…

It was a bear, one of the many large, brown higuma roaming the Hokkaido
wilderness. The higuma had originally migrated from the Kamchatka Peninsula and
bore the same ferocity and raw power of their Siberian cousins. This one was
enormous, I could tell by the pitch and resonance of his breathing. I judged him to be
no more than four or five meters from me. I rose slowly, and without fear. Next to
me lay my ikupasuy. It was the closest thing I had to a weapon, and, I suppose, if I
had thought to use it as such, it might have made a formidable defense.
…
I wept as I prepared myself for the blow.

It never came. The bear stopped panting then released a high, almost childlike
whimper. “What is wrong with you?” I actually said to a three-hundred-kilogram
carnivore. “Go on and finish me!” The bear continued to whine like a frightened dog,
then tore away from me with the speed of hunted prey. It was then that I heard the
moan. I spun, tried to focus my ears. From the height of his mouth, I could tell he
was taller than me. I heard one foot dragging across the soft, moist earth and air
bubbling from a gaping wound in its chest.
I could hear it reaching out to me, groaning and swiping at empty air. I managed
to dodge its clumsy attempt and snatched up my ikupasuy. I centered my attack on
the source of the creature’s moan. I struck quickly, and the crack vibrated up through
my arms. The creature fell back upon the earth as I released a triumphant shout of
“Ten Thousand Years!”

I went through a good number of scenes online to see which I wanted to remix, and the ending was the one with the most normal talking/sound effects and least zombie noises (which are usually great but not fitting for this assignment. Though, now that I think of it, I could have remixed ONLY zombie noises. Very tempting…)

I did the Context assignment, though I am not sure how much I changed the meaning exactly. The most troublesome part was working around the background music that was already in the movie’s audio. Besides that, slicing and merging and layering the audio was really fun. I was excited to get back in to using Audacity, and I still am, so I wouldn’t be too surprised if I did another audio assignment for this week.

I see the final product as possibly being a dramatic story of an unspecified introvert who wants to just disappear (in all forms).

The website could have enthralled me for HOURS (and it did for at least one). It is so interesting how everything is tied together under one “radio” and that anyone can add to it. The filter placed over all the additions moreso unifies all of the pieces. The anonymity of audio but also the humanness it creates makes for a powerful medium. I frequently got enveloped in other broadcasts that I had to remind myself I’m not in the apocalypse currently (though sometimes I have my doubts).

I wanted to take a different route than I normally do and try to make something inhuman (or, at least, inhuman sounding). I recorded my own audio with my phone and bunkering down in my closet to reduce background noise. Under that, I tried to put sounds of waves crashing on the beach, but when I uploaded my message it got mostly drowned out, though you can still hear it if you’re listening for it. Along with that, I put even quieter sound effects, but the only one you can partially hear is a soft ringing noise above everything.

**There is NOT any form of ENCODED message in my addition to the radio. The findings of Scout Bot 4531 were DIRECT with NO ALTERNATE MESSAGE. **

In the chapter “Blame”, at the Vostok Station in Antarctica, Breck Scott is a man who played on people’s fears to make millions of dollars. He thinks he is justified in every decision he made, saying he never fully lied and nothing was directly his fault, without regard to people’s livelihood. In his eyes, it is others’ fault if they are “too stupid” to avoid falling for his business.

The music I used, in order of appearance:

1. Lion King Be Prepared Instrumental
2. Lion King Be Prepared
3. The Bells of Notre Dame
4. The Elegant Captain Hook
5. I’ve Got Friends on the Other Side from The Princess and the Frog
6. Pocohantas’ Mine, Mine, Mine
7. Hoist the Colours from Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End

Creating the piece took a lot of time, both in getting the original music and editing it all together. Finding what exact lyrics I wanted was probably the toughest part. I ended up Googling “evil Disney character songs” and jumped around a bunch until I had a rough idea of how I was going to execute my vision. If I had unlimited time I could have kept this going, especially to do multiple different stories and styles!

Here is my finished piece:

I made it so that it felt as if I were listening to a storm outside, then I moved inside and hear the rain on a window, then I read a book (flipping through the pages, which I frequently entertain myself with), and finally I listen to music (I personally play the flute, but I love the sound of strings, especially the cello). The audio came from these YouTube videos, in this order:

Gentle rain and thunder sounds, Winter Snow Storm Sound, Old Book ASMR , Stranger Things Medley by Nicholas Yee

Making the mix was relatively easy. After obtaining the sounds, the hardest part was loading the music into Audacity (since some files were an hour or more in length. Then, cutting and merging the files took merely minutes. I first uploaded the file to SoundCloud, then I realized the music at the end was unproportionally loud, so I had to lower the volume back in Audacity before re-uploading. Doing this assignment was actually really calming and I enjoyed making it my mix!