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 did the assignment Why So Serious? in which I had to put funny audio over a dramatic (even traumatic) scene from the movie adaptation of my book.

Initially, I wasn’t quite sure what comedy to dub over World War Z. I played around with using audio from Elf, but I just couldn’t get the right mix. I ended up googling “comedy movies” and saw Shawn of the Dead. From there, I decided to stay within the apocalypse genre and use audio from Zombieland. When I first saw it last fall, I thought the movie was going to be way more raunchy than it really was, and I appreciate it for that.

I highly recommend both Zombieland and World War Z (even if the book and movie are entirely different). To get a taste of both, why not watch the video I created?

I used part of the opening of the movie Zombieland and laid it over the Philadelphia scene from World War Z. The video quality wasn’t the best, but I couldn’t find any better version of it, sadly.

I had to do a little bit of cutting (and thankfully I was able to use a Mac with iMovie for that instead of my HP’s Movie Maker) but in some places the audio fell PERFECTLY into place. Other places were a little more challenging, but I eventually worked everything out.

Making this video wasn’t too challenging. Again, I had to use my phone to record so shout out to my Galaxy s7. I tried to give a more interesting background and use my Marauders Map tapestry that always hangs on my bed. I hope my answers were sufficient for Nessie.

via GIPHY

On the version we watched on Amazon, there were two different possible endings. I won’t spoil what happens, but basically one was much more uplifting and hopeful than the other (but both still felt out of place). Because of this, Cypherpunk, Chris, and I decided to make our own alternate ending. It will make the slightest bit more sense if you’ve seen the movie, but either way it’s a good watch. Only thing I can say is don’t take it too seriously.

Making the assignment was a lot of fun, though it proves my on-screen acting skills leave much to be desired. I learned second-hand some aspects of using Final Cut Pro, thanks to Cypherpunk for editing the video. We tried to be as cheesy as possible, and I think we hit the mark on that one.

I really wanted to download everyone’s radio show and do a little bit of all of them, but when I couldn’t immediately download all of them I started working on my own. It took a lot longer that I originally thought, by cutting the radio into the audio I wanted, planning the shots I’ll take, memorizing my lines, shooting, and editing, it had been a good number of hours and I was dead tired. I couldn’t see myself spending literal days doing some of everyone’s. I am really proud of the product, though it still blows my mind that so much work only ended up being a video less than a minute long.

It was so much fun recording, but it usually took multiple takes to get the shot just right, so I felt the need to take the left over files and make a blooper reel. Please enjoy.

I didn’t know what show or movie I should have done for this assignment, so I asked my roommate. The first thing she thought of was “anything Ron Swanson and/or Jean-Ralphio”.

So, these majestic videos were born (yes I made multiple, it was just too funny not to). I’m afraid Jean-Ralphio didn’t make it in, but these ended up perfectly nonetheless.

I used this video of every single time Ben looks into the camera on Parks & Rec. I edited it down to what I thought were the best moments, but props to the person who made this video in the first place.

I used Windows Movie Maker, since I only needed to do simple cuts and to speed things up. I didn’t want to get my videos taken down by NBC, so I mixed up the names to trick the system. Let’s hope they stay up.

I made the following two videos of Ron Swanson and his glorious self using the many emotions of Ron Swanson and Ron Swanson’s best moments.

This video was made for the “Where do your shoes take you?” assignment. This assignment was perfect to produce for the HCC media wall! Since sound wasn’t necessary, I had fun making a coherent story just from the video.

It was weird how self-conscious I was pointing my phone at my feet while walking, especially when I had to record while a lot of people were around or record my feet in a desk (and everyone was early to class that day to study for the test we’ll be taking). It was fun editing though. I liked matching up my steps across different clips, so that even if it were a jump cut it would have a sense of cohesion. The sweet ambient music I found on freesound worked well and wasn’t too distracting.

This video was made based on the Sardonic Tour assignment. I chose to do my dorm bathroom, because while I don’t hate it, I can definitely say that I won’t miss it when I move out in a few weeks. I tried not to take this too seriously and lose the humor of the video, so there are parts where I could have redone the shot, but I chose not to. I do wish I could edit out my suite mates talking in their room or “Susan” laughing at me for most of the video.

I had a hard time finding a good free video editing program. Open Shot would freeze for a whole minute anytime I tried to make a cut or move a video, and Avid Media Composer|First wouldn’t even install (it’s not meant for Windows 10 sadly). So, I just stuck with Windows Movie Maker.

Making this video was super fun and hilarious, though I’m not sure if it will be funny to anyone but my roommate and I, but here I go putting out into the world to judge.