IDM blog

   Hi Everyone! This week I watched a few videos about representation and I found them very interesting and would like to share my thoughts and what I learned of them. Why does representation matter? It is a way of people to see themselves, it validates what they look like or who they love. When creating worlds where entire races don't exist, bigger bodies don't exist, sexual orientations don't exist, you're creating a lie that does damage to the viewers. How to not make mistakes of not having groups represented properly in the media in the future is to hire them, put them behind the camera, behind the scenes, to be creators who can tell their own stories. Representation is one of the cornerstones of media studies and traditionally looks at how the media literally represents reality for example like social groups, events, etc. It's always measured accurately that these representations are against reality. Stuart Hall saw a problem that implies the original subject h...

 Hi Everyone, Today I read a few articles and I found them very interesting. They have given advice for improving common academic writing issues and they really helped me improve on my re-writing experience this week. The first thing I will be talking about is how to make your writing more concise. The main goal is to use the most effective words to concise your video. Concise writing always includes all the strongest words. Only the effective words should remain and the writing will suit this and be more readable for the viewers. To do this in your writing the first step is to replace several vague words with more powerful and specific words. Therefore this means that instead of using multiple small words and making the paragraph long you can just express your ideas through fewer specific words in a better way. The second step is to interrogate every word in a sentence. This is where you check every word to make sure it is providing something important to the viewers in the senten...

    Hi Everyone, This week we made more progress with our groups for our projects. We met with our group to discuss all the research we have done for our project during reading week. The topic of the research was how cultural remixes were taken from cultures. The topic of the research was how different cultures influences in todays films, TV shows, etc. When we met up we decided for the video that we don't want our faces included. Kris has taken responsibility of animation for our video. We also decided for the video that we will use the B-roll step. This step is basically where you get all the shots/details for the video. We are adding this to make the video interesting to watch for the viewers.  When we met up this week in our Introduction to Digital Media lab we decided to start to write our script for next week. Kris will be doing the introduction to the video and also the animation and the rest of us will do the rest of the script. We began compiling our resear...

 Hi Everyone! Today I watched a few videos about video compression, video format, codecs and containers and I found them extremely helpful, so I would like to share my thoughts about them. There are 2 ways to compress a video which is spatial compression (intra-frame)or temporal compression (inter-frame). Spatial compression is applied only to individual video frames. To compress a video frame it is the same process that is used to compress a still image like a JPEG. When JPEG is created, colour information of the image reduces in the process called chroma subsampling. Then the image is split in sections of 8x8 pixels called macroblocks. Then the file size is reduced. For MPEG (motionJPEG) it's more complicated.  Temporal compression works by reducing redundancy, like JPEG the MPEG standard breaks a video frame into 8x8 pixel macroblocks and each macro block receives instructions on what to do with pixels they already have. There are instructions for staying exactly the same f...

  Hi Everyone! This week I had my peers give feedback on one of my blog posts, and I had to rewrite my blog post based on the feedback I got to create a better post. I found this week's blog to be quite difficult as the feedback was very positive and I honestly didn't know what to rewrite or what to do as I was happy with the post already. It took me a bit more time than I expected but I did end up rewriting it successfully and I'm even more happy with how it turned out in the end. I read an article that really helped me rewrite my blog. In the article what really helped me was when I looked at the relevance and importance of the content that was in the feedback. I realised that I needed to give more factual information and less of waffling about unnecessary information in my blogs. I also thought about the things I could have included and why I didn't include them. Where I was going with my sentences in some areas and if they were clear to the audience and not just me....

Hey Everyone! Today I watched three videos about cameras and audio. I found them extremely useful for my photography and my videos in the future so I would like to share them with you. There are 5 camera basics that everyone needs to know to make professional photography and videos. The first one is Frame Rate. This tells you how many frames are in 1 second of your video, For example we shoot a video in 1 second with 30 frames. It basically means it takes 30 photographs in 1 second. The industry standard is 24 FPS "most cinematic", This is the most natural looking motion. If you want to do a slow motion you do it on 60 FPS so when it is slowed down it is clean and smooth.  There are 3 settings to get correct exposure which is the ISO, shutter speed and the aperture. The second one is the ISO, usually known as "fake light" . It's a way to make your image brighter or darker completely digitally. The down side to this is that it produces noise/grain in the image/ w...

 Hi Everyone! This week we made our final progresses with our groups for our projects. We met this week to put our finalized scripts together and just piece it together and time everything with our audio, Some of our audio was too long so we had to cut it and make sure it didn't sound cut off and the audio was natural. The audio took us all quite a while as it was very hard to make everything sound very crisp and clean, As we also made these audios at home by ourselves with our own microphones so our sounds all sounded quite different. We had to use editing tools to quiet or higher down each others audio to sound the same, But after a while of trying to make our audios sound the same we finally were done with that step. Then we moved on to the animation, which was already basically done all that was left was the mouth movements which we had to sync with the audio we made. This wasn't too hard as all the animation was done except the mouth and we just needed to move it and adjus...

 Hi Everyone! Today for our assignment we had to watch 5 videos about technology evolution and the history of media literacy. This has definitely changed my view on media literacy and I have definitely learnt a lot of new things and I would like to share it with you! Technology like smartphones and internet made media literacy more important than ever, but concerns about media and their affects have been around a long time. Arguments for and against media have shaped how new technology, industry and culture have developed through history. Media literacy only became a term until 1960s. In the Phaedrus, A dialogue he wrote around 370BCE, Plato imagines a conversation with his teacher and one of their friends. Socrates and Phaedrus discuss live but then start to debate the best way to give a speech. Socrate believed that leaving words on paper would encourage people to use them out of context.  As media became deeper, more people had the means to become more literate. For people ...

 Hi Everyone, This week we had to write feedback on our peers blog posts and we read an article and learnt how to use the SPARK method when giving back feedback to our peers. I feel like this exercise really helps us build our confidence with each other and also helps us improve on our blog posts a lot more, As we get to read about how to improve on our blogs.  The article includes 6 steps on how to give the right feedback to our peers. The first step is "overview of peer assessment", In the article it shows from previous research that giving and receiving feedback may play different roles in peer assessments, Basically the students engagement in both roles can either have a direct or indirect effect in their learning. The second step is "methodology", This is the context, subjects, and peer review process. This step also includes the data collection and analysis. The third step is "results and interpretation", This is the processes undertaken by students ...

 Hi Everyone, This week we made more progress with our groups for our projects. We met with our group to discuss all the research we have done for our project during reading week, My topic to research was how cultural remix was taken from cultures, taken from shows in different cultures and in films, tv shows, video games, etc. When we met up we decided for the video that we don't want our faces included in the video, So Chris will do the animation for our video so we don't need to include our real faces. We also decided for the video that we will use the B-roll step, This step is basically where you get all the shots/details for the video. We are adding this to make the video interesting to watch for the viewers.  When we met up this week in our Introduction to Digital Media lab we decided to start to write our script for next week. Chris will be doing the introduction to the video and also the animation and the rest of us will do the rest of the script. We started off by put...

Hey Everyone! Today I watched three videos about cameras and audio, I found them extremely useful for my photography and my videos in the future so I would like to share them with you. There are 5 camera basics that everyone needs to know to make professional photography and videos. The first one is Frame Rate, This tells you how many frames are in 1 second of your video, For example we shoot a video on 1 second with 30 frames it basically means it takes 30 photographs in the 1 second. The industry standard is 24 FPS "most cinematic", This is the most natural looking motion. If you want to do a slow motion you do it on 60 FPS so when it is slowed down it is clean and smooth.  There are 3 settings to get correct exposure which is the ISO, shutter speed and the aperture. The second one is the ISO usually known as "fake light" it's a way to make your image brighter or darker completely digitally. The down side to this is that it produces noise/grain in the image/ w...

 Hi Everyone! Today I watched four videos about media ethics that I found very interesting and would love to share with you all. I learnt that the word medium in the message "medium is the message" means that the change of the fundamental scale of those interactions, for example the phone has changed the idea for social gatherings now a days.  Cambridge Analytica is a data marketing firm, it harvests online information to create microtargeted content. This company claimed that it "uses data to change audiences behaviour", But the data they used for "audience behaviour" was them harvesting data from the person using Facebook. They collected data not just from the person who used the app, but everyone that is linked to that one person, so all the data they get from one person branches out to multiple different peoples information. In February 2018, NIX faced a parliamentary inquiry on fake news, they said they didn't use other peoples data which was a li...

 Hi Everyone! Today I read an article about news media literacy and the perception of bias and interpretation of news that definitely grabbed my attention. I did find this article a bit long winded, as it repeated itself which was unnecessary in my eyes and it took me quite a while to finish everything. I definitely think differently about media literacy and have a better understanding for its importance nowadays especially.  I believe that the impact of digital media is good in many ways as many people can share ideas and become connected with others, but we all need to be aware as literacy now a days anyone can publish anything online. A piece of information from this article that shocked me is that many digital media companies have been lacking to help users in Ireland. Over 62% of Ireland worries about misinformation online and this shows me that not enough people are informed about fake news and what to do when it's come across.  There was a study done to show a sign...

 Hello Everyone! This week we had our blogs sent out to our peers so they could give us feedback on our posts for us to re-write and improve on and we also had to read four articles to help us re-write our blog post properly. After reading my feedback and the articles I think I have a good understanding of how to improve on my blog post. I have a good understanding now on the proper layout of a paragraph, A strong paragraph has the main idea in the first sentence to inform the audience with no confusion. In the beginning you must state one idea clearly, in the middle you must elaborate and explain the idea that was introduced in the beginning, In the conclusion you back up the main idea of the paragraph and move on to the next paragraph.  The article I found the most helpful for me in my future blogs was the "paragraph-level revision questions" as I will definitely use these questions for myself before I upload my blogs as they are extremely useful and they will refine my fut...