Reflective Statement

Reflective Statement

            Throughout my thirty-day challenge, I struggled with finding time to sit down and do my challenge. I chose to write every day for thirty days. Instead of rewriting constantly, I wrote out an entire prologue before going back to revise it. I found blogging to be very easy to do. I would write like I was talking to someone and used humor in my images and posts. The writing aspects of this challenge were very easy. It didn’t hurt that I had already laid out ideas beforehand for the story I wrote before I had known I was going to be doing a challenge. The digital story script I wrote was almost as easy.

            I had to talk about the results of my thirty-day challenge. What came naturally to me was to just talk about what I learned. Other than a few sentences that were redone to sound more fluid, the script was easy to do. The ending was short, but I couldn’t find a way to make it transition better. I was uncomfortable recording myself, and had to rerecord myself because my video editor didn’t seem to have an edit function for the voiceover. After that was done, I planted in images and set music in. It was the most anticlimactic part for me.

Artist Statement

Artist Statement

            I used what I learned during my thirty-day challenge to make my digital story along with snippets that I took from what I wrote. I felt that this was the most effective way to communicate what I had done for my thirty-day challenge. The photos I used were to emphasize my points and were more explicit than implicit.

            At the beginning of my video, I explained the reasoning behind my thirty-day challenge before telling my audience what the challenge was. I used images from my Steam library, which showed how many hours I spent on a game, to emphasize my points on what makes a game good. The music starts about when I start talking about the challenge. I tied into my thirty-day challenge by linking storytelling in gaming to writing stories. I used an image of me typing at my computer, then I had it change into an image of me sleeping at my computer. I used it to transition from how good it felt to write again to the frustration of having no time to write.

            I moved into the story I wrote by using a hand drawn picture to help illustrate what I was talking about.  When I spoke of their persona, I used word clouds with a few words to break from the monotony of using the same hand drawn image. I finished on an image of me sleeping at my computer, and the music stops a few seconds before that so the watcher can focus on what I am saying.

            I was sick while I was recording myself the second time to fix a stutter I had in the first recording, and that definitely comes across when I try to say a few words and my voice warps. The first recording I was able to achieve different tones but I feel the tone is pretty much the same throughout the second recording.