Insanity.
I watched the video titled “portable” with everyone else in class. To start off, this video was very funny. I liked that they took an obviously silly idea and further incorporated humor into their video so that it was not just the idea that was funny. As far as special effects go, I thought that it was neat whenever they inserted the still-screen pictures into their video of the paramedics carrying someone on two portables and also the screen at the end when they put the infomercial-type picture up. This made it a tiny bit realistic even though the idea was totally out there, and that made it that much funnier. Their audio wasn’t the best, but I feel like it will be very hard for any of our groups to accomplish audio that is virtually perfect, given the materials we have to work with. I’m worried about the project as a whole, not because I think that my group’s ideas will be hard to portray specifically, but in that I am not very technologically advanced from the beginning so making a video with good audio and visual quality will be difficult for me and I will definitely have to do some research on it. All of our ideas are reasonable and should be generally easy to record as long as we can figure out what we are doing. I’d like to be able to incorporate special effects like the still-shots in the movie “portable” but I’m not sure exactly how they did that. I’m also wondering how we are going to lay over the links to each choice at the end of each video, but that is something that we should be able to look up and figure out. Other than that, I am excited about this project and think that it will teach us some valuable information on technology and how to produce a good video.
Airport Security Game
I chose to do my tumblr post on the game airport security. I feel like it could be fun for some people, but it wasn’t fun for me because I don’t like games with a time limit and they give me anxiety. The game asks you to act as an airport security guard and check through the passengers luggage/what is on their body for things that are not allowed at the present moment, and if they aren’t, you’re supposed to click them to take them away. The stressful part is, what is or isn’t allowed is always changing. I frequently had the problem that I would take an item away from a person but before I could take everything else away to send them through, the item would be allowed again and I didn’t know how to give it back to them. My highest score was a 240 on the beginner level and I don’t think that was very well at all. A lot of the times when I sent the passenger through and got points taken off I couldn’t even figure out what I did wrong (obviously this game was not my cup of tea). I’m a little bit confused at what argument this game is trying to convey. I guess they could be attempting to make fun of the airport security system for being so strict and taking things away like passengers pants or shirts, but that’s the only message I got from this game. Another spin on the game is that they could make it more informative where you actually have to take things away that are logical and plausible to a real-life situation, but if the maker of this game’s primary goal is to make fun of the airport security system then I think that this game did an efficient job at that and does not need to be changed or improved.
I am a huge believer in biases. I believe that anyone (a newspaper company or just a guy on the street) will create some sort of bias-based story, even if they are asked to make one that is not. I don’t think this because I am convinced that he or she is going to physically voice their opinion, but it is more along the lines of what is not said that I’m interested in. Any writer can incorporate factual events into their writing but even when a story is completely made of facts, there can still be bias. Let’s say, for instance, that I believe that chocolate milk is good for you. I mean I really love it. If I was writing a research paper on chocolate milk I would, possibly even subliminally, include more facts on why it was good for you over why it isn’t, therefore creating an unintentional bias without even realizing it.
Scholarly sources, in my opinion, are just about the closest thing you can get to an unbiased account of facts if they are peer-reviewed. I don’t, however, believe that you can go out and find one great credible source and write an entire paper on it. If this was the case, why would our high school teachers require all sorts of different sources for our projects? Why would Mr. Liddle require 10 sources for our Annotated Bibliography? The credibility comes, instead, from a multitude of sources. It is also important that they represent all different views on the subject. If this is the case, you can get a full perspective of your topic and fill in any of the holes that one source may have intentionally (or unintentionally) left out with answers that other sources didn’t.
