Ben+Miller+Week+12

Monday 4/16: With my Visual Story Project I wanted to demonstrate the idea that every decision we make will take us down one of many possible paths. When you choose to go to class or not, your whole day separates there. One path will take you to class where you will learn and do work. This path allows you to be a good student and probably get better grades. If you don't go to class then you run the risk of losing points, or missing out on assignments or tests. This decision to go to class or not will produce very different outcomes.

This is the idea I want to convey to my audience. That their decisions can have a much greater effect than they initially realize. I think for my project I'm going to use this scenario of going to class or not to demonstrate my point. I want my main subject to have completely different encounters while following each separate path. I would like each path to meet at some point, showing that not every decision changes your outcome completely.

Tuesday 4/17: After attempting to put my initial round of photos together, I realized I hadn't planned ahead very well. There were some inconsistencies with my initial plan, so after discussing it with my subject, we went out and shot another set of photos. These pictures were more concentrated and the time frame of the story only spanned an hour or so, instead of a full day like I was doing previously.

I decided to tell a story about a guy who is offered a beer when he comes home. One path had him drinking the beer, getting drunk, getting into a fight, punching a hole in his wall, and then passing out. The other path had him declining the beer, washing some dishes, doing his homework, and finally going to sleep in his bed. I was disappointed in the quality of the photos we took, but unfortunately we were strapped for time. For the next iteration of the project I would like to include higher quality photographs, and possible some references to outside sources instead of using only photographs I've taken.

Messing around with Prezi was very interesting, and a bit confusing. I can see that it has a lot of power, but I'll need more time to get acquainted with it.

Wednesday 4/25: I have had a very difficult time trying to shoot high quality photographs for my next revision. My subject and I have both been extremely busy. For the time being I've applied some Adobe Photoshop effects to the pictures to make them stand out a bit more. I played around with the "levels" adjustment, in addition to the "color curves" setting. I've totally rearranged my pictures in my Prezi so that the project flows a bit better, and makes use of Prezi's ability to zoom in and out, and reorient the camera.

Friday 5/04: I have come to the conclusion that I will not be able to take new, better quality photographs for my project. After many scheduling conflicts, my subject and I got together and took a bunch of really nice pictures. We worked with the lighting, and attempted to include a clock in some of the shots, to demonstrate the idea that each side-by-side shot shows two alternative realities, much like the ASUS tablet video we watched in class. When I uploaded the pictures from my camera, they ended up having weird artifacts all over the picture, making them impossible to use. We tried putting them on other computers as well with the same results.

Because of this, I have beefed up my Prezi and the photographs to make a higher quality presentation. I went through and really tried to touch up my current pictures to make them look nicer. I also added a time for each picture in Prezi, in addition to arrows of different colors. These arrows are an attempt to show the audience that when a single shot splits into two shots, the shot with the white arrow was the reality where my subject didn't accept the beer. The black arrow was the reality where the beer was accepted. The red arrow is just meant to indicate a forward movement through time.

I also tried a trick that some other students did in their presentations. I returned to one photo multiple times during the presentation to add some emphasis to my idea. I really like the way this project is looking.