Herzog Reflection Post

 

I think you have already heard about learning with an Apple Pencil in my post called The Power Of a Pencil. In the post I explained that there where two sides to this project, Herzog and Carr, one side was about art and drawing (Carr) and the other about Photography (Herzog). Since I have already done Carr I moved onto Herzog. This learning experience was kind of hard to reflect on since I have already learned about photography when doing courses over covid lockdown.  We went through many different processes to grow our knowledge of editing and photography on an ipad. I will walk you through the Herzog project.

First we started with taking photos of simple objects in the classroom, the object I chose was a pair of scissors. We experimented with different angels and using markup afterwards. 

Here are some of my scissor pictures:

Here is my end photo that I used mark up on:

I used me and my friend Hannah’s scissors, its their first date and it went pretty well. 

Then we learned about different elements you can add to your photo, like focusing on texture, colour, lines and more. We all chose a element we wanted to focus on and ventured outside again for a themed photo walk. I chose texture and here is a collage of my photos I took.

When learning about different “themes” for a photo we learned about the basic photo editjng you can do in Snapseed and Pixelmator Photo. 

Since in both those apps you can add filters and do all sorts of things to change your photo and we used them to help create mood. Since that may be a bit confusing I shall explain, we had to take a photo capturing a mood we picked from a deck of cards,  I got the mood silly. My first idea was to get my sister to hang from a tree upside down, but then it snowed and she didn’t want to hang upside down anymore (I don’t know though why who wouldn’t want to hang on a wet branch). I ended up having to use a mini snow man that I made well freezing my hands off. Here is my final photo:

Why I think it’s funny because it’s a snowman in the middle of green grass with no trace of snow close to it. Also I find tiny stuff really cute and funny for no reason

 

 

The last thing we did was…

 

 

 

 

Hack keynote >:D

not literally though.

How we “hacked keynote” was by creating GIF’s with the transitions and animations used to sPiCe Up presentations. I would hope everyone would at least have the slightest hint of what Keynote is but if you dont its kind of like PowerPoint, you can create organized presentations.

Here is my completed GIF:

The backstory of my gif was my sister singing I believe I can fly so thats where I got my inspo. I tried to do a different approach of burning my friends name in my first attempt.

As I said earlier this project was hard to reflect since I already learned about these skills. But that was with a camera, I have learned some new things with my iPad and new things about editing. Also I have learned that keynote can do many different things and it is actually kind of cool. I have had trouble with remembering that my Ipad is not my camera so it is harder to get a nice focus and other things on it. Throughout the project I have also seen that it doesn’t matter if your good or bad because you can keep on learning. Also you can express many things in a photo and it can help people learn new things about you or something.

About me!

About me!

 

My name is Kira and I’m a PLP learner at Seycove. I will be including some photos I have edited and took in class to show more about my self.

This is my name in photos, it was hard to find interesting subjects that could create my name ( K is a letter in a sign, I is a Christmas light, R is a branch of a Christmas tree and A is from a book cover). After we took photos we had to a sort them into our name in keynote. Then we learned about adding shadows, borders, and reflections to make it more eye catching. Or realistic. Here is my finished result:

Then we had to create a personal collage about what’s on our mind or what we think about. Sometimes the most random things pop up in my head but I stuck with the more practical thoughts. When creating this we had to draw doodles to spice it up and add borders and reflections for a 3D effect. Also using our keynote skills we used instant alpha to make transparent backgrounds, and we also masked images into shapes. Here is how my collage turned out:

We ventured into keynote some more and learned about how to create a GIF. We learned about animations and transition between 2 slides. My sister was singing “I believe i can fly” so I decided to make a GIF with her flying in it. As I’m writing this I realize it might have been better to do a Live Photo and make it bounce between movements but I can’t do that anymore.

Here is my GIF:

The power of a pencil

As usual I’m going to start with the driving question: “How might I use technology to create and communicate?”

At the start of this project, we were split into two different groups. One group was focused on photography and the other on drawing. The overall purpose was to progress in our skills using the ipad for artistic expression. Each group was given an artist for inspiration, which for photography was Fred Herzog and for drawing the inspiration was the famous Emily Carr.

Caitlin and Hannah I were in the drawing group to start, otherwise known as Carr.

The app we used was called Sketches Pro and we enjoyed exploring the different pen options, here is a photo of the different types of pens, and my personal favourite is probably the fine liner and then the pencil for outlining.

We started learning about how apply pressure with the apple pencil, for example when you push harder on the pencil when drawing it makes the line thicker but when you angle it to the side and dont press hard it becomes thin and has less opacity. Then we tried out the built in patterns and quickly moved onto creating our own. I highly enjoyed making zen tangles. Soon after we learned about shapes and drawing circles with all the different tools that make the shapes have perfect, clean edges. After learning those basics we applied those in into creating a drawing a of our name that reflected us in it! Here is mine:

  • This is my final name I made!

Next we proceeded onto shading and identifying shapes. For this mini project we used a cup for our object, this is the one my table group shared: 

Continuing with the mug we identified the shapes:

Maybe you expected this but then we drew the mug and mine didn’t turn out how I expected it to. I struggled with the shading and it looked too chunky. So I redrew it as a different mug but I still think I could do better if I ever draw one again.

  • The original mug

Since we learned the basic elements of drawing we created a robot using our knowledge of shapes and shading. When I was drawing my robot I realized I had to shade my head and try and make it realistic, but I chose a hard shape to do and I was halfway through already…and I was not about to start over! Now I know what shapes are the easiest to draw. Here is my robot:

 

The most useful skill I learned about was probably sketch noting (our wonderful friend Karen helped us), the point of sketch noting is to get down your thoughts with a more visual approach. We had to listen to a video of a person talking about why doodling is effective, the video is called Doodlers, Unite!. Here is what I came up with its my very first sketch note:

 

I find sketch noting an effective way to make verbal information visual, but personally I like writing plain notes since it’s easier for me to navigate through and create checklists. 

One of the very last skills we learned was about perspective, we learned about the vanishing points and how to make rooms look more 3D and realistic. When doing this we also navigated through layers, and I find layers super helpful since it makes it easier to overlay drawings and being able to erase a certain components of a drawing with out erasing the things you want to keep. The first thing we did when learning about perspective was drawing a room, we did this by locating the vanishing point then making all the lines of the drawing lead up to it. Then we used a photo on the internet and located where the horizon line was and what the point was where everything leads up to (aka finding the leading lines). The hardest thing for me was having to draw something around the school, I did not do very good on this since I picked a difficult spot to draw. Also I finished drawing then realized I did it at a completely different angle and had to restart (it was delightful). Finally we drew a still image of a landscape we are familiar with, for example a deep cove landscape would be good. What I used was a photo I took in Sunshine Coast, here is the photo:

Drawing this was hard, my drawing ended up being kind of abstract because of all the different hues of blue and having to blendy blendy everything. Here is a slideshow of of my completed art work: 

The last thing we did was create a logo with the help of Mrs. Maxwells friend, Chloe Devine. Chloe is a graphic designer living in New York, she has been in the industry for 3 years.

To start off we had a zoom call with Chloe, some students went up to ask these questions:

Sofia – What did you want to do when you were
younger? Did art naturally come to you?
Cam – How did you fall in love with designing?
Mackenzie – When and why did you decide to move to
NYC?
Gwenyth – What apps do you use to create your art or
graphic designs?
Susan – How do you incorporate shapes into your
designs?
Naomi – What is the hardest part of graphic design?
Hannah – What is the favourite part of your job?
Keaton – What is your favourite tool to use?

After having insight on what to do we created a design brief about what our business is and what the logo would look like. Here is my design brief:

After getting my brief approved I moved on to drawing my logo (quick insight on what my business is, its a bakery filled with deserts but all in tiny proportions), we had to choices in apps that we could create our logo on, Sketches or Keynote. I ended up choosing sketches, my idea for my logo was to have a birds nest with macaron’s in it. My first attempt was quite messy but I still went on with my idea of a birds nest. After drawing 2 more birds nest I was on my 4th one, and after adding the macarons I realized it wasn’t going to work. So I scrapped that idea and decided just to do a stack of macarons instead. Here is a slideshow of all my drafts:

  • This is my birds nest logo

In conclusion I have learned a lot more about digital art in the past week than I have in basically  11 years. I’ve learned about shading, perspective, shapes, disappearing points, and more. The drawing I am most proud of is my final name draft, the reason I like it is because I made every letter part of me. I didn’t just draw the things I like in the letter, I made the letter look like an object. A challenging thing was getting rid of my bird’s nest idea. I really loved my idea of having a bird’s nest in my logo since I love nature and baking so I thought it would be a good way to connect them. I had to tell myself that no matter how hard I tried I would never be satisfied on how it would look, so eventually after persuading myself it was to hard for me I got rid of it. One thing I would work on next time is my shading, I would try and make it a more gradual effect instead of making it one block of colour. Even though I learned how to gradually get darker or lighter I usually ended up with a colour block, but I know I can create a good gradient. I think drawing is a great way to express your self and show you view on the world, I prefer digital art over physical art since it’s more forgiving with my expert level of skill. 

The Ring Of Flames, would you play? – a scimatics board game

“How are thematic and mathematical elements used in game design?”

Does “The Ring of Flames” pique your interest? Does it sound like a board game? Because that is exactly what it is and is a result of Gwen, Caitlin and I brainstorming and creating a game that involved probability and tectonic plates (We had a lot of fun throughout this, especially with the paper cutter.)

Taking what we learned about tectonic theory and probability we created a board game that could be played with 2-4 players. The goal of the game is not to get to the end first but to get the most points by the time everyone reaches the end the trail of volcanic islands.

But we didn’t start with that game, first we had a test class were we made drafts of ideas we had. My group for this was Caitlin and Mackenzie, our idea was Slug Island (chosen by Caitlin) here is a photo of our ideas.  

As you can see they needed work, and we realized they were confusing because we rushed through the process. It became really messy and we didn’t have a clear idea. 

 

The creation of the actual game was challenging since Gwen and I had never worked together (we had different groups for this game) and we each had many different ideas (Caitlin wasn’t involved yet, I’m not excluding her). We had to really compromise with each other and went through discussions around whether to use dice, cards, figures, rocks, etc. Luckily, we were able to find common ground between all of our ideas, starting with the idea that snake eyes on a dice meant getting points. This then lead to creating point cards for the game and bringing in an element of chance with the dice because you could end up with zero dice, one or two for gaming points.

 Finally after picking through many ideas we ended up with these notes

Then finally Caitlin showed up at the end of our note taking (took her long enough) and we started finessing the rules. Thankfully, Caitlin was able to use her artistic skills and create great visual elements for our board game and our rules page (see below). Then we started creating the physical game, our theme was to have the characters (beautiful rocks with smiley faces) advance along a trail of volcanoes, but along the way they encounter natural disasters. In a way it is like a story, in that characters are trying to reach the end but use points as lives to boost their survival. For the mathematical part of our game we had the players advance using cards and then rolling dice. There was a lot of probability when rolling the dice because you could either pick between rolling for something with a higher risk but more reward or choose lower reward but a better chance at getting the points. That also includes chance because who knows what the dice are going to roll. Here are some examples of that cards (sorry they are upside down they where being finicky when I made the slideshow)

Curricular competencies

#1 

Evaluating: Demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of evidence

In the particular one I think we could have expanded on since we didn’t have a lot mathematical evidence in our board game. I think we could have added some more probability or made it easier for the players to risk there rolls. For example on each of our volcanoes it indicated how many dice you could have but most of them where 1 so I think we could have made that better since most of our point cards needed two for the larger point sums. For the tectonic plate evidence I think my group did ok with that since on most of our advance cards we had a reason for why they would have to move forward or backwards. An examples are SLAB PULL you miss a turn since you got pulled under neath because of gravity. I agree with us being between emerging/developing and accomplished.

#2 

Questioning and predicting: Demonstrate a sustained intellectual curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest

I think my group did well on this since we spent a while writing our rules, set up and what its going to look like we were able to speed threw creating it. We knew how many cards we needed to cut (we cut like 1000+ though but we only need 60ish) and we assigned roles to each person. We got our game done quite quickly and played threw it a couple times. Since our group pitched in equally we all where into it so we all enjoyed creating it together and I think that helped pique our interest about this project. I think we where accomplished.

 

#3 

Understanding and solving: Develop, demonstrate, and apply mathematical understanding through play, inquiry, and problem solving

Again since we spent overtime planning we knew where our math and tectonic plate learning landed in our game. When creating the cards Gwen and Caitlin made sure there was a variety of different probability outcomes ( I was colouring the volcanoes on the game) some where hard and some where easy. One of the cards was roll two dice (very hard to do I know), well another was roll a double. 

 

 

Coming back to the driving question of this project, “How are thematic and mathematical elements used in game design?”, in games the thematic element is like the framework of the game as it give it a backstory. As a simple example in Candy Land you’re trying to reach the end to see the king in his candy palace. The theme in the game Catan is people settling into a knew land for the first time and have to look for resources. Without a theme a board game would be very boring and it gives purpose to the mathematical elements. Strategy, Probability, risk, and chance are 4 main ways that mathematical elements are infused in games. For example in the Game of Life there is probability right from the start, you can either chose career or collage. Career gives 7 college offer more salary and career options but it takes longer and puts you in debt, well career is a shorter path to start getting out of the entry area but limited options in career and salary. Also there is a part in the game called risky road where you can either chose to play it safe or go onto a risky road but you may lose money but also gain.

 

In conclusion I think I like simple card games the best since they are easy to bring and pack up. Also you can do a lot with them and it includes probability and chance as well. I think if I ever made another board game it would be much easier since I know how to add fun elements and make sure there is risk and probability involved.

Becoming A PLP Learner

A

This is my customized memoji/memoji laptop, the people with stretched out faces are my friends (I do have friends). 

The driving question for this project was, “How Do I Build & Strengthen The PLP Learning Team?” 

The first big thing we did was the big life journal (lots of “bigs”), and during this I realized that I have a lot of interests and I mapped down all of the things I could get better at. There ended up being 5 different chapters we had to do and in each one we wrote about our strengths and stretches. Also, we went deeper into our lifelong goals and hopes. Then we were told to pick 3 assignments and amp them up! Here are the before and after:

  • This is my mantra

To build team strength we did team challenges. The first one was a spaghetti tower and my group was really awkward at the time (after all, it was the first time we ever collaborated) so we struggled a bit. As we did more group work and challenges our group started supporting each other more and realizing everyone’s strengths (💪). Some people were good at presenting well another was good at writing things down and creating ideas fast. The hardest one we did was probably the cup challenge, the goal was to stack 6 cups on top of each other with an elastic band that had strings attached to it. We had to each take a string and pull the elastic and put it around a cup to move it to the position we wanted it to be. Sadly, we never finished (big surprise) because our cups kept on falling over and not cooperating (very rude in my opinion). We did more challenges, but our last one was the spaghetti challenge again… Our group thought we had a different idea but didn’t…it was almost the exact same (shows our creative juices 😎). Although, even if it was the same we definitely improved on talking to each other because everyone contributed even if it was in the slightest bit. Here is our first and last towers!

  • This was our first tower

For teachers to get to know more about us we were assigned to make a user manual about ourselves. There were multiple categories we had to write about like, warnings, trouble shooting and tips to maintain performance. The hardest one to write was probably trouble shooting because I didn’t know how to write about what to do when I’m in “distress”. We had to format the document to the exact same as the teachers and doing that helped us figure out how to use features of pages! Here our some parts of my user manual:

Then we had to make a blog post of how we work in a team, this was difficult for me because I was trying to learn how to use my blog (I still am). The post included my Memoji laptop, a paragraph of how I work in a team, some parts of my user manual, another paragraph explaining my creative media (hip hip hurray) and then my actual video I made. It explains how I work in a team (creative media). I had fun creating my creative media because I enjoyed editing it but I could have done way better. If you haven’t seen my creative media here it is:My Creative Media sorry if the slides where to short I couldn’t upload the full video.

All of this work came up to one big assignment, a keynote guided tour (for an exhibition). In this tour we had all of our work we created (most of it at least), and we presented it to the parents. The presentation was fun to make and we got to learn a lot more about keynote, I’ve learned a lot about keynote (Im practically a expert, not). For example when making the Memoji laptop I learned how to erase the backgrounds of photos and in the keynote guided tour I learned how to link words to slides in the presentation. Here is a video of my Keynote Guided Tour

Not everything for the exhibition was on an iPad (plot twist) we also created a physical piece out of a variety of material. This was quite hard because my brilliant brain of mine had a whole plan set up then realized you were aloud one of each material. So I picked a different box and tried to use the same idea. My idea was this:

The hot air ballon states big ideas and the person is me (obviously), and it shows how I’m made out of different things. When I created this I used box A instead and it was much easier to create something with it. I never took a picture of the finished product all together, my bad, but the photo is what my hot air balloon ended up looking like. I never got a photo of my person so I have drawn a draft of what it did look like. The colours on my person represent different things, and here is what they mean Yellow: sunshine, happiness, warmth Orange: joy, creativity, determination, enthusiasm, fun Blue: calm trust intelligence Brown: safety stability dependability  Green: nature, taking action, growth White (its my head): purity, balance, understanding. Here is my photo of what my creation looked like:

In the end I think I’ve learned a lot and I’ve gotten better at working in a team. What I bring is inclusiveness (that’s a word?) and creativity (super original). I can show my learning through projects better then presenting in my opinion. I had fun working with group 4 and this was our very last project we did to together. It was a “horror” film trailer our star actors are Christian as the innocent boy and Hayden as the creepy stalker/murder. Keenan was the producer? And I was the camera guy. Sadly Naomi wasn’t there, but she was in spirit (so sentimental). Here is the amazing video: Very Horrific Film

Group members blogs!

Caden

Hayden

Naomi

Christian 

Keenan 

Medium Is The Message

 

This is our final ad my group made!

Check out my group members’ blogs:  Hayden, Caden, Naomi, Christian, and Keenan

The driving question for this project is, “How does what we hear, see, read and view influence the world around us?” Throughout this project we gathered information and other media to help us build knowledge about what techniques are used to attract people/target audience.

From this learning we were then expected to create an ad around what our assigned business wanted. 

I created many drafts before collaborating with my group and received lots of helpful critique from my peers. Throughout the journey I learned about how to finesse my skills and ideas to the best I could do! In the slideshow is the journey of all of my drafts.

  • This is my first draft.

The first of step of this project was understanding the task and discovering out our business. Fortunately, I was surprised to discover that my group’s business was Honey’s as I enjoy baking and I especially love doughnuts.

Once we had a FaceTime appointment set up, everyone had to brainstorm questions about what we should ask our business in the conference with them and present it to Mr Hepburn. For some reason I decided to volunteer to present one of the questions to him (I think I was delusional at the time because I am usually the shy one of the group). The reason we had to talk to Mr. Hepburn  is because he works in the advertising industry and has been doing it for many years. After, we had to create questions (more questions woowoo) our group would ask when talking to the business, keeping the feedback from Mr. Hepburn in mind. We also brainstormed ideas in our specific groups, specifically ideas about our ideas for first ad drafts! Then of course we had the meeting, in the meeting (FaceTime call) we found out what exactly Ashifa (Honeys Doughnuts Manager) wanted for their ad. 

Here is a photo of all of the ideas we made!

Then we started creating our first drafts! These are some of my group members first individual drafts!

  • Caden’s first draft!

Mine got cut off because it was the only landscape one so here it is!

After many long hours (maybe like 10 minutes) I was reunited with my first draft. Quite frankly it’s not very good as I didn’t add in all my ideas…. I completely ignored all of them and I went for a minimalist approach (as you can see because there is nothing there). I like the photo but there isn’t a lot to catch your eyes.

Slowly, we all progressed by getting peer critique from each other, and throughout the process we started connecting with each other more. As we went through this we learned more about the apps and how much our iPads can do as well as learning more about advertising. We learned about having the right ratio of visuals, 70, 20, 10 (70% is the picture?, 20% the text and 10% is the logo). We also learned about the KISS abbreviation, which mean Keep It Simple Stupid (I already knew it, haha), Mr. Hepburn told us to keep this in mind well creating our ads.

Then we ended up coming together as a group and creating our final ad to send to the business. We ended up choosing mine and fixed many things, and made sure to bring in everyone’s voice and input so it was a true team effort, before sending it off to Mr. Hepburn for more critique and knowledge. We ended up getting great feedback and I learned more things to not only help make the ad better but to help my photography skills. I improved many things in my ad throughout all of my drafts but here is my first and last draft close together, I think I’ve improved a lot. You can check out the final ad we sent at the top!  

Also, here is the link to Honey’s website: I am the link to the amazing website.

While we waited for our businesses to get back to us we created an advertisement journal with pictures of all of the ads around us. Personally, this project helped me connect to the driving question the best, since when I learned about all of the concepts of advertising like weasel words and things like logos and ethos, I noticed more of who ads were directed towards and how they attracted attention. Instead of me thinking, “That ad is ridiculous,” or “Why is that ad here I see it everywhere?” I now recognized the hard work that went into it and what they were trying to achieve. When it comes to my completed graph I think I could have done better but I never got out so I had to speed take photos when I eventually did. My Graph is right here in this blue writing.

Lastly, one other thing we did was our historical media analysis! The point of this was to pick a historical ad and analyze it. We did this and ended up having to create a document answering multiple important questions when creating an ad. Doing this I realized older ads are much more different then I thought. Most surprisingly they are sexist. For example, in cigarette ads they say it’s a good idea and won’t affect your health, Also, there are some pretty messed up ads like a pig chopping itself up into salami and some other weird ones. My friend cough cough Hannah cough picked a very interesting  one you can check it out on her blog, it’s highly disturbing (press this to go to her blog).

The ad I picked to analyze is actually a video for Pepsi. One of the things they did to attract attention is quite obvious, using Micheal Jackson. Here is the video link!! Micheal Jackson Pepsi Ad (not Coca Cola) . I don’t have a specific website because I knew about this ad before hand so I didn’t search anything up on a browser.

In conclusion I learned a lot more about advertising then I thought I would. I never really knew all the hard work that went into creating a simple photo. Now whenever I see an ad that appeals to me I don’t just wonder about the product, I also think about how long it took to create the ad. Also I never knew about all the fancy terms in advertising, like weasel words. Whenever I see a bounty ad I immediately think, “Those words are weasel words”, for example, Bounty is basically no different then any other brand for paper towels. Another thing I learned is the different terms for what ads try to evoke. Ethos, logos, and pathos, The one that appeals to me most is probably logos because I like having the facts down then reading reviews before buying a product. The reason ethos doesn’t make me want to buy something is because when it evokes emotion in me its usually not something I necessarily need, or it ends up being about crackers or shoes and then I think it’s ridiculous. I enjoyed this project a lot because I got to do photography and I really enjoy that and I got to connect with my group more!

Your at the end now 🙂

My Drafts For The Ad’s

  • This was my very first attempt at making my ad.

 

 

This is my slideshow for my ad drafts, I have Honey Doughnuts.

 

Team Contract

 

Hi i finally finished

This is my Memoji, and I have customized the laptop to what I would like my laptops stickers to look like in real life. As you can see some of my stickers are people and they are stickers of my friends. I have a camera, which is actually the camera I use currently (I’m 99% sure) so I thought it would be cool to add. I have the hive because I like rock climbing, and I have kermit because why not.

How I work in a team:

As a team member I can listen to others peoples ideas and then i can try and figure out if they would work. I think I can merge ideas well but I can get faster at creating a end result. I am a optimist so I will try and support and push anyone to keep on going even if I feel the opposite about myself. I am good at reading and I can am kinda fast at it. I can learn on the go and try and adapt to situations. I am good at self regulating so I probably won’t get super angry, burst into tears or anything random at weird times. I like hands on experiment and digital art, but not drawing because I’m realllllly bad at that. I will try and help my group whenever I can and I’m a introvert but I think I’m getting better at that stuff I have no clue though.

Some things about me that you might want to know.

 

Creative Media:

I was told just writing something about what I bring to the team was boring so i made a animation. In the animation I was asked by my team what Im good at and then I answered with a very dramatic scene. What I said is explain what I’m good at I said, I’m kind, optimistic, helpful, empathetic, collaborative, smart? And I can work as a team. I was asked what I needed to work on, and I answered, I need to work on staying on topic, not getting stuck on an idea, pitching myself, listening even when I get bored. I don’t have a big reason for why I did a animation it was mostly not to be super boring and I thought it would kind of be fun to do. It was sort of fun but my hand got a cramp from doing those amazing drawings. I’m like working in teams because I find it is nice to be able to meet new people and be in the same boat most of the time.

My Creative Media

👆🏼

That’s my animation video for the Creative Media!

Boom. Done.

 

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