Slideshow with Audio!

 

Check it out!!

REAL LIFE!

CARE for AIDS is starting a club at Furman and I am in charge of the social media!! I’ve made a twitter account and Facebook page for the organization, and I really feel like I’m putting the skills we’ve learned in this class to use!! I even used what we learned with photoshop to create an image to promote CFA at Furman:

 

I meshed the CARE for AIDS logo into a picture of the Furman bell tower and lake that I took for this class project.  I wanted to portray the message that CARE for AIDS and Furman are really working together and CFA is ingrained in Furman’s campus… and I think I succeeded!

I love being able to apply all this stuff to the real world, and the things I’m interested in!! I’m really making a difference with these new skills.

Dynamic Duo

Multimodal Polyphony by Anders Fagerjord was a very interesting article that discussed the importance of the combination of various modes of communication.  Fagerjord begins the article by saying that we usually think that “the simple lables of ‘alphabetic’ and ‘image-oriented’ will be sufficient to describe the communication practises of coming generations” (1).  He continues to go on and describe the various other methods that are also important to communication and interactions in today’s day and age but maybe don’t get as much as recognition as ‘alphabetic’ or ‘image-oriented’.

Fagerjord focuses a lot on the “flash documentary” which he describes as a “true Web genre that became widespread in 2000 and 2001.  I had never heard of them before reading this article, so I found this section particularly fascinating. They are timed slideshows with a narration.  The still images are made to move by “moving the frame in panning, tilting, or zooming over the image… a technique [called] slide-motion film” (2). The combination of still images (photography as well as drawings and paintings) and audio (speech, music and sound effects) are shown to be extremely powerful and meaningful through these flash documentaries.  The combination of audio and visual is very different from that of image and language for 3 reasons: 1) we can listen and look at the same time, instead of trying to read and look, 2) the audio adds a rhythm and dynamic to the slideshow that words alone wouldn’t offer, and 3) new rhetorical possibilities arise with the movement of frames.  These 3 things, among others, offer insight into why a slideshow can be made so much more powerful with just the simple addition of some audio, whether that be narration or music.  

ON TO AUDIO!

What connects us all as a nation? Yes, we all live in the United States. We share the same president and have the same country written on the front of our passports.  But chances are, we’ll never meet 99% of the people living in this country, so how is it possible for us to feel such community with all of these random strangers? Well, the author of The Zen of Listening argues that radio broadcasting is the reason for this connection that we all feel.

Nationalism and pride in being a part of the American community began when newspapers became a big part of our culture.  The author explains that “the paper, through its stories and, later, its images, was a concrete representation – one you held in your hands every day – that such a nation did exist and did have particular, distinctive characteristics” (23).

Newspapers played a huge role in the creation of nationalism, but radio broadcasting strengthened the feeling in a way that print never could.  Being able to hear the real voices of people from several states away at the exact same time as people in that state was unheard of – and made everything feel much more personal.

FDR played on the power that the radio had when he had the “fireside chats” in which he addressed listeners as “my fellow Americans”. He was able to rally the nation during a time of war using this new technology, something that would have been very difficult to do otherwise.

A lot of what this article discussed regarding the merits of radio made me think of today’s computer age where we don’t listen to the radio as much as we used to.  I think we are brought together in the same way through computers as our grandparents were by radios, only on a much more global scale now.

Furman Campus Slideshow

Furman Campus Slideshow

 

I created this slideshow to show the beauty of Furman’s campus, and how it affects the students who are surrounded by it everyday. Enjoy!!

Dining Hall Lakeview

I enhanced the colors and contrast in this picture, and blurred the dining hall and background a little bit more than it had been.

Chapel

 

For this picture, I simply enhanced the colors and cropped the part of the building on the left out. I thought the building distracted the eye from traveling straight back to the chapel.

Hammocking

This picture is one that I adjusted to the two-thirds rule.  Originally when I took the picture, the hammock was in the center of photo, but after recomposing it the hammock is just about in the intersection in the bottom right corner.  I think this helps the composition of the piece immensely and makes it much more interesting.

Philanthropy

This photograph was very dark and it was hard to see exactly what was going on; I brightened the picture and enhanced some  of the colors so it was easier to see and more interesting to look at.

Rose

 

This picture was taken in the Furman Rose Garden. I edited this only by blurring everything except for the flower itself. I thought it would draw more attention to the beauty of the rose and the background was less distracting.