A More Productive and Fulfilling Newsroom

This article was about a Florida newspaper that was failing due to pumping out mediocre content for the purpose of filling up space. The paper decided to switch things up by focusing on major stories with better content and letting the newsroom experiment with journalism, which resulted in a happier newsroom and a higher quality newpaper. The author's argument is that by allowing more freedom to the reporters and valuing quality over quantity, a newspaper can become more interesting and brings joy to the journalists "... [due] to new opportunities to dig up enterprise stories and try out new ideas" (Nesmith). The strengths with the author's argument were that they were supported by anecdotes of the people who worked at the paper and who could give their experiences. A weakness of the article could be that it never acknowledge any possible opposition. Overall, the author wants a much more flexible newsroom. The author's arguments does support the main points of the article, because the success of the paper was convincingly contributed to the reasons the author's argument makes. The author explores additional reasons also, and shows how they might have helped to the success too. Being in Convergence Journalism, this applies because given more freedom and resources means more possiblities for us too. All in all, I believe the author provided a convincing argument that had great supporting anecdotes.

Professional Video Blog Post

The video I chose was a short animated video about a lazy intergalactic delivery service. The general scope of the video was to portray a quick, dark, but funny short video. The story is about a how an incompetent delivery man land on a tiny planet, and unknowingly manages to bring terror to the planet and its inhabitants, and eventually disintegrates it. I decided to analyze the video through its cinematography. I thought it was fairly well made; although there were a lot of long and centered shots, it did also use the rule of thirds frequently and the long shots never felt drawn out or boring. For example, there is a scene where one of the aliens is running from a giant can, and while the shot goes on for quite some time, it does not entirely bore you by throwing little jokes here and there (although I agree that the team should have split it up into different shots). One element I might use from this video is the use of a wide shot to not set the scene, but to show the characteristics of characters, like the wide shot of the delivery man's messy ship. Something that I had already learned that I thought the video did well on was how to position the rule of thirds, by placing the subject on a line and having something interesting in every box. Overall, I believe the cinematography was pretty decent, was pleasant looking, but could use some improvement in adjusting shots and drawn-out shots.

Graphic Design Pencil Project

For this project we had three sections to work on. The first section was to create a basic pencil using a tutorial sheet, as well as creating a can to put the pencil in, and it helped you learn how to create a basic object with basic shapes. The second section was to create another pencil, but have it personalized. My personalized pencil was colored in Royals colors and it was writing on a piece of paper. The last section had you create something of your own using shape tools and other useful tools in Illustrator. I decided to create a synthesizer using the mainly the shape tool and the text tool.

One of the main things I learned when doing the project was to always save frequently. At one point at this project, I forgot to save my progress, and right towards the end of class Illustrator unexpectedly crashed. Consequently, I had lost all of the work I had done that, which pushed me back progress-wise from the rest of the class. From that moment on, I try to save every time I make a major change, and I will try to make that a habit for later on in the year.

As for tools, I learned how to use the shape tool. For example, I learned that if you simply single click on the board, you have the option to input specific measurements for that shape. Also, if you hold the spacebar it locks the movement of the shape to a certain path. If you hold down the shift button when expanding the object, it locks to the original shape, allowing you to keep the same height and width. I also learned what the Live Bucket Tool is, which is a special kind of bucket that creates objects out of what's drawn, and then fills it in with a color.