For this whole project, I learned a lot and had lots of fun in group working. We all tried our best to working on our group project. We discussed a lot together as a group and working together. When someone in our group had some troubles, other group members would help he/she out. For this project, I was charging to shoot the photo and videos for our group. I brought my own camera and took photos when our group stayed together. I also set my camera in a nice angle and shot the whole competition videos. The other thing I did was to edit the video that we sat together and watched the “Nailed it”. For this project, we faced lots of problems and solved it together. For instance, we found that our audio for the competition video is not recorded very well, and the luckiest thing is that we had two cameras shot the video, so that we had another video that we could use for our website. From this group project, I learned some new skills, like how to decorating cakes. When I was decorating cakes, I learned to be more patient on it and be more creative!

Overall, this was a really fun project to participate in. It isn’t often that a school project leads you to joking around with friends while getting to decorate and eat cake. A lot of the group was spread out across members so we each played an important role. Everyone had to do some type of preparation for the competition, or lack thereof, and create b-roll of said preparation and edit it together with a pre-interview footage. As well, we each created out own bios to detail both a bit about ourselves and our preparation for the competition. On the night of the competition, we obviously each decorated our cakes. As well, I aided in obtaining close-up shots of everyone’s cakes and setting up the camera for the overall shots of the competition. All the footage had to be edited, of course, so we split up the work for the editing process. Personally, I edited the results video as well as my own bio video. The webpage itself was a team effort with each person helping to edit the pages, with Ben on lead, and with the overall layout being based off sketches that I drew.

Most of the challenges that we encountered with this project were technologically based, such as the audio of the camera being insufficient at times. As well, while our original plan was to take a decorating class together, when we couldn’t find any we each did our own individual preparation on varying levels. However, I think this ultimately aided the project and gave it a more humorous edge. I would definitely do this project again, especially if it involved eating even more cake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh8JRm3WtaM&feature=youtu.be

This project was actually really fun compared to what I thought it would be at the start of the semester. I think I did the best job I could to help out our team. We were all very involved in the planning process and deciding on an activity to do. As soon as we had everything decided I volunteered myself to be the main editor for the competition video. So I edited the 16 minute competition video we have that focuses on the activity we did. I also edited my bio video, wrote my bio piece, and found the headshot of myself for the competitors page. During the actual competition we all had a say in the set-up of the cameras and how we would do the mid competition interviews. I tried to set up the audio for the competition but something messed up with the audio on one camera, so we had to use just one camera for audio. The only thing I would have done differently for our assignment is film the competition before spring break. We were able to get all of our work done before we needed to and stayed on task but if we were able to film before spring break it would have made the whole process a little bit earlier. I spent a couple late nights editing the video just because of how much footage we had it took a couple hours to render and export the video the couple times I had to. I think everything in our group went well. The only real problem we had was getting stuff to show up on wix sometimes but a little bit of messing around and we it to work so nothing to complain about!

This week was mostly cleaning up our website and presentation. We have our in class practice presentation on Wednesday, so we need to be sure our website is, mostly, done and ready. We have a few things we are still tweaking, such as the “Failed It” reveal videos and the accompanying audio. As well, there are a couple videos and pictures that still need to be added. I think in general, we wanted to add another page on the website detailing out credits to the help we received and including the video of our group watching “Nailed It.” We figured out the first time we tried to meet, that not all of us can work on the website together. Instead, we can all sit there and watch one person work on it, because the rest of us cannot log in and help. Therefore, most of the updating and editing the website has been done alone. We have met up a few times this week, though, to discuss how we think the progress is going and what else we need. We might need a bit more practice before our final presentation, but I think we are definitely prepared for the in-class practice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1ZWVRYf7qk&feature=youtu.be

In this week, our website is almost done, and we don’t have so many things to do. The only few things that need to be done is that we need to finish building our website and practice together for the final presentation. When we built our WIX website, we also faced some problems, for example, WIX is not allowed us to upload very long videos, so we found a solution is to upload our videos into YouTube and then we could put these videos into our website. Also, some groups had the practice presentation during class, and our group will go next week. Before this week’s class, we had a small discussion together. We divided works to every group member, and we practice the presentation together. For the presentation part, I am charging my introduction part and the voting part. I think that this week’s class helped me a lot. I learned a lot when other groups were presenting.  It was beneficial for us to prepare our presentation. Next week, we will have our practice presentation in class, and I think it will help our final presentation a lot. Also, we will have our final presentation on next Monday.

This week we did not have much to do. We thought we might get stuck presenting last week, so we finished everything up before then. So, I have gone over the website a couple times to practice what I will be presenting for the final. I think we have a pretty good website and a lot of content for people to view and see. We used wix to do the website, so it has a very nice layout and is super easy to navigate. Wix does not have it own video player to hold some of our longer videos so we had to upload them to YouTube in order to have them on the website. We plan to meet up after Wednesday a couple times to do some practice runs of our presentation which should help us out a lot. I am supposed to go over the competitor page of the website. Which we were able to get a written bio, headshot, and a video intro into what each competitor did for the competition. Each intro video is between 45 seconds and 1 minute long so it gives a very quick behind the scene look at what everyone did to get ready.

This week was the week to get everything done and ready to present. That meant we met multiple times outside of class to talk about layout and design. The hardest part about this week was that only one person can edit Wix at a time so it was hard to get all the content done then wait for one person to put it together. We all talked about how we wanted things organized it took a few different tries to see what worked best for the viewer, but also for it to make sense. We also had trouble with some wix features so we had to improvise and make things work. Overall, we had a very successful week and only need to tweak a few things before our final presentation. One of these tweaks will be our data visualization graph. The component is there, but I don’t know if it is at the level it could be. It was hard for us to find a component besides preparation time that fit the data visualization aspect of the rubric. A lot of features with voting could be data visualization, but in order to convert our voting data into a graph on the website we had to pay a Wix membership which we didn’t want to do. 

This week the main objective was editing all of our raw footage and compiling it onto the website. Because we had so much material, we split the amount of work between each member. Each person was responsible for their own biographical information. This included a personal photo (or headshot), a written bio  about that person, and a short video combining his/her preparation for the competition and the pre-competition interviews. As I didn’t have any preparation, my interview is interspersed with me watching Netflix, eating frosting, and taking a nap on the couch, very intense work. In addition to this, I was working on editing the “judging” video. Following the competition, we each judged each other’s cakes on both appearance and taste. Then we each picked a winner. I edited this footage together to be put on the results page of the website. Because it isn’t a very serious topic, I tried to reflect that in my footage keeping in some of the more humorous comments on the cakes’ appearances and taste. We attempted to work on the website together earlier this week, but realized only one person can edit the page at a time. Instead, we just compiled everything that would go on the page into folders on Box and are taking turns putting it together.