Citizen Media Review + Individual Role

I typed the individual role description before we decided to do the blog thing, so I just decided to include it with my review of the course. Anyway, this was with-out-a-doubt, my favorite course. I loved the small class size, being in a computer lab, talking about cool media related topics, and having a team oriented project. It was very refreshing to be in this learning environment compared to the 300 plus lecture. In addition, I loved working in groups toward a big project. Group dynamics are always interesting. As far as criticisms, I feel that we should have dove right into Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash. The first eight weeks were interesting as far as the books and articles we read, but I felt like we should’ve been learning more about tools that were required to carry out our campaigns on top of the reading. This would’ve prepared us more for the campaigns and given us the ability to do more. Overall though, I think if we had one more week of class, we probably could’ve been okay with our campaigns. As far as Thom goes… he is the man… enough said.
In the Drunk Bus campaign, my primary role was the illustrator. In addition, I worked as the web designer, and I was filmed in the Drunk Bus commercial. During that first class period when we began discussing campaign ideas, the Drunk Bus idea jumped out at me. At first I had no clue what the Drunk Bus was, and I was just attracted to the catchy name. Then, when I went to the “Midnight Special” link on the IU Bus website, I found out what we were talking about. The main motivation for me in this campaign was the message that we would be trying to send out: Don’t drink and drive, Get home safely. Drinking and driving is such a common problem and has affected many people where I live and in my life. To me, getting this message across and actually preventing those grave consequences would be worth all my effort. From here, I knew I wanted to commit to the project, and I began imagining what would really be effective in getting our message across. The method was really quite simple to me: make everything about this campaign cool. That is make everything in this project look appealing, funny, and creative to a college student. The first thing I thought of immediately was the actual bus. I wanted our bus to be pimped out with spinners, tints, fat rims, and all of those bells and whistles that college kids love. From the bus, I would be able to create an evident style for the project – a (hip, pimpmyride, graffiti, street) type of appearance/approach. This thing could be so cool. Then, I made the text logo in graffiti style. The design method that I took involved sketching my ideas onto paper first, then creating them digitally on the computer. So, I just experimented with my scanner and with Adobe Photoshop, and wound up with a cool looking bus and text logo. Then, Adobe Illustrator was introduced to me for designing things that would be more flexible and compatible with the web. At this point, I really got into the designing, the website being my focus. I wanted the site to be interactive and extremely visual rather than textual. I pictured the bus pulling up to a door in an ally with the logo graffitied on the wall. The top links would in the gutter of the building, and the door would be a portal for further animation. I saw the Drunk Bus bouncing with music notes streaming from the top and hot beats playing over the page. Again, I drew all of the pages in a notebook first and then recreated them in Illustrator. This process was so interesting for me because as I was designing, I was learning more and more about how to use the programs. It was a slow process, but rewarding nonetheless. In the end, I learned how to translate my illustrated pages into html using Dreamweaver. This process was difficult, but productive. We finally got our site up, plugged in the information we wanted, which was researched, summarized, written by the other group members, and it looked great! In the end, I felt so proud of my work. I think this project has opened a new interest for me in designing, and I hope to continue further in my exploration of design.

Kyle