What I did in S104!!

here is the list of what i contributed to the whole campaign process (i'll try to remember as many as possible!!!) keep in mind these are in no particular order (haha)

first of all, i was a full time member of the drunk bust group serving as the creative supervisor (haha, we all made up funny titles for ourselves). I attended all of the group meetings and shared my two cents like a good little group member should. I helped edit the hoosiernews broadcast along with Caleb and Taylor. I wrote the credits for the hoosiernews broadcast. i helped ms. beth riley write the about page on the drunk bus website as well as helped try to start up the site in the beginning. I also contributed my ideas for the campaign (just like all of my other groupies did) and some notable ones that i am especially proud of are the dbus ping pong balls and the dbus cups. I also worked with beth and kate on some promotional ideas...we made a playlist for our dbus imix, we came up with a design for a t-shirt, and i am a proud member of our dbus facebook group. Finally, I assembled the Final Presentation packet of all of our campaign information into a cute little packet. I also made little flash cards for all of my group members to look at during our presentation. I also was in charge for adding drunk bus to wikipedia and i am working on linking some of our info like the website, the zazzle site to the page.

so i think thats all and i just want to say...that my group was awesome and i had tons of fun working with them on the dbus campaign. love you guys!!!

Evaluation/Final Report

Thom,
I'm not quite sure exactly what we are supposed to put in these blogs, but from what I gather, you want to know what we did individually, what we learned, and how the class was. So, that is what I am going to share.

I was part of the Drunk Bus group. Like everyone else in the group, I was involved in the brainstorming of how we were going to get our campaign off the ground. Together we all pitched in ideas for the website, which Kyle then took and produced. I thought of the idea to have a little flash animation involving the trash can, which led to the rest of the group adding their own comical scenarios. Unfortunately, we were too inexperienced with flash to make this work in the amount of time we had. I also suggested raising awareness of the midnight express by organizing to have posters of bus routes and bus route pamphlets on the buses and at stops. I also thought it would be a good idea to put our slogan "Do you ride it every night?" on the scrolling marquis of the other buses on campus. However, due to time constraints, we were unable to make it to that stage of the campaign. Having the other aspects of our campaign being handled by the other group members, I worked on creating a website fof Hoosier News with Jason. Not having a clue what I was doing, I was very pleased with the outcome of the website. Although it is fairly basic, it says what it needs to, and I now have a little more knowledge of how to make a website.

I came into this class completely inexperienced in the realm of media. I definitely feel like I have a better understanding of it now, but I am still a little shakey on how to use programs such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Although we only had so much time to learn everything, I feel that what I did learn was a good introduction to more advanced productions further down the road.

All in all, I really enjoyed this class. I really do wish we had more time for you to really get us experienced with all the different programs, but that is obviously unrealistic. Perhaps it would be best to get into the different programs earlier on in the semester, so that more can be fit into the class. This class has definitely inspired me to look into more media classes, and hopefully I will be able to take another of your classes in the future.

-Nathaniel Gold

CM for SC

I'm going to miss everyone! Sorry to be emotional here, but I learned to much from you guys- we are all so different and working in this environment where we are forced to use eachother to create something has made me realize how great it is to work will other people. During Dormland Security's first group meeting I remember not being able to concentrate because I kept thinking about how different each of us was and how weird it was that this class brought us together to work on a project. But by the close of this semester, I felt like I've gotten to know almost everyone- from my original confusion friend Kate to STL Sharahyah- I love hearing what each of you have to say. I think the enviornment was the best thing about the course because I got to learn what it's like to HAVE to work with people to get something finished, even if it seems confusing or impossible. It was cool to see how easy it was so begin a campaign with a few talented people. I also enjoyed the books we read on the side. It was nice to choose something to write about that interests me because it is easier to learn when you love what you are learning.

Things that could be changed... I don't want to be repetitive so I'd say obviously a little more organization. It would be okay to simply touch on some subjects as long as we focused on the more relavent points concerning the topic. Sometimes it seemed like topics did not exactly tie in together, but on the other hand some of the best ideas came from random thoughts and subjects.

I was in the Dormland Security group. I participated in all of our meetings, and was "on screen talent" for Hoosier News. (Nope, I've never taken acting.) I also held up cue cards with Caleb, which was more difficult than it seems! Overall, I've had a lot of fun with the campaign and I'm so glad that I got to meet all of you. Thom is definatelty one of those professors that you remember throughout your life. I'LL MISS YOU GUYS!

Seriously, we should have Citizen Media reunions.

My Very Detailed Evaluation... Apologies

In my evaluation for the course, I’m not going to focus so much on what I did for the campaign, but more on what worked and what didn’t worked for certain aspects of the course. I will try not to be as long-winded as my friend Kyle, but this may take a bit of time to read through. I split Citizen Media for Social Change into four categories: the course, the equipment, the final project, and the professor.
When I signed up for this course last summer, I had no idea what this class entailed. Now after completing a semester of the class, I feel like I’m just grasping some of the concepts that Thom taught in the class. Citizen Media for Social Change was an awesome course and the material that we covered (from the books we read to the videos we watched on the Internet) lead to me really getting into new media. I thought that learning basic html was important, but I thought that this shouldn’t have taken up as much class time, so other applications could be focused on like Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash, and maybe even, FinalCut. To add time to the course, I think the books were important to read, but I could have read those books much faster than the time that was allotted to us.
The class environment was perfect. Like Kyle said, it was great to be out of a 300-person lecture class and into a class where we had more interaction with the professor. I really like seeing all the computers on the first day of class also. The only criticism I may have on equipment available to us was the lack of cameras available and other audio and lighting tools that could have made the newscast look pretty professional. If not professional, it would have at least been fun to play around with the stuff.
I think the final projects turned out better than I could have imagined, especially with the small amount of time we had to throw something together. It was amazing to see everyone’s talents come together to produce the final project. The only criticism I can express is the same as everyone else’s – time.
Finally, I have come to Thom. I think when you are first starting into college everyone wants to find that professor who inspires them and makes them think differently. Thom was that guy for me and I bet for a lot of the class. What I noticed about Thom was he took away any shyness that was in the classroom and he wanted people to speak up with what they were good at. The artists, the writers, the editors, the actors… he knew we were talented and was just the guy to bring us together. Now when I think of Thom, I think of the Santa Claus in The Christmas Story. We were all a bunch of Ralphies sitting on his lap, intimidated to bring our ideas across. The only difference is when we told him our ideas he didn’t say, “You’ll shoot your eye out kid,” and kick us down the slide, he ran with our ideas.
Overall, I have little criticism for this course and only a positive assessment. The class worked. I actually wouldn’t mind staying in this one for another semester. Sorry for rambling on so long.

Thanks everyone.
Caleb

Sarah Greenberg: Review of Citizen Media

First off, I'd just like to say that I enjoyed this course very much. When I registered for classes back in the summer, I wasn't really sure what to expect with this one, but I was very pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed, actually, the books I read for the book reports (my favorite was definitely The Revolution Will Not be Televised) and of course, the group work for the final campaign. If I had to improve the course, I'd say that we probably should have started working on our campaigns earlier, maybe spent some time with video editing as whole class so everyone could be involved in that, and not spent so much time on css.
I worked on the Nap IU campaign. I helped gather information for the website, and with the rest of the gorup, brainstormed ideas of the webisite and planned out the story boards for the commercials. I also provided on-screen help for the commericials, but only my hands and body are actually visible on the film.
In early discussion in the napping group, we talked about actually having campus wide "nap time", handing out sleep masks and stuffed owls, hooting on buses, and lots of other stunts to increase interest and awareness. If we had started this earlier in the semester, maybe we would have been able to get started on this stuff also!

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

Improving S104

I think this class was really very ineresting. We could have really improved our campaigns if we had started them earlier or had more time to continue working on them. Here we are at the last day of class, and we're finally ready to really put everything up on a website. What about all the great advertising ideas? We thought of passing out pingpong balls, tshirts, lanyards, and posters with our drunk bus logo and the website, but we were not able to even start these ideas until the websites were up. So if we had more time, then we could have really shot off with our ideas.

-Abby Schmiesing