Storytelling and Ways I Desire to Express Myself

Posted on by Jay

When a story is engaging, the audience themselves are also engaged into the story—they are able to retain information easier, and produce different theories to themselves about what could happen next. When there are visual or audible clues—hand gestures to guide the viewers and give context, followed by creating sound effects with your mouth or giving characters in your story different voices—it helps keep the audience engaged and willing to listen to what you are sharing. The same can be said about doing things in a virtual world; they follow the same sort of style of storytelling, in which the storyteller shows and tells the audience what they want them to know, and can create specific things that are related to the story to help keep the audience engaged.

While presenting a story visually is not my strongest suit, I would like to try and find a way to create something visually to aid my writing as a way to give the audience a better idea of what I’m trying to portray. I want to create stories that are fictional and entertaining to consume and have fun with, while containing ideas and conversations that can help others digest topics that may be hard to express and talk about in any other setting. I want to create things that people can relate to in some way, or find themselves at least gaining a new understanding of things.

I think movies and stories that I have read in general have inspired me to create stories that are both entertaining and informative in their own way. No specific story comes to mind, but I know that stories themselves are influential, and with that responsibility of being a storyteller, more than anything, I want to make sure people have a fun time with the stories that I create; and, hopefully, I can inspire others to do the same and have fun with their own story creating.

The Importance of Designing for Everyone

Posted on by Jay

It is important, while designing something and adding text to it, that we keep in mind to make it accessible and easier to read, while also keeping the reader’s attention. In order to do so, we need to use colors that contrast well against each other, and we need to use fonts that make it easier for people to read.

Contrasting colors are colors that are easy to see and discern when put against each other, or even when they blend into a gradient. Typically, the contrast of two colors depend heavily on how opposing their values are, as well as the saturation of color. A general example of this would be black text against a white background (just like this text right now) – their values are polar opposites, and their saturation level works extremely well for differentiating text and background. Now, if the color of this text block would be white on yellow, then it would be a poor choice of color, as their values are very similar to each other, and it can be hard to read the text since there is no way to differentiate the text and background from one another.

Finding a text font that is easy to read is a vital thing to note when you’re adding text to a graphic, as people with dyslexia can find it difficult to read – sometimes people who don’t have dyslexia can find it hard to read! Sans serif fonts are fonts that are designed specifically with the intention of making easily readable text. For example: Arial is a sans serif font, compared to Times New Roman, which is a serif font with extra wind-dings at the edge of each lettering to give it a more fanciful look. Comic sans, for example, is a wonderful font to use (as often as many people slander it), as it is known to be a font that people find to be easier to read. It also helps if the font is in a bigger size, so that no one is straining their eyes to try and read the text even when they’re close to it (if billboards were to use small fonts for their signs, then no one would be able to understand what it was they were trying to advertise).

Overall, these specific design choices are important to factor in when creating something that can be easily accessible to everyone, not just people who struggle to read something less contrasting in colors, or who can’t read in serif fonts. If we make everything we create accessible, then it is something that anyone can use and consume with little issue.

Creating Myself in Avatar Creation

Posted on by Jay

Being able to create myself in an avatar maker was a nice experience! Anything that involves customizing a character is something that I’m more than willing to do and most likely will enjoy, and this involves creating myself in character creation as well. I ended up creating two versions of myself, one as realistically as possible (not including the art style that I used for it), and one as a fictional pirate version of myself.

One version of myself I created was from the website Avatar Maker, which is a free avatar making website with four different art styles to choose from!

There were many more options than I thought there were going to be, which was really nice to see; though, as someone used to having a multitude of options to choose from games and such (Baldur’s Gate 3 is an amazing example of how in depth character customization can get), I could not alter the features of the avatar more than just a few nudges here and there, as well as choose a different color palette to work with. This is not a bad thing, however—I think it is nice to have a limited palette of things to use to create something! The style that I chose to create my avatar in was the second one, which was the polygonal style. I like how stylistic it was, while also being just realistic enough for me to find choices that were semi-accurate to my own. In the end, I was able to create myself in a way that was satisfactory to me.

I had also used another website called Piratetar, which is an older site where you can create a pirate avatar of yourself, or any character! This was the fantastical fictional version of myself that I have created. This was a website that I used before to create a much different version of myself (seen below).

I gave myself a little bit of an update, and one with less dark clothing!

I had a fun time recreating another pirate version of myself! There were still many options to choose from, which gave me the opportunity to chose things to make the avatar look like me. This is definitely not what a usual pirate looks like, but I like to think that this is a modern take on a pirate? Or at least a pirate with unconventional style and looks. This avatar creator gave me the option to have a pet as well, which immediately makes this a wonderful avatar creation site.

I could get lost in the process of character customization, and especially when it provides you with many different options to choose from that allow you to go as extreme or as simplistic as you want. I’m grateful that these websites limit you with only a few options, as it forced me to think about basic facial definitions that give you enough information to show that this, objectively, is supposed to represent me because it looks like me. These were fun to create, and I hope that other people give these websites a chance, and are able to create a person of their own!

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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When I first read this book as a required reading for my multimedia web class, I skimmed through it, and I thought to myself, “this is literally just a book. We are reading a story as an assigned textbook.” I even almost skipped out on buying it because I wasn’t too sure that was the right book for the class. It most definitely was, and after reading through it, I can see why it was required reading. I am very glad that I got the chance to read the book and see how innovative the writing for it is.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2) was a phenomenal read, and a story that was already relatable nearly 50 years early. Douglas Adams told a futuristic story about the future, and did so in a way that no other author probably could at the time that story was published. The elements within the story, and its relation to modern technology, provide us with something phenomenal that makes you wonder how Douglas Adams was able to create a story about technology, back when technology was a thing that many people overlooked when it was first being introduced.

To quote a character from the musical The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals: “Once confined to the world of science fiction, she is now science fact!” (He was referring to Amazon’s Alexa that acted as his virtual maiden). There have been many adaptations of the technology within the world of H2G2 that are used now in everyday lives; things such as Wikipedia websites that have a forum of information that can be accessed at any time they want (such as the in-story H2G2 that was written by Ford Perfect, and many others that came before him). Or an app that can translate words and sentences from a different language (like the Babbel Fish, without the intrusiveness that comes with using the Babbel Fish).

These things help make gathering information, and learning about them, much more accessible than it used to be. They are also constantly improving and becoming faster and smarter, which is both highly impressive and intimidating at the same time. On the other hand, they can also cause confusion, as there are so many things to keep track of and keep up with; sometimes it seems like things are new, but lack the charm of what came before them, and even seem worse. In the same vein, as I have attended my multimedia classes, and begin learning these new programs and try my best to keep up with all of these larger projects, one thing that has been taught to us, and hopefully something that can be taught everywhere else, is: Don’t Panic. Of course, that can be hard to do when the task is daunting and intimidating. But when we learn to path our way through the chaos, or maybe learn to take a step back and reassess ourselves and come back to it later, we’re able to achieve great things, and navigate ourselves better through a world that doesn’t want to wait. And hopefully, you too, can figure out where your towel is (I don’t believe I have yet, but that is a discovery that I must make for myself).

Featured image credit: “Towel Day – Dont Panic – Douglas Adams – The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” by Alan O’Rourke is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Animation Inspiration

Posted on by Jay

I grew up watching a lot of animation, and to this day, I still watch animation (though I don’t really watch many shows anymore…only if something really catches my eyes, and if I decide in the moment to start it and commit to it). I’ve been able to collect a couple of pieces of media that I enjoy lots and have captivated me and inspired me to be artistic, and creative, and to enhance my imagination even further.

As it stands, my favorite Japanese series is My Hero Academia, which has an anime adaptation of the manga, and that is definitely a piece of media that has inspired me to start creating again for myself (I don’t have much motivation or time anymore to create things outside of college anymore, but every time I consume something from this series, I feel myself getting inspired). The author, Kōhei Horikoshi, is a fantastic artist (and overworked, if I may be honest), and he creates such captivating panels and knows how to tell such an amazing story. I hold this series close to my heart, and it’s one that I won’t ever get tired of talking about.

As far as animation that have inspired me to pursue art a bit more…I would have to go with Arcane. The animation is absolutely gorgeous—the way it mixes 2D and 3D animation to create something spectacular blows me away. The writing is outstanding as well. But something that has captivated me so much about the show is how they design their characters. I aspire to be able to create characters like Arcane, and to be able to customize them in any way that I want to. Of course, my skill is not to their standard, and I am going to need a lot of time before I can create a standing character pose that doesn’t make them feel stiff; but character design, and character concept design is something that I want to try and do, even if it’s just a hobby that I do during my free time.

A warning to those who want to watch Arcane: this show contains lots of flashing lights, blood and violence, and other various things that happens throughout the show. I recommend going through the Does the Dog Die website, which gives a list of content warnings for users to list whether or not that specific thing is mentioned or happens in the show, and to give context for each episode. It will contain spoilers for some posts, but if someone has some triggers that they want to avoid, then I recommend this website for anyone who wants to look through it.

Moving Pictures

Posted on by Jay
lego mosaic recreation of van gogh's "starry night"

The world of storytelling is vast with many different genres of stories, as well as the different mediums that they come in. Film, specifically animation, can create impact in the same way that watching a movie with live actors could; or in the same way as reading words on paper, or on a screen, could. Not only is it effective in gaining the attention of the audience, but because of its eye-catching visuals, it gives people the chance to make things educational and inspirational.

Some short films, like “To This Day”, a poem written and performed by Shane Koyczan, showcases the artwork and animation skills of multiple artists that have collaborated with Koyczan to put together a gut-hitting, emotional performance. The impact of using the mind of many other artists to tell a story has created an inspiring film that could, hopefully, motivate us to be a little bit more kind to others, and to help those that are struggling.

“To This Day” by Shane Koyczan

Another example of a video that is impactful in its own way, and educative, is the video that comes from the TED Ed channel, “The unexpected math behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” – Natalya St. Clair”, uses animation (done by Avi Ofer) to emphasize the thesis of the video: how Van Gogh’s famous oil painting Starry Night, which was created during his time at a mental asylum (of which he self-admitted himself to) uses the unexplainable natural occurrence of turbulence. The usage of animation to emphasize the swirls within Van Gogh’s artwork is interesting, and might make some people want to research more about Van Gogh himself, or even about turbulence in nature…or of even turbulence in space, or even space itself (aka, go down a “rabbit hole” of learning about different things as you learn more and more information, and find references to others things that are somehow connected to each other).

“The unexpected math behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” – Natalya St. Clair from TED Ed

Featured image: “Starry Night Lego Mosaic” by s.w.Lepak is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Apple Logo and Copyright

Posted on by Jay
bitten apple against a white background

Apple Logo

Since the creation of the Apple company, its logo—simplistic and easy to understand (and easy enough to even replicate)—is very recognizable. With a logo as simple as its company name and used as things such as a religious symbol in stories and media, it is bound to have some people wonder what exactly it is supposed to represent. Apples have been associated with health and hygiene (“An apple a day keeps the doctor away”), religious themes (the apple from the story of Adam and Eve, also known as the Forbidden Fruit), and even Isaac Newton (the idea of him discovering the concept of gravity when an apple fell from a tree while he was under it). But do any of these have any correlation to the company Apple in some way or another?

Aside from the very first iteration of the Apple logo, which displayed Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree with the words “Apple Computer Co.” written on a banner surrounding the image, I like to think that the logo does incorporate these themes within its very simplistic logo. What comes to my head is the idea of Apple communicating the idea that they want to focus on knowledge and power—advancement in technology.

Copyright

Copyright, as a multimedia creator, is a thing that is very important to me, and to other creators out there who share their work. We have a responsibility to make sure that our work isn’t stolen or used for something bad, and therefore, to protect ourselves, we should be teaching people about intellectual property and copyright (I also think the concept of Creative Commons and derivative works should also be taught so people know the difference between the two).

Wikipedia and H2G2 are both similar in the way that they are both thought of as indexes for practically everything your heart can imagine in this world (or, in this case, the world that is in the world of H2G2). Currently, as I read H2G2, the in-world H2G2 is incomplete, with incomplete entries about different subjects. I imagine that Wikipedia will never be complete, and it will continue to have incomplete entries as the years go on. As said in the beginning of Chapter 8 of H2G2, “[The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] has been compiled and recompiled many times over many years and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travelers and researchers.” Replace H2G2 with Wikipedia, and the sentence written would still be accurate.

Featured image credit: “Bitten Apple” by dlg_images is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Photoshop, Beauty Standards, and Art

Posted on by Jay

Photoshop and Beauty Standards

Women Get Photoshopped Into Cultural Beauty Standards – Ladylike

Rather than using a photo to talk about the affects of what Photoshop can do to people, I decided to use a video that showcases four women who volunteered to have their bodies photoshopped to fit the beauty standard of the culture that they’re a part of (the video itself was six years ago but can still be applied to how beauty standards still affect people to this day). In the video, everyone is talking about how their photoshopped selves, which have all been altered in some way, looked very strange—one of them (Kristen, who was photoshopped to represent Italian beauty standards) even said, “This is like me, with all of the me sucked out of it.” The way that every single person who volunteered was altered in some way tells us that beauty standards are unrealistic, and that not every single person is going to “fit” the standard. It can affect people negatively, thinking that if they don’t fit the standard, then that means that they are not pretty enough for someone; this can make some people develop body image issues, which affects you mentally and physically.

Photoshop and Art

The advancement of technology to create art has brought in a whole new type of art style in art that, while hard to replicate physically on a canvas, is just as creative and amazing as the artworks created on canvas. The creation of Photoshop by John Knoll, who is known for working behind the scenes as a visual effects expertise in many films (Star Wars and Avatar, to name a few), helps with creating, and advancing, the art that we can do and create.1 Practical effects are still a practice within the industry—and still required to use since it’s difficult to accurately put visual effects on every single moving object—but with the digital applications that have been created to create something as illustrative as the things you see on screen, we wouldn’t be able to expand our creativity in the way that we do now.

  1. Mark Telfer. Fantha Tracks. “Star Wars: A Photoshop Story.” 1 Mar. 2018. https://www.fanthatracks.com/news/film-music-tv/star-wars-photoshop-story/ Accessed 29 Oct. 2023 ↩︎

Moore’s Law and the Babel Fish

Posted on by Jay
diagram of fictional fish, the "babel fish"

Amongst all the things that were written in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and have proven to be a scarily accurate prediction of our technological world, the Babel Fish was one that didn’t take me by surprise but was one that I hadn’t thought related to our present world straight away. Now, upon re-reading what a Babel Fish was, and reading about Moore’s Law (and what transistors are…), I can say with confidence that we are living in a time where we have a modern execution of a Babel fish from the mind of Douglas Adams—and is something that is affected by Moore’s Law.

The Babel Fish, according to the H2G2 entry (the in-lore guide) in chapter 6, is a small, yellow fish that processes different languages that are spoken, and allows you to understand what is being said because it translates the language for you in real-time (of course, this is once you have let it wiggle inside your ear…). The in-lore explanation is that it nourishes itself with the brainwaves of others around you, and then excretes a “telepathic matrix” into the user’s mind so that it can decode the languages spoken to you and help you understand what is being said. Thankfully, we don’t have anything that requires wiggling inside your ear to decode and understand other languages. Of course, it’s not as easy as having instantaneous reception, but we do have different apps and websites that allow us to learn a new language without having to take a class in a classroom to do so. We also have translating apps as well to instantly translate something from one language to another; however, from personal experience, those translator apps do not do a very good job at translating it properly, which can create conflict and misunderstandings between people who speak different languages; this also takes away being able to retain the information that comes with leaning a new language by being taught the actual words and sentence structures their meanings in each language. But these are things that we have nowadays that are equivalent to a Bable Fish found in H2G2. As content creators and students learning about multiple ways to communicate through media (hence the name multimedia communications), it’s our job to relay information to others in any form that we can. Of course, it is difficult to write things in other languages, especially if we only speak one language and can’t afford a translator to translate out media for us; but those types of things are wonderful to have, especially if we want to expand who our audience is and what language they are able to understand and speak.

Moore’s Law, which was a theory written by Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore, is the idea that the structure of a chip will get smaller and smaller every two years while transistors (which are semiconductors that are the basic building blocks for electronics) double in size within that same time. This means that they can minimize the cost of making chips, because they are making them smaller, while being able to input more transistors within them to make electronics function more efficiently. Being able to make technology more efficient and making them cost less means that they can produce more of them, which means that more people are able to use them. There has been talk about the “end” of Moore’s Law, saying that, at some point, we will no longer be able to make applications smaller since there will eventually be nothing to build upon that. So far, as of right now, we have many devices that are small and portable, and easy to take around with us if we need to work on something in a different location (aka, smart phones, and laptops). While I do not think that there is a better way to make these types of things smaller and execute well (look at the previous invention Google Glass, and now Apple Vision), I think that there will potentially be new and better ways to make things more portable and efficient to our needs.

Citation:
Bell, L. “What is Moore’s law? wired explains the theory that defined the tech industry.” WIRED UK, August 28, 2016, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wired-explains-moores-law. Accessed 11 Nov. 2023.
“Moore’s law.” Intel. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/resources/moores-law.html. Accessed 11 Nov. 2023.

Featured image: “Lazlar Lyricon 3” by AnnaMaja42 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

User Interface and User Experience

Posted on by Jay

Often when we see color, we associate it with a certain attitude or emotion, or even status (for example: red is associated with anger, and purple and gold is associated with royalty, or an aura of luxury). Some color choices are intentionally used to tell a story, or emote an emotion to someone, or to catch someone’s attention. When creating a website for a business, or for personal use, keeping in mind which colors to use is typically an important aspect of how you want to properly present who you are and what your brand is. It is also important to keep in mind who your audience is and how you want to represent yourself to them. Using color matters—for both you and your audience.

A positive user experience (UX) is one of the most important things to think about when it comes to deciding on what colors you are wanting to use. Whatever colors you choose can affect how you and your brand are perceived, and therefore it is important to keep track of how brands have changed their style guides and how it has been received by the public. It’s important to keep that in mind, especially since picking a color that is “inappropriate” for your brand can bring negative reactions and consequences for your brand. It is also important to make sure that there is an inclusive user interface (UI). If a good portion of people who use the website struggle with where to look for something, that means that there is something wrong, and that there needs to be a change in layout to make it accessible for everyone. It’s good idea to have a palette that is easy to digest—and one that most people can enjoy while looking through the website.

It is also important to make sure that there is an inclusive user interface (UI). If a good portion of people who use the website struggle with where to look for something, that means that there is something wrong, and that there needs to be a change in layout to make it accessible for everyone. It’s good idea to have a palette that is easy to digest—and one that most people can enjoy while looking through the website.