Literature Through My Eyes
Literature Through My Eyes
Portfolio is coming along slowly, but surely #ilit
— Hunter Young (@Hunter_Blakeee) April 18, 2016
Dear Reader,
English 150, Introduction to Literary Studies, was a class that opened my eyes to all the different ways literature can be expressed and viewed by an individual. The class isn’t like other traditional English classes, where you analyze a book or poem and write a paper on it. The class uses multimedia in the form of Camtasia, a video editing program to help the maker express his or her thoughts about the literature.
Coming into English 150, I really didn’t know what to expect, the title Introduction to Literary Studies is pretty vague in itself. I was pretty excite to work with computers, video editing, web designing and other technological aspects that this class offered because it differed from the standard English class. The use of multimedia allows me to be creative and express literature in the way that I saw it.
The goals of this was to make various projects using Camtasia and also a poetry essay. The projects included an essay on poetry that we could choose, an e-poetry video, a film review video on No Country for Old men, reading watchmen, a portfolio video that compared and viewed our essay and our e-poem as a whole and creating this portfolio webpage. During this class we also use the hashtag #ilit to use as a collective to archive our thoughts during the semester about the various projects that we work on.
English 150 has really challenged my thinking on how we view literature and we can express it in many different ways. As someone who likes technology and working with computers more that working on writing essays, English 150 turned out to be one of my favorite classes that I have taken so far as a freshman. Experimenting with what it means to write about literature has been the aspect of that class that I will take away from the most. The combination of digital literacy and the aspects of a traditional English class is what makes this class so appealing and unique.
Camtasia Tutorials
The Camtasia tuorials showed us how to download Camtasia and gave us a basic understanding on how the program worked. Camtasia is a video editing tool that offers many different features that allows one to create, edit and add audio to create a dynamic video.
Life is Fine by Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes is one of the foremost poets in advancing social change. His background and experiences growing up shaped the way he wrote poetry. Hughes was considered a social activist on the forefront of social issues. Hughes’s poems often talk about the struggle of the African American race. He had a unique past that helped shape the creation of the poem “Life is Fine”. This poem centers around overcoming struggles of everyday life. Langston Hughes’s mixed racial background and his upbringing shaped the way he created “Life is Fiine”
The first draft of my poetry essay centered on using a biographical lens of the life of Langston Hughes to analyze the poem Life is Fine. I argued that Langston had a unique and difficult past that helped shape the creation of his poem Life is Fine. I also talked about the theme of death and suicide the poem revolves around and why his life shaped his decision in writing a poem related to these subjects although Hughes never tried to commit suicide. Some mistakes I made in this draft was not including enough of the poem and “intentional fallacy”, I didn’t separate the speaker from Hughes because he never tried to commit suicide. The comments I got back on this first draft really made me take a step back and refocus my paper.
Taking a step back and refocus my paper included me going back to the poem and dissecting it more. I decided to take a new approach to the poem, while still incorporating the biographical lens, I decided to focus more on the quote “I was a victim of a stereotype," he observed wryly. “There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. "Well, everyone knows -- except us -- that all Negroes have rhythm, so they elected me class poet. I felt I couldn't let my white classmates down, and I've been writing poetry ever since.” (Shmoop). For this essay I focused more on the plight of the African-American man and the struggles that Hughes faced through his life and how that is reflected in his poem Life is Fine. Refocusing my paper more on the struggles of his race and the culture that he grew up in, really helped show the biographical lens that I wanted to analyze my paper through.
For my last draft of my poetry essay, the main mistakes I made in the 2nd draft were copyediting mistakes. Using more concise words and reorganizing some of my thoughts made my essay flow much better than before. I wanted to keep the project mainly the same and not lose the purpose that I saw in the biographical lens and the background/culture that Langston Hughes grew up in and how it had an effect on this writing, Life is Fine in particular. The struggles that Langston Hughes faced in his life and the plight of the African American man is what shaped his writings.
Hard at work crafting the final version of my poetry essay #ilit
— Hunter Young (@Hunter_Blakeee) April 26, 2016
Website Comments
Life is Fine E- Poem
1st Draft
For my E-poem, I chose to use the same poem that I wrote my poetry essay on. My E-poem I chose to take a different angle on the poem than I did for my poetry essay. I think seeing the poem in a different angle is a unique aspect of literature that before this class I didn’t know was possible. The use of video helped shaped this different angle and really brought it to life. My E-poem starts off slow like the poem, but ends upbeat. The reason for this is because when I read the poem, I read it in an upbeat tone and rhythm. Although when I researched the poem, it was usually read or portrayed in a slow and depressing tone. I think this is an example of how literature can be viewed differently by individuals and how each person can see something different in the same piece of literature. For my E-poem I use scenes in the 1st person POV, something I believed put the viewer into the video and made it interactive. The poem uses literal interpretation of the scenes and shows the struggles and the triumphs the speaker goes through.
Life is Fine E-Poem from Hunter Young on Vimeo.
Walkthrough
Showing the creative process of creating an E-poem helps one appreciate the completed project #iLit
— Hunter Young (@Hunter_Blakeee) February 4, 2016
The walkthrough of my e-poem really allowed me to show my creativity and the thought process for choosing each scene. For the walkthrough I chose to show my inspiration for choosing the POV scenes being the upcoming movie Hardcore Henry, which is an action filmed entirely in first person POV. I also showed different Camtasia techniques I used such as copying and splitting different audios to create a new one, using the fade transitions to go from one scene to another, Leveling the audio so that it fades in and fades out correctly and timely, I explained why I chose the audios such as Moonlight Sonata because it had a slow and depressing tone that I wanted my poem to display in that scene to choosing The Good Life by Kanye West and T-Pain to show the transition of the speaker overcoming his or her struggles. The walkthrough also allowed me to show the different layering of audios that is used to combine sounds and create new ones. The walkthrough’s main purpose was the help show the behind the scenes aspects of our creativity and the use of Camtasia techniques.
Walkthrough E poem from Hunter Young on Vimeo.
Revision
Great feeling finishing my E-Poem and seeing small various clips combine to creat one large project #ilit
— Hunter Young (@Hunter_Blakeee) February 23, 2016
The revision of my E-poem allowed me to go over mistakes I made in my first draft of the E-poem. Some changes I made was adding the Jaws theme music as background during the swimming scenes to add tension to the scene and make the scene’s audio more dynamic. Another thing I did was refine the audio transitions and the scene transitions. The audio needed to be leveled out better in some places, some places it needed to fade out sooner and fade in later. I also leveled the sounds so that some of the audible sounds displayed by the speaker were more prominent and there were less quiet spots unless intended to create tension. Another notable thing I did was short the last scenes time to about 15 seconds instead of 30+. This made sure the E-poem didn’t linger on the single scene for too long and ended at an appropriate time.
E-Poem revision from Hunter Young on Vimeo.
Citation Vide0
The citation video showed a walkthrough of the revisions we made to our original e-poem and then we focused on citing the sources used in our video. In class we watched a video that went over the intellectual property and fair use of different literature and media we used in our videos. In citing our sources we followed similar to the MLA Handbook in trying to evaluate our sources by including who, what how where and when in our citations. The way that our citations were different is that we didn’t use the same format as MLA or any other way that is standard in English. When creating our videos we could use the material we used because of the Fair Use law that has an establish set of parameters for Fair Use. If what we were using our sources for fell under these parameters it was fair use. The walkthrough video will be built around guiding the viewer through your use of sources in a meaningful way. We tried to explain why these sources were valuable and meaningful to us and what we were trying to create, but still give the creator of the sources credit for what they did and use it under the parameters of the Fair Use law.
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Film Review
For the No Country For Old Men film review, we used both the text and the movie to review and discuss the dynamics of the film. In this film review I tried not to compare and contrast them, or say which one is better, but tried to use both pieces to evaluate the work as a whole. I noted aspects that were the same and aspects that each the book or the movie brought to the table, but tried not to put this attribute against each other. I used scenes from the movie to discuss important themes, the genre and the film/book techniques of the work. I choose the theme of destiny/fate and talked about the differences between two of the coin scenes, the one at the gas station and the one with Carla Jean. I then talked about the genre of the film and concluded that it was a sort of neo-western. It had the same setting and characters typical in a western, but the ending was different. Next I talked about the writing of the book and where McCarthy used little punctuation and how the movie used little audio and how that represented the way McCarthy wrote the novel. All in all evaluating both of the works as a collaboration allows for a unique perspective on the works.
NCFOM from Hunter Young on Vimeo
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Watchmen
Watchmen is a graphic novel by Alan Moore. When I bought this book after registering for this class I was pretty excited. Having read and loving graphic novels such as Maus by Art Spiegelman. Once I started reading Watchmen I noticed that the story wasn’t your average superhero story. The characters didn’t possess superhero like qualities as one would expect. They weren’t necessarily good or bad, but somewhere in a grey area. All the characters except Dr. Manhattan also didn’t have superpowers. I noticed this early on and while the characters had extreme strength and were in better than the average human, the qualities weren’t to the superhero extreme. I believe one theme of the book to be that you don’t always get what you expect out of literature. When I got the book I expected it to be a good vs evil and simple story about superheroes, but what I got was an extremely complicated story about humans and how we make mistakes and sometimes everything isn’t black or white, it is a shade of grey. The different moral struggles of the characters highlights this area of grey because everything they do isn’t always right and usually they in some bad in the good or some good in the bad. The story paradoxes the superhero complex and also represent the contemporary anxieties of the time. Also another concept that I loved about the graphic novel was the in-depth development of the characters and the detail placed in the development of their backgrounds. This is most notable in the flashbacks or the excerpts at the end of chapters that give some kind of background information on a person or the situation. Watchmen is truly a story that allows one to interpret it several different ways and helps one understand literature. It is a novel that is completely situated in the moral struggle of man and the grey areas of good or bad.
Portfolio Video
The Portfolio Video, captures several aspects of our learning related to the work with poetry we did during the semester. The portfolio video zoomed out and considered both of our e-poem and our poetry essays. We chose three different articles related to our topic of choosing, which I chose to be Understanding Literature, that would help us further our discussion about the topic. Next we created a video that used polished Camtasia techniques and evaluate both poetry projects. Evaluating the projects as a collaboration of works let us compare and contrast the works. The differences being the two different mediums they are expressed in, one being an essay and the other being a video. I choose to discuss about the biographical lens that I chose to analyze my poetry essay and why I chose that. Then I talked about a poem that I contemplated doing my e-poem on, The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, but decided against it. I decide to spend a good portion of the video talking about this because it was a good example of understanding literature and how we often interpret literature the way we want to. Next I talked about my e-poem Life is Fine and how the binding together of ideas with words and imagery appeals to the sense. The e-poem is a different way to understand literature because it is visual and not just textual based like most literature is. The portfolio video was a good way to reflect on my poetry projects as a whole and analyze them under the topic of understanding literature.
Portfolio Video from Hunter Young on Vimeo.
Final Reflections on English 150
As the semester draws to a close, I believe that this class expanded my understanding of literature more than any class I’ve taken. It made me a believer of the fact that different mediums can be used to express an individual’s view of a piece of literature. The new mediums such as videos allows ones ideas to be expressed in a visual manner and giving the audience a new perspective on the idea by allowing them to see it in a different way rather than just words on a piece of paper. I’m more than glad that I choose to take this class, an English class were I don’t consider writing or creativity to be one of my strengths. The focus on digital literacy allowed me to create projects that I never thought were possible and express myself through creating videos with Camtasia. Getting comfortable with being a creator of original literature was something that I wasn’t used to at first, but as a created more projects using Camtasia, I started to become more comfortable with the idea of creating. The projects really allowed me to express my creativity and show how I understood literature.
Finally completed my final portfolio for #ilit! Had a great time working on it and developing the webpage for it.
— Hunter Young (@Hunter_Blakeee) May 4, 2016
1. What do the hotkeys F9 and F10 do? F9 is the hotkey that starts the recording and F10 is the hotkey that stops the recording.
2 .How many tracks are available to build your video projects? You can add an unlimted amount tracks to your project.
3. How do you manually add an animation? Position the playhead where you want to add the animation the select "video properties," and choose an animation, then select "add animation."
4. How might the layers in the timeline prevent a callout from appearing on the canvas? A callout may not appear if it is posiitoned below the audio track.
5. Which media on the timeline can have visual animations added to it? You can add visual animations to any media.
6. Name one way to change the zoom level of the canvas? Scroll up to zoom in and scroll down to zoom out.