- What was your favorite project(s) during the semester? Please explain why: My favorite project this semester was the audio story. This is because I have always enjoyed writing scripts and performing them. When I was young I would write my own youtube videos which were mostly monologues of me talking about video games and sports. I am also in COM 300 right now and we do a lot of broadcast writing which is practically synonymous with the audition assignment. It was also fun to learn a new adobe software because I am familiar with premier pro and photoshop as well.
- What skills did you learn in the course that you believe you will use in the future? : I believe that I will use photoshop in the future because I usually like to make funny edits of my friends and other pop-culture references. Photoshop is also useful for recreating logos and other advertisements for a company. I also think that creating a timeline for what you want to do with your company and interests is a good skill that I learned from this course.
- What coursework or career path do you see in your future? What skills or projects from this class may be influential in your chosen career path? : I see myself as a journalist in the future. The skill of writing a story and storyboard is important to the success of myself as a journalist. Journalists need to know what they are writing about and how to organize information so that it is understandable for the reader. Another skill that may help my career path is writing these blog posts as they are a long form explanation of what we did in class.
- Is there any skill that you wished you would have learned in this course that you did not learn? If yes, what skill is that? : I wish I would have learned more about the microsoft suite such as excel and powerpoint. While the adobe suite has many useful pieces of software the microsoft suite seems to be used more in an office setting. Knowing both of these would be beneficial rather than just using one of them. I.E. do excel and power point then photoshop and premier.
- Did you find any websites or resources from outside the class material that were especially useful? : If I ever had a problem with the software YouTube was my go to site for figuring it out. Many of the YouTube tutorials were very helpful and easy to understand. The tutorials for the class were good but the YouTube tutorials were much more in depth and focused on more than just bare bones editing and such. I also used the adobe website sometimes as they have employees who monitor the forums for any troubleshooting or questions.
- If you have any other thoughts, comments, suggestions, etc., please feel free to add them to your post : I felt that most of this class was useful but there were definitely some assignments that felt like busy work. I am specifically talking about the “raw footage” and “sketch” assignments. I felt that these really had no value to the assignment and were purely made just for having an assignment. Most of the time the draft would look completely different than the raw footage. This makes those menial assignments obsolete and I would urge to rethink a different assignment. Other than that this class was a pleasure.
Eric Virta's Blog for COM210 at Washington State University 