Virtual Realities, Week 1

Engineering Class: Through Dr.Dons engineering class, I have been able to research resources that could benefit me while being a video editor for a possible job in our project. I am hoping to be a video editor full time , and a part time set designer/ special effects makeup. I feel like having more than one skill set will not only help me make more "money" during my project, but extend the amount of skills I know. I am very new to video editing, and have only filmed very briefly in previous projects. Through researching what it takes to edit videos, which in our projects will mainly be 360, I have realized that the job is going to be very tedious. Luckily, there are many resources online available that fit the needs of the programs we will be using in class. However, the biggest problem that I have encountered is the fact that a lot of the programs that are required for the 360 fly are very expensive, and if we cant't afford those options we have to figure out how to use the programs that we already have. My goal for next week is to begin playing with video I shot this week with the 360 fly, and importing it to the CS3 version of premiere we have in our ThinkPads. Below is what my group and I have been working on in class.

English: I personally really enjoyed learning about propaganda in class. One of my favorite readings was the "DoubleSpeak" by George Orwell, the author of 1984. I never realized how strategically politicians and those advertising certain ideas to people can completely change the meaning of a word. I think that making words more complicated than they have to be looses the message, and thus the people who are being fed the message don't think about the idea in depth. People end up settling for what they are told because through these words, which almost act as mind tricks, they don't understand that there is no true meaning behind what they are telling the people. Propaganda really made me question whether or not politicians actually care about what they are preaching to people. Since most of their campaign is solely focused on telling people what they want to hear, I think it causes us to forget about figuring out if their intentions are in the right place.