Personal Essay (Final)

Though this was the only final I've ever been able to enjoy, it caused me lots trouble. The biggest obstacle I encountered was with the images and a spacing issues, at first anyways. My flash drive and private space were both full of things that I couldn't really delete. I then tried to e-mail them to myself but the file was too big (I still have yet to receive it.) I then tried to upload them onto facebook, but that was taking too long. I eventually transfered the pictures in groups using different flash drives. This turned out to be a problem later with Filezilla. But once I picked out my pictures and made the mp3 of my voice and song, it was pretty easy from there. All of the technical things were out of the way (or so I thought) and the only thing left was the artistic part. I just had to arrange the pictures to match the sound, which of course took longer than anticipated because I wanted it to be perfect. Overall, I am pretty satisfied with the final product. I put a lot of time and thought into the pictures and even the sound. It is something that I am proud of and I feel it demonstrates my progression of skills. I would not have been able to put this together at the beginning of the semester because all of the skills that I acquired built up on each other. I had to edit a lot of photos in Photoshop and I even pulled a few things into QuarkXpress. I then pulled my song file and voice file into iTunes and did the necessary conversions and edited the sound using Garage Band because I am more familiar with that program. I am also able to apply so many of these skills in other classes and even outside of the classroom. However, if I had more time, I would probably do the voice over again. I thought it sounded fine on tape and I had recorded it numerous times and tried to cut out the parts that I messed up a lot but I only had a short period of time with the Edirol and it is hard to find a quiet place with not too much echo. Once I heard it in paired up with the song, you can unfortunately, hear my breathing in some parts and I sound a little hesitant in other parts and I only had so much time to edit. Also I had a hard time trying to sound natural and not as if I was reading a script. Once I thought I was done, I wasn't. It turned out that my Sound Slide file was too big. I had too many pictures and it took too long to load, so long that it didn't even show a play button and what viewer would wait? So I had to go back in and delete some pictures. This may sound easy but I had to rearrange everything! Now that the file was much smaller it was supposed to work. But it of course didn't. This time Filezilla didn't have enough space for me. Luckily I had some duplicate websites from earlier in the year that I was able to delete and create space. Finally, it fit but this time, it wouldn't fully load in Safari. It turned out some of the files didn't transfer over from my publish to web folder. I had to go in and individually move each file into Filezilla which showed me that computers aren't going to always do what you tell them to. So hours later and with the help of Professor O'Connell, it worked and I was very relieved and excited. Not even ten minutes later, my friend was having a similar problem and I was able to help her. So even though it was a bit of a pain, I'm better off for it because I had to fix this problem and now I know what to do. This was probably my biggest learning experience of the year and I am proud of myself for not giving up or going insane. Overall, I believe this course is so valuable because even though these programs change all the time, I feel as though I can figure out new programs with this basic understanding that I now have and even when I was frustrated with a project, it was very rewarding once I accomplished it.