Media Arts: History and Theory: Midterm- FMX 211-4- Group #4

Midterm Writeup:

For our midterm, my group had a list of words to develop into a presentation. Being the team leader it was my job to divide the words amongst the group members, and make sure everyone was on track. We had 2 team members absent the day we got the assignment so I made it a point to make a group-chat with everyone in it so we could communicate over the weekend. I periodically checked in with everyone to make sure we would be done for our presentation on Tuesday. While in class, we did have to discuss the interactive aspect of our presentation. At first we were going to just come up with a game to play with the class once everyone was done, but we wanted to make it more fun and have more variety rather than just doing some sort of Kahoot! That's when we decided that instead of doing 1 game or activity, we would have some of the group members do an activity or game for their specific word to maximize the fun. This went over really well as the class seemed to be into the games and quizzes we had them do throughout the presentations.

For me specifically, I chose Leonardo da Vinci as my word. I chose him because I've always been fascinated with Leonardo. Everyone knows about the Mona Lisa, but not a lot of people know about his scientific inventions and rich history. In my presentation I wanted to focus on that aspect of Leonardo first. Then I moved on to his artistic breakthroughs and religious affiliation that we were aware of.

After deciding what I wanted to discuss in the presentation I had to think of a medium. The assignment was to make it fun and interesting and I knew a 10+ slide presentation was not the way to do that. After sitting on it for a few days I came up with the idea to have Leonardo sit down for an interview. I would use TikTok's "green screen eyes and mouth" feature to put my eyes and mouth over a picture of Leonardo to make him come to life. I would then record his responses to my questions and film myself sitting down being the interviewer, and eventually put it altogether to make 1 video. This was the original idea, which I would soon come to find out would need some adjustments and changes.

At first, I wanted to do everything myself, but I thought it would be more fun to have someone else be Leonardo in the video that way it's more interesting (almost like I am actually talking to Leonardo not just myself). So to solve this, I asked my best friend if he would be the voice of Leonardo and he said yes, so I had him use the TikTok feature and it worked really well! The problem I faced while filming was time. The presentation could only be up to 5 minutes due to other groups having to go and with my video it would've taken at least 10-15 minutes. I knew I had to cut something, so I modified the original video idea. Instead of a sit down interview I just had Leonardo talk about himself, and after some editing, it cut the time down to 4 minutes. That still left a little time for me to do a wrap up at the end and an introduction at the beginning, but the main aspect of the presentation was the video.

I wrote the entire script for this video and came up with the idea on my own. The use of the TikTok feature was also my idea after watching some TikToks one day and seeing someone use the feature themselves. All my deliverables are attached at the end of this post!