Culture Mission Reflection

 Hi, guys!

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This mission really did open my eyes, especially about the downsides to YouTube. I knew there were downsides, as every social media has but I didn’t think much into it.  Overall though, I think I did learn a lot doing this research and presentation. I did actually research into vlog styles too and seeing about cameras and everything. I decided to just use my phone to vlog as I didn’t want to carry around my big camera, it was very big and I was afraid I would’ve dropped it. I also learned that these types of things are much easier when you actually have an interest and a previous knowledge on the topic! 

As I researched the downside to YouTube is the whole situation of monetization. YouTube really need to find a better technique to sort out what is “advertiser” friendly and what is not! Some of the words that get you instantly demonetized are very strange. Obviously, some make sense and that’s fine but words like Brazil, Gays and New Zealand are just a bit strange. I don’t see why they would be instantly flagged as not advertiser-friendly. But this is down to the software (bot) they use, it sees a word and instantly thinks it’s bad. Obviously, you can get this problem looked at if you think your video is advertiser-friendly, but you have to hit a certain amount of views in the next 24 hours for an actual person to look at this. 

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I think I could’ve done a bit more, especially down to the fact I kept forgetting to vlog. I think if I was to vlog more of my day and give better content. Hopefully, though our class will enjoy our video and think it’s good. It’s hard to tell how a video will do until you actually see how it does. I think this is down to being your own worst critique. I think if I started a bit earlier it would’ve been better and I wouldn’t have rushed. I didn’t rush too much but still at points I was stressed trying to do everything at once. 

I think the three of us in the group worked well together. We didn’t argue about anything and everything was clear on what to do from the get-go! We all agreed on what to do straight away, so I’m very happy about that. It honestly could’ve gone horribly as none of us was friends before this started and I really didn’t know anything about them apart from their names before this. I think this is a great opportunity to get to know people. 

Although there are downsides to YouTube it obviously has its perks, getting paid to post a video of you having fun and just showing people your day really is great. It’s not the best money but what do you expect? I also learned a lot about the history of YouTube, I use the app daily but really didn’t know much about it's passed except for YouTubers who have been posting for years, almost since the beginning of it. 

Overall, I am very happy with all the work and I hope you can see the hard work I’ve put in between the blogs, the slides, the video and the reflection. I do think I have done better in this than the last mission and hopefully, in the next mission, I can do even better again!  

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Thanks for reading!!

Talk soon, 

Megan

YouTube Update

Hi Guys!

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A little update about the YouTube presentation. So we decided as a group that we would each film a day in our lives at college and make a video with all three of us in it. So this post will be all about the video and what we did and what we're gonna do. 

So I started off my day as normal but of course, I had to vlog every minute of it, well, try to anyway. A vlog is a genre of YouTube videos, it is short for a video blog. You can have a sit-down vlog, a daily vlog, and many others! Basically, you’re just telling the camera about stuff that happened or you’re bringing your camera around with you and filming your day. This is what we decided to do, we thought it would be very interesting to show our daily lives to people. Even for each other to see how our day varies. Yes, we are in the same course and class so all our classes are the same but that could be the only thing we have in common. 

I wasn’t very good at vlogging, I kept forgetting to film. When I did remember to film it was usually in places I couldn’t just whip my phone out and start talking to it. I really think though this mission brought me out of my comfort zone. Before doing this I would never even think about vlogging in public. It is a scary concept to me, people look at you like you’re crazy just sitting/walking-talking to your phone and filming yourself hahaha. So the times I did vlog was in the morning, as I was leaving for the bus, at lunch, on the train home and when I got home that evening. Thursday (which was when I filmed the vlog) was the busiest day I could’ve picked, we were off Friday in college due to the graduations being held so I was going back home to Roscommon straight after college. So, of course, I forgot to vlog after college and didn’t remember to vlog again until I was on the train home. I tried to get a bit of footage while on the train and it was packed with people so it was the best I could do hahaha.

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I did gain a bit of confidence while doing it though, I just had to realize who cares what people think. You’re doing this and you’re having fun which I think is the main thing. I also kind of felt like what it would be like to be an actual YouTuber. Obviously on a smaller scale but still felt it. 

I’m very happy I picked this topic and I’m happy I had to pair up with people I didn’t speak to before this as it added something different to it. I’m nervous but excited to see how the presentation goes on Wednesday morning. I’m very nervous to see how the video turns out and if people like it or think it’s silly. But hey, we tried our best and put our all into it and that’s all that matters. 

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Thanks for reading,

Talk soon,

Megan.

YouTube Presentation

Hi guys!!

This is a little blog post about our new intro to digital media mission!! This mission is "culture", I decided to pick the topic YouTube. I decided this because I love YouTube and I watch many videos on the platform daily, far too many to actually count hahaha! I love how you can connect with people over a simple video, it is honestly amazing. I also love how people can literally go from nothing to being one of the biggest people on the planet. You can post a simple video on YouTube of you singing and the next thing you know your new album is top of the charts. This has happened to so many people including Justin Bieber. It is such a powerful platform. The quality of videos on it nowadays is incredible some are basically like Hollywood films, people are so talented and it's great they have a platform to show this off in. So because of all this, this is why I chose this mission. 

David Dobrik - Famous Youtuber with 14.7 million subscribers. image from dailydot

As I have said I adore YouTube, but not everything about it is a good thing. The main thing in this mission that I want to look into and do my part of the presentation is about monetization. Monetization is basically making money by posting videos on YouTube. YouTube puts advertisements onto the videos you post and that generates money. But they can also take the advertisements off, this is called demonetization. This happens when YouTube think your video isn't suitable for advertisements. This has been known to cause a lot of controversies as it is a software that decides if your video is suitable or not. Of course, we know you can’t always trust computers to do human work. So what has happened is that the software is demonetizing videos that shouldn’t be demonetized including a lot of LGBTQ+ videos. This has come under a lot of fire. So I wanted to bring more attention on this and research more into it and I thought this was the perfect opportunity. So I researched a lot into this and of course since the topic is on YouTube a lot of them were YouTube videos that I watched. I came across this video of a guy who went and tested all the words that can get you monetized or demonetized. The list of words are very strange, using words like North Carolina and South Carolina in your title or description will get your demonetized whereas North Korea won’t. Which to be fair doesn’t really make sense. Not sure what North or South Carolina ever did to YouTube hahaha. This guy tested so many words and he put them all into an Excel type of document and listed them below the video, so I did go through the whole list which was a lot of words. I just found it very interesting to read and try to understand why this is happening.

It wasn’t too hard to find the research because of the YouTube algorithm suggests videos like ones you’ve watched as to watch next. So without realizing I was in a binge-watching of all these videos but were all very interesting and brought up very valid points. So yes, YouTube can be used as a new way of expressing your creativity but it does have a bad side and of course this is only a minor thing really there is also the whole algorithm, where YouTube hasn’t been showing people new videos from certain topics at all, frankly they’re topics that need to be discussed too, like mental health and LGBTQ+ topics to name a few. I do believe though that this can get better and I really think it will, especially when people are raising their voices about the topic!

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Thanks for reading, and as always I’ll update you all soon on how this is going!!

Talk soon, 

Megan

Creativity Reflection

Hi guys!! 

This is the reflection of my creativity mission!! 

Overall I’m happy with how we did, I think we worked well as a team and did good work. I think I probably could’ve put a bit more of creativity into it but as it was my first I was unsure of different ways to do it. I did really like the GIFS I made and how I put everything together. I think maybe if we just did a little more with GIFs or even just the layout it would’ve been better! I did actually learn a lot from doing this presentation. For example, I didn’t know anything about the legal status of a GIF until doing research into it. Reading all about it actually made it interesting and usually I wouldn’t have much of an interest in anything like the legal status but because it was to do with GIFs, which I use and really enjoy I think that’s why I actually enjoyed learning about it and actually took it in. I didn’t realise how easy GIFs were to make, obviously, it’s way different than a few years ago but websites literally do it for you all you have to do is get a video and select the seconds. I’m sure when they were first made it wasn’t even close to how easy it is now. The success of the project was definitely how good all three of us worked together. It was so natural and we didn’t fight or argue and everyone really pulled their own weight which was nice! We definitely make a good team and if I get to pick who I work with in the future I would definitely consider working with Lauren and Danniella again! Another success would have to be learning a lot about GIFs but also using my existing knowledge especially how they’re used on social media sites. It was very useful having existing knowledge about GIFs as I was able to use it a lot and even to help Lauren and Danniella out with their slides and point them in the right direction. As I said I would’ve loved to do something more creative and added more to the presentation but I did struggle with ideas, but this is my first mission so I will use everything I learned in this mission for the future ones in hopes it’ll make them all much better. My friend's group are adding a video and I think that is such a good idea and I’d say it’ll work very well if only I had thought of that first. But again it is the first presentation and first proper written and research involved assignment of college so it is a big step and overall very proud of it all, hopefully, by the end of this four-year course, I can come back to this, my first presentation and still be proud of it but have lots more ideas on how I could improve it. It would be great to see and it would really be a tell on how far I’ve come and how much I’ve learned!! 

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Thanks for reading!! Talk soon,

Megan

GIFs update

Hi guys, welcome back to my second blog! Hope you all enjoy, This is the second instalment of the first mission, there will be another one after this. It will be my reflection.

This is an update on the mission of Art of the Animated GIF. We are halfway through our presentation, we are working well as a team so this is exciting to see it all come together. When I say we’re halfway there (wooow living on a prayer, sorry I had to) we have basically finished it we just have to do a little tweaking and fine-tuning! We all have similar ideas but we all come up with different stuff to add it in to make it better. I'm overall happy with the work we all put in and how it has come out. It’ll be exciting to see how it’ll look when we’re all done! I think we are really doing good work, especially for our first group project. We are all enjoying it and seeing it come together. We did end up using different resources than said before, I just used GIPHY for all the GIFs I needed. GIPHY was so handy to use as it had so many different gifs to use and it even let us make GIFs on the website so we made quite a few GIFs, we only included a few as we didn’t want to overpower the whole thing if it was covered in GIFs. I ended up spending hours on GIPHY looking at all the GIFs they had, my laptop memory is now nearly taken up with the number of GIFs I saved, lol. I didn't end up needing other resources as the slides I was doing, I had knowledge of already which was very handy! We used Google Slides to make the presentation that enabled us all to make the slides we needed to make and without having to send them to someone and telling them to put them all together, it worked very well and let everyone do their own part in their own time. This was an eye-opener as I had never used google slides before, it really just made it handy to do the teamwork we could communicate and then edit it and all. I definitely learned way more about GIFs in general and the history behind them. It was very interesting to learn about it, I didn’t realise the history behind them at all, I just thought they just popped up randomly when someone realised they could make them. Lauren and Danniella did great work too throughout the mission and their slides were very interesting! Overall I'm very happy with what we did and I hope everyone enjoys our presentation and we get good marks as that would make it all worth it! I'm also very happy with how much I learned about GIFs and I hope we can pass all the information we learned to everyone else. 

Thanks for reading, I hope you all enjoyed it. I’ll be back soon with my reflection for this mission, 

Talk soon, 

Megan

GIFs sourced from GIPHY

The Art of the Animated GIF

Hi guys, This is my first proper blog for my assignments and missions! I’ve never written blogs before this module so I hope you all enjoy this and let me know what you think!

This is a blog post about the first mission for the module Intro to Digital Media. I read through all the different topics and I was really tied between the Podcast and GIF topics as which to choose from. I kept reading through them and researched a bit on both of them and finally decided that I would pick the Art of the Animated Gif.  My goals for this mission is really just to learn all about GIFs, the history, how they came about and just overall how people use them in different ways. For an end product, I would hope to have a really good presentation to inform other people all about GIFs, also to have made different GIFs and to show them to the class. The resources that could help me along the way are google, Tumblr, and Artnet. I'm sure as I get more into this assignment I will use many other resources. I will update my resources in my other blog post if I have others. I'm excited to get into this fully and enjoy researching about GIFs. I’ve used GIFs for years now and it will be very interesting to actually learn about them. I usually just use them online in a funny setting and would never even had thought about a simple google to see where they come from or how they came about. I'm also looking forward to hearing other people's presentations about all the different topics, especially podcast ones as I really enjoy listening to podcasts. I was not sure who to go within a group but I asked around in class and on slack to see who was also doing Art of the Animated Gifs. Turns out two of my friends Lauren and Danniella wanted to do this topic. It worked out well for the three of us as we are friends and we can work together really well. We all really enjoy GIFs, and we all have an interest in learning all about them and what you can really do with them. I am excited to get into the mission properly and research and to see what Lauren and Danniella’s ideas are for it. It’ll be interesting to see how we all work together and to see if we have similar ideas or completely different, I would say they’ll probably be similar ideas. I am very nervous about having to get up and talk in front of my class as I haven’t really done anything like this before, especially in front of a big class. I am very glad though that it is in front of our lab classes and not our lecture class! Everyone in my class is really nice so it should be okay. Fingers crossed anyway and I will let you know how it goes after it.

Thanks for reading, hope you all enjoyed it!

Talk soon,

Megan

(Both GIFs sourced from GIPHY)

Introduction to an average 20 year old.

Hi, I'm Megan Kelly. I'm 20 years old and I'm currently studying Creative Digital Media in TU Dublin, Blanchardstown Campus. This is an introduction post for my module "Intro to Digital Media". I live between two small villages, called Four Roads and Ballyforan in rural Roscommon. I've moved up to Dublin during the week to attend college, so I live near Ongar in Dublin during the week and go home to Roscommon at the weekend. There's five people in my family, my sister, brother, mam, dad and myself! I also have one dog, Chomp and two cats, Ralph and Zoe. 

Some of my favourite tv shows are Grey’s Anatomy, The Good Place, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Glee, Queer Eye, Jane The Virgin, Atypical and Derry Girls. Most of my favourite movies are musicals, like Mamma Mia, Mamma Mia: Here we go again and The Greatest Showman. My favourite music would mostly be pop I’d say, my favourite artists are One Direction, 5 Seconds of Summer, Taylor Swift, Little Mix, Sam Smith, Scotty Sire, Troye Sivan and The Jonas Brothers! In my spare time I usually just browse various social media apps like, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tik Tok and YouTube. I used to be sporty but then I discovered social media and here I am… Tik Tok has become a recent addiction for sure, people are giving it a bad name though as it used to be owed by a different company and it was called musical.ly which wasn’t the best. Tik Tok is the new vine (Yes I would go that far). It is very underrated and would recommend everyone to give it a go as you will definitely find a video to make your day so much better. 

Apart from social media all I really do is go to concerts whenever I can. You’d never find me out on the town but if there’s a good band or singer in town there is a good possibility that you’ll find me there singing every word at the top of my lungs. I’ve definitely been to 50+ concerts in the last few years, some like One Direction, Khalid, Twenty One Pilots and Taylor Swift. My first concert was the Pussycat dolls in 2009 and my most recent one was Julia Michaels, which was 2 weeks ago. 

A photo from my most recent concert, Julia Michaels.

That's all for my introduction! Thanks for reading,

Megan