Family History Project

For the past month, I have been researching and compiling information about my family's history. I've learned a lot of interesting things along the way. This is my final product.

Interview Transcript for Mother's Side
Interview Transcript for Father's Side
Persuasive Email

Prezi

Infographics

For this project, I decided to do two infographics, one to display each side of my family. You can see the one from my father's side below, but because things got messy, I could not embed the one from my mother's side and there is a link to go see that one.

Infographic for Mother's Side

5 Frame Story Board

Monday, April 29

Journal- Who is the oldest member of your family that you have ever met? What do you know about your family history? Have your parents ever told you anything about your family history? Do you know what kind of heritage you have? Explain as much about your family and any history you know of.

The oldest family member in my family that I've met was my Great Grandma Della. She was 95 years old and just passed away about a month ago. We visited her all the time and she absolutely loved talking about when she was a young girl. Grandma Della is on my dad's side. They are almost 100% German. When my dad's family came to the United States from Germany, they lived in a small all-German town in Iowa called Hanover. They were all farmers and for the longest time, there was just a one room schoolhouse. My Grandma Sandy has kept many things that are from this town and we've spent a lot of time looking through them. The church was the most important thing in town and my family had always been involved in it. So that's my dad's side. German through and through. We actually sometimes speak in German to each other even though it usually isn't the nicest things. My mom was adopted so I do know about her adopted family but nothing about here biological family.

Monday, April 22

Journal- Which web design platform did you choose- Wix or Weebly? What are three things you've learned about web design so far?

I chose Wix. Originally, I was going to sign up for both and just see which one I preferred but that plan didn't work out so well. Weebly just kept loading and loading. It never actually got to the website creating part. That's why I chose Wix; so that I wasn't sitting around all hour. I've learned a lot of things about web design. The fonts and the size of said fonts are important. You need to make sure that they work together and don't over-power one another. It's also good to have a general idea about what is going on and how you want the lay-out to look. If you don't have an idea to start with, everything will just start going places and become really out of order and confusing. A third thing I've learned is that the colors shouldn't be too much. They need to complement each other and correspond with the theme.

Wednesday, April 17

Journal- What have you learned about making a website? Explain.

I have learned that making a good website is not an easy task. It is important to make a user-friendly lay-out with a navigation bar that will allow someone to jump from page to page. It is also important to pick a design that doesn't distract from what is being presented. If possible, the design should aid the presentation of the information. I also learned that fonts are very important. You shouldn't pick tons of different fonts because that can be very distracting. Instead, you should choose a few different fonts that complement each other. I also learned briefly about encoding. I'm not entirely sure what this exactly entails but I hope to find out in the near future.

Tuesday, April 16

Journal- What do you know about building and creating a website? Have you ever done it before? List qualities of a well designed and well functioning website.

I don't really know a whole lot about website creation. My friend took Web Design last semester and she talked to me about it sometimes. What I know is that it involves a lot of encoding. I'm not sure if everything needs to be encoded but I know that quite a bit of it does. I, personally, have never created a website. However, I have been to many a website in my day and pretty much know what makes a good and a bad one. Good websites are easily navigated. Everything can be easily found just by simply looking at the website. They also look decent. The display and design goes along with the subject and presents it in an interesting format. A website can be bad if it just has too much going on. When a website is cluttered, I just feel super overwhelmed and not sure what to do. It's very important to try and strike a balance between too much and too little. I also know that I strongly dislike when websites have pop-up ads. I understand that they may be necessary for business reasons, but in my opinion, the pop-ups are a little too far. Ads on the page, however, are tolerable if they are present in a reasonable amount.

Voting for Stop Motion Animation

Best stop-motion animations videos:

1. William Liu
William's idea was a whiteboard Harlem Shake. I liked the idea and I'm sure that it took a lot of time to get all of the details drawn on the whiteboard. Almost everyone knows what the Harlem Shake is and it was an incredibly creative thing to do. Although the drawings are stick people, they have a lot of detail. Also, ,a lot of different things are going on all at once and I can imagine that that took a long time to create. His video was also funny because it used a well-known meme at the end which tied it all together.

2. Jacob McCrary
Jacob's idea was shoes. But not just any shoes. These shoes were walking and they went everywhere. There were many different angles involved and that really made it much more interesting. These shoes walked down the hall, went down the stairs, tripped over themselves, and opened the door. It was an incredibly creative twist on just walking shoes. The video was also rather long and used a lot of different pictures which I can assume was very time consuming.

3. Hunter Liggett
Hunter used forks. That might not sound exciting, but they were used in a very creative way. It started with a fork just going across the screen, but then it multiplied. The newly made forks all did a sort of dance and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't mesmerized. The forks all then came back into the original one. What really made this video, though, was the credits. Every other video had the credits added using the Movie Maker software. His video, however, had the credits going across the screen just as the forks had. He took pictures of them "scrolling" and I really liked that idea.

Wednesday, April 10

Journal- Tell me about two things you've learned while creating your stop motion animation video. Go in to detail about these two items.

Over the course of this project, I've learned that it is important to take the pictures right after one another if you want the final product to look realistic. While my brother was going up and down the stairs, I took pictures on every step. When he was walking to and from the staircase, though, I wish I had taken more pictures. I think it looks somewhat unrealistic. I can't imagine how long it takes animators to make a full movie using this process! Another thing I learned is that the video will look better if the pictures are shown for a shorter amount of time. When I first put it together, I had each picture being displayed for about one second. I thought that that would be short enough. After previewing it, though, I found that it didn't flow very well. I changed the time to half a second and I like the result of that much better. I could probably even go faster, but if I did that, I wouldn't meet the time requirements for the video.