The creation of John Flavel

For our last task for contempory media issues, we had to create a fake character using facebook. Unfortunately the week that the teachers had given us this task I was sick so was not in class. However, instead of joining into a group the next week, James McKeown and I decided to create our own group to make a character. We discussed different ideas for different types of personalities and how we would be able to convince other people on facebook that our character is a real person.
James and I decided to create a character that is really religious. Although this character is religious, we wanted him to be very critical of what other people around him are doing. An example would be teenagers writing on their facebook profiles about going out and getting drunk, John would not approve of this.
James and I added our own friends using John Flavels account. We were suprised as to how many of our friends accepted a man that they did not know just because they seen they had mutual friends with this person. However, we did have some people report abuse against John Flavel and also had one of my friends having an argument with "John" although it was actually me writing to her.
I thought it would be a good idea to have Johns hometown as a place in Ireland called Knock. Knock is known for being quite a religious place and people may thing that this is why he has become so religious if they seen that.
We also added a Twitter account to make it seem as though John was a real character with more than one social networking sight. On this, we talked about religion and followed religious groups on Twitter. I found that it was harder to have people follow you on twitter because when you add them as a friend on facebook, they can either accept or decline but when you follow someone on twitter, that doesn't always mean they will follow you back.
Below are links to both John Flavels facebook account and his twitter account.
http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=100003619638228&sk=wall
https://twitter.com/

Twitter!

In Contemporary media issues, we have been looking at what way people behave online and if it is how they would act when they are in person. Our teachers discussed social networking sites and if we are actually ourselves when we are using these sites.
To give a better understanding of using these sites, we were each asked to make a fake twitter account and by using "weavr" we were going to describe what type of person we wanted to create. We were asked diffferent questions about the persons personality, words used to describe them, words that they might use often, gender and many other things.
Unfortunately, I was not able to make my fake twitter account due to technical problems with google mail however I did try to follow other members of the classes fake accounts.
Once the class had their fake profiles set up, they were asked not to log on as their fake person because the person they made in weavr will take over the twitter account and make his own statuses. Next week in class we are going to find out how everyone got on with their twitter accounts and who has the most followers.

Ghost Stories!!

For our final film of our first year, we have been asked to make a 5minute documentary of anything of our choice. My group sat down and discussed different ideas and positives and negatives of each idea.
We as a group then all decided to make a documentary about ghost stories and why people love them so much. We are going to base this more around peoples views on what makes a good ghost story, why they enjoy the ghost stories and also talk to people that work for haunted walk groups.

I think that this will be a very exciting project to do and to find out why we all love ghost stories so much. Our group have already began researching places around the liverpool area to have the best shots and best locations that we can have for our final first year film.
I am very enthusiastic about working on this documentary and I am looking forward to seeing the outcome to our project.

Personal Profiling video!

For our class Production Practice, we had to make a perosnal profiling video for someone who had an interesting life and that would be a good speaker for a video. The group that I was in decided to make a personal profiling video on a teacher that we have for a different class called Keith.
Keith used to be a DJ and was offered jobs in different places over the world. He has a very strong passion for music and had a very interesting story behind his career as a DJ.
Keith took in his DJ equipment which we then got images of him setting up his equipment, plugging in the speakers and hooking up all of the wires. We also got Keith actually using the equipment and playing some songs for us.

I thought that we had a really good person to do our personal profiling on. However, because our location was in a classroom I thought it didn't quite set the mood right for what we were trying to achieve. Our teacher also gave us the same feedback as he thought it would have been better if we had showed his setting up his equipment in a nightclub. I still thought that it was a very interesting personal profile but I think we could have made it alot more eyecatching for the viewers.

Tahrir Square - Egypt!

In class, we were asked to make a wiki on wet paint to show how we can recieve information of the internet about particular topics and events. Each group consisted of four or five people. We had five in my group. We were then given a topic of what we had to write our wiki on, our topic was Tahrir Square. We were each given a bullet point which we had to write a thread for our wiki's on.
I had to write my thread on Social Networking and identity. For this I had to talk about the riots that happened in tahrir square and how people uploading images and videos of footage to their social networking sites would effect peoples judgements of them online.
We also had a main page that everyone contributed to. We added pictures, links to social networking sites and videos so that people reading our wiki could get a better understanding of what was happening in tahrir square during the riots.

Before I started writing about this topic, I had very little knowledge of what had happened in tahrir square. I found out most of my information through the internet which I also think helps to show how important the internet can be sometimes. I also learned alot about how people want to make themselves appear online and how that can be different to the person that they genuinely are.

Below is a link to our Wiki that we created based on Tahiri Square.
http://contemporarymediaissues.wetpaint.com/page/Tahrir+Square

Why we need creativity and concept.

In our creativity and concept class, our teachers decided to discuss why we need these lessions for helping us become more creative.
From this lesson, we were given a BBC CV with all the different types of questions that they will ask when applying for a job in the Media industry. With this application form, there were alot of questions which we will need to come up with our own creative answers for so that our  application form will stand out against all of the applications that will be sent in for the same job.
This is why our creativity and concept class is so important for when we leave university. We need to be able to show that we can come up with good  ideas for programs, are able to problem solve and that we can use our own initiative.
Our creativity and concept class shows up different techniques that help us to come up with new ideas and also problem solving techniques. From looking at the BBC application form, I now understand why this class is so important for our university class.

You Tube!

In class yesterday, we were all given the name of something that we had to go and search for on YouTube. I had been given "Model Aeroplanes" to look up. Once we had searched for our topic, we had to take note of how many views there had been, how many likes or dislikes for the video, how many comments there were and what where the comments about.

Once we had wrote down our findings on our topics, we then came back into the classroom and discussed what we had each found. From this, we then discussed You Tube, how we would discribe it to people that don't know what it is and what You Tube means to people. After we discussed what YouTube is, we then watched a 55minute long video on how youtube became so big for so many people around the world. From this video, it was found that YouTube became a place where people were able to communicate with others all over the world and how this had mostly started from one man dancing to a song which people had seen and then joined in by adding their own dances onto YouTube.

From this video I discovered how much YouTube means to people all over the world. For me, I would mainly just use it for watching videos and listening to music but this has helped me to see that there are so many people that use YouTube as a way of communicating with people all over the world and even people that they don't even know.
I found this video very interesting to watch and has taught me more about YouTube.