For my DGST 101 Final Project, I have decided on a video production of my mother’s brand new business. She already owns a coffee shop in Yorktown, Virginia called Persnickety Crane Cafe. She has recently opened a new business entitled, Serene Bee Bakery. I will be filming an informative video of these businesses with the latter being the focus. The video will include the location, information on the owner and her story, as well as information about both businesses.
I chose to use the 2022-2023 Grade Distribution Summary for the Spring 2023 Graduate Colleges. This data set consisted of three graduate program colleges, College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), College of Business (COB), and College of Education (COE). It also contained the number of students in each college for Spring of 2023 and their average of grades, ranging from A-F. Looking at this data set, I wanted to determine which College was the most difficult to receive an A in. To do this, I created a graph that allowed me to see the average percentage of A’s received among graduate students within each college for this semester. I concluded that the College of Arts and Sciences is the most difficult to receive an A in, with 70.59% of students receiving A’s, and the College of Education is the easiest, with 90.65% of students receiving A’s.
Excel was becoming an extreme pain to use in order to create a Pivot table, so I attempted to trouble-shoot until eventually giving up on Microsoft Excel. I turned to Google Sheets which was infinitely more user-friendly. I imported the data set from the UMW website and worked from there. In the “rows” section of the Pivot table, I plugged in the different colleges, and in the “values” section, I plugged in the average percentage of A’s. Once this generated to my pivot table and showed me the average percentage of A’s received in each college, I inserted that information into a bar graph, showing me the data more clearly.
The content of this video highlights different aspects of the UMW Apartments, which is an apartment complex for upper-class UMW students. I explained three positive qualities of these apartments: the picturesque scenery, the practical parking spaces, and the relaxing courtyard.
There were many steps I took during the process of this video including steps in pre-production, production, and post-production. During the pre-production phase, I planned my script and what shots I wanted that would fit with my audio. During production, I used my iPhone 12 (in landscape mode) to film various types of shots in various locations. Lastly, post-production was the most time-consuming step of this process. I used Canva to edit the video files in the order that best suit my script. Then, I used Soundtrap to record my audio files. Once I had both of those saved, I input my audio files into Canva with my video, added background music, and edited it all harmoniously. I did all of the editing in Canva. There are two things I gained through Canva that I would like to give credit for:
The UMW Apartments are a beautiful residence hall apartment complex located on William Street in Fredericksburg, Virginia. They have housing for 350 upperclass UMW students contained in 10 separate apartment buildings.The first thing to note about these apartments is the gorgeous scenery, looking especially beautiful in the fall, as shown here. Secondly, a practical perk being the various different sections for parking keeping in mind the numerous students being housed here. Lastly, in the center of all these buildings is a serene, relaxing courtyard space. In the courtyard is more picturesque scenery, along with many areas of seating, and much more. Thank you for watching!
The subject of my mini podcast is a short book review of If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio. I gave a brief summary, then I talked about some of my favorite themes and what they accomplished. To get another perspective on this novel, you can visit Cloud Lake Literary’s Book Review: If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio. This is a creative website for readers based in Canada that contains book reviews, a literary magazine, interviews with various authors, etc. When doing a search of the organization, all of their social media popped up as well as other publishing and reader websites that were citing some of Cloud Lake Literary’s book reviews. So, I believe they are a reliable source.
For this process, I used a few different resources. I used the UMW audio kit to do the recording, Soundtrap to edit, and Bensound: Royalty Free Music for Videos for clips of music (the credit of the music goes to Benjamin Tissot). I recorded my audio inside my closet using the handheld recorder to minimize background sound.
Transcript:
Hello. Welcome to my mini podcast. Today I will be doing a very short book review on If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio.
The novel takes the reader through the dramatic and tragic events of a group of Shakespeare enthusiasts who are also best friends. They attend a special school of arts that goes through cuts after every school year. By the time the theater students reach their final year, they are down to 7 students, Oliver, Richard, James, Alexander, Meredith, Wren, and Filippa.
This group’s fatal flaw is their absolute devotion and obsession with Shakespeare. It ends up costing one of these seven their life. After this major event, we start to realize that the book is literally unfolding into a Shakespearian tragedy. I think this is an amazing creative choice because we are able to watch the Shakespeare obsessed realize that you can’t actually justify anything if you do it poetically enough.
Thank you for listening!
I created the site icon png and the jpeg of the star on a pink background. There was not much thought behind why I chose to design the site icon the way that I did. I just wanted to stay on the pink theme of my website. The header image I chose followed the same line of thinking, I chose it because it was pink.
The process for creating the site icon was fun! I used the Vectr website to design it. I used the shape and color designs that the website offered. For the header image, I used a Canva template.
I chose CC BY-NC 4.0. I do want to receive credit for work that I have created, but I want to allow others to remix it and share that remix without restriction. I believe this is a form of creativity, not copying. I did choose to not allow commercial use of my work because that felt wrong to me. However, I may choose to change this later.
I found the Pexels website through the ‘Free Resources’ section on UMW’s Digital Knowledge Center website. I chose this source because they list themselves as “free to use” and they say that “attribution is not required but appreciated.” I did not want to risk getting in trouble with accidentally using someone else’s work when I wasn’t allowed to. Also, after browsing their site for a bit I found they had so many beautiful options to choose from. To access this website, go to Pexels: the best free stock photos, royalty free images & videos shared by creators.
I chose the title, “Ema’s Persnickety Projects,” as a tribute to the theme that my mom uses to name her businesses. The name of her cafe/coffee-house is “Persnickety Crane Cafe” and her bakery business is “Serene Bee Bakery.” I wanted to use the word ‘persnickety’ and that alliteration because it feels very connected to the family business that I have been a part of for nearly four years. This title feels very at home to me. As for my domain name, I went plain and simple and chose my first and last name with ‘.com.’ Luckily, this was available!
