I think our film manipulation turned out well. I liked the way our earth and water looked. While the film strip was drying, the ink and paint was dripping and running down the film. For the earth, my partner and I tried to bead up the ink so it would form small ink balls to look more like gravel. For the water, we used a lot of different brushes to see the effect on the ink and paint when trying to make waves.

I also really like my animation I drew on the film strip. I tried to animate the cycle of water and plant growth. It started with a drop of water falling from the sky. Eventually, that drop hit the ground and seeped into the soil. There was a seed planted in the ground and when the water reached the seed, it started to bud and it sprouted into a big tree. Then, the animation continued up to a cloud where another water drop fell out of. The only thing I didn't like about my animation was how short it was. Since my animation contained a lot information, I should have stretched it out over more frames. Instead of limiting myself to the required 100 frames, I feel like 200 or 300 frames would have made it easier to see and understand what was happening.

Crowd Sourcing

            It is awesome that we live in a time that we can crowd source. I like the idea of crowd sourcing. Whether it is for funding, help, or information, crowd sourcing allows us to connect with so many people and use everyone’s abilities to maximum potential. Interconnected does a good job of demonstrating this in their film. By using people from all over the world and from so many different cultures, it shows how crowd sourcing can bring people together for a greater good. I feel like crowd sourcing was the best way to do this film since they wanted to show how we are all interconnected through the Internet. Some people see the internet as a bad thing, like it is impairing people, but this movie shows how it connects us all and allows us all to grow intellectually and as a community.

I found the Ted talk to be very interesting. I was amazed to find out their business expenses only being about $5,000 a month for servers. You would think that a website that big would have much higher expenses but when you think about it, most of their workers are volunteers which almost eliminates most of their expenses. I was also amazed at the credibility and validity of Wikipedia. Jimmy talked about how German Wikipedia was tested against other forms of news and articles and Wikipedia won every time. I have often wondered about the truthfulness behind Wikipedia, since most teachers talk bad about it but often, Wikipedia has the correct information and more compared to other scholarly articles. It should be interesting to see how Wikipedia’s plan for Wikibooks turns out.

            

It was very interesting reading articles and watching the videos on sound and acoustic ecology. It makes you really appreciate sound, from the very loud noises to the quiet, faint noises. I liked the end of the video "Listen" when he asked, "what happens when my voice stops? What do you hear then?" The silence was nice and almost therapeutic. I wish I wasn't in the library when I watched it so I then the silence could have had more impact of an impact.

When I started reading the “Opening Our Ears to Acoustic Ecology” article, I immediately started to think about people that are deaf or have hearing impairments. In the first sentence, the author claims “sounds bring the world alive.” So is the world not alive for some one that is deaf? I know this is an irrelevant argument, but I found it interesting to say such an assuring statement without considering the other perspective. I agree that sound helps a setting. It’s almost like the icing on a cake for a beautiful scene or setting. This article, in a way, ties in perfectly with the “Listen” video. Just like what the author talked about in the first paragraph, I picture myself standing on top of a mountain over looking hundreds of miles of rolling hills and the thing that brings that whole scene together is the sound. To escape all the noises in a city, or regular life, is a great thing that isn’t appreciated that much.