Writing Up The Assignments

I’m putting the write-ups of all the assignments in one post rather than put it with the posts themselves because two out of the three assignments involved writing and I didn’t want it to be confusing with random chunks of meta-cognition at the end of the story. I wanted those to just be what they were. I hope that’s okay.

Assignment one was the fanfiction assignment. I wrote a piece called “The Waitress” about a waitress in The Avengers. The prompt was to tell the story of the background people in a movie or TV show, so I chose her since the camera focuses on her for an extra long amount of time. I seem to remember that she had a few more scenes and was supposed to be a love-interest type deal for Captain America but most of her scenes were cut. I definitely have seen deleted scenes with her in them that aren’t in the final cut of the movie, but I can’t verify whether or not it’s true. I wanted to tell the story of the random civilians that live in superhero movies. I love the Marvel movies, and this one random unnamed lady had a pretty big focus for just being an extra. She stands out like a sore thumb, so she was kind of begging for someone to do this. I write a lot of fanfiction, especially about background or side characters, so really, this was something I do all the time. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to incorporate Bob Ross into the others, so I included a Bob Ross cameo the way Marvel movies include a Stan Lee cameo: there, in the background, and usually entirely forgettable. This was a fairly basic, straightforward assignment, I wrote it directly on the post, so there’s not a lot to say about it.

Assignment two was also fairly straightforward. The prompt was to write something using only the thousand most common words in the English language. I described a scene from the point of view of Bob Ross when he was stationed in Alaska. I wrote it first in plain English and then using the translator put it into simpler (?) English. Most of the translations were fairly easy, although I struggled with the word “moose” and ended up calling it a “death-horse-with-head-fighting-sticks” which sounds more like an angry deer but alright. Just like the last one, I only did one draft and just started writing, I was still in the vein of the daily creates.

Assignment three was the most involved. The prompt was to create a spooky audio clip using multiple layers. Using Audacity, I layered different clips of me that I recorded on my computer. I relied on how different the sounds were (one is laughing maniacally, one is whispering the Hail Mary in Latin, one is breathing all terrified, one is singing “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” and one is saying Bob Ross quotes) and the fact they were so different to make it creepy. I also added the sound of me scratching the metal part of my bed to give the piece a sort of heartbeat, and I added music I downloaded from AudioBlocks a while ago to get something that made it sound more cinematic. At first, I was going to set it up where you were hiding in a closet from a killer, then it was two killers, then it was you and a friend, then it was you and two friends. I tried to portray the different people by panning them so that they would come out of one speaker or the other, but in the final draft I realized it was too chaotic to really get the vibe and decided it was all in your head. I was going to make the closet sound more obvious, but none of my doors would squeak for me so I couldn’t get the sound, which added to the fact that I moved it from an external to an internal source of sound. Also, they all sounded like me, rather than like several different people. That one changed the most as I worked on it because I was doing multiple drafts and changing what exactly I was representing in the sound. There’s a stinger at the end of the clip (one of the voices says, “Let’s get crazy”) that just kind of ended up there as a happy accident, so I cleaned up the end a little bit more to make it stand out.