All About Me
My name is Angel Castillo and I attend to Bronx Bridges HS. I plan on receiving my high school diploma in 2020. I decided to come to the New Media Arts program because my teacher said I was going to have fun doing this. I did not know anything about neither website design nor video producing. Since I stepped in this class I’ve learned so much things about media and how we can use it to send a messages to all type of people. I also learned how to send a message for equality and justice. I learned how to use Wix, a very useful website that helped us design our own page and also the group page. I learned how to use different templates and images to show who I am. I learned how to edit videos, just the basic part of it like cutting clips,adding transitions,and video effects. I’m sure that I can use the knowledge that I received in the program outside of it like in my school or in a job. Making my website was not as hard as I thought, it was really easy to choose a template that I felt would fit me and to transcribe all the work that we’ve done in class to the website. My role in the final project of the documentary was to help with the editing of the video, I was in charge of looking for soundtracks, information, clips of violent acts and statistics to insert in the video. I also cutted some of the interviews clips in order to reduce the duration of the documentary.
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The social issue of our group project is Youth Violence but focusing on whether media provokes a violent behavior in the youth. We chose this topic because we were intrigued to know what made a person violent. Due to the numerous factor that surround a person’s behavior being violent. For example, Individual factors as age, education, income, Relationship factors being your best friend or family member being an influence in your actions.Community factors like schools, workplaces and neighborhoods and Societal factors which can be social and cultural norms. We decided to narrow it down to media because of the mass consumption of media in today’s world. I think this issue is very important because youth is the future of the world and as Ex-President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated “We cannot always build a future for our youth, but we can always build our youth for the future” so we must know what children are consuming in the media and control it. Different movements are being realized by young activists such as campaigns in social media and hashtags making some of these topics go viral and give awareness to people of what is really happening in the society.
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I’m very proud of the work we have done together in the class but, regarding the group website I believe that my classmates did a pretty good job on sending the message of criminal justice across and giving the website that contemporary style that engages people. I think my peers know how to work under pressure very well and I believe that our website is all set but with more time I think we could insert more information and also specify who are we giving this information? Who are the readers?
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Out of this experience I have multiple takeaways, one of them was that the program helped me clear my path of what do I want to study.Also another takeaway was that is really important how we use media and that media can serve for good as well as it can serve for bad.As I stated early, I feel like I can use the skills of making a website and video editing in my school or in a job.