The Beginning of a Podcast

I decided to review a Harry Potter podcast to get an idea about how podcasts are made and presented through iTunes. The podcast's name is: Pottercast #217: The Leaky Cauldron. The podcast can be found here.

The layout of the podcast for this fan fiction production was very similar to a radio program. There was a music intro and occasionally in the background. There were excerpts of speaking from the characters in the Harry Potter movies. The hosts for the show were introduced and they outlined what they would talk about during that episode of the podcast. The episode carried on like a conversation between the three hosts and they displayed something similar to radio personalities with different knowledge on the topics they were talking about (mostly news about HP movies, books, the wizarding world of Harry Potter, etc.)

While informative, the hosts shared their opinions and critiques of the films and fan fiction that resulted from the productions. This was a really long podcast (about 45 minutes) so mine will be a lot shorter, but I think I want to follow this setup with the music and quote excerpts if possible.

I put together a script for the podcast and it is included below:

Intro Music

Hello and welcome to my presentation about fandom- a look at fan participation in the current media. My name is Rachel and I am a senior Communication major in South Bend, IN. Today is April 7^th and I am here to tell you about my fandom study. For this study, I look closer at the fandoms associated with Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Twilight and this presentation incorporates research from my senior comprehensive research project and various skills from my Web Communications class.

This slide presentation is supported by Creative Commons and some rights are protected.

For this project, I developed several hypotheses and research questions that are explored in this study. My research questions explore how fans show their participation, looks to define the point at which someone becomes an extreme fan, a deeper exploration of the idea of an “extreme fan” and helps look at trends between age, gender and education and how each of these relate to fandom.

I distributed a survey for this study called “Fandom in Today’s Media” available online at surveymonkey.com. This survey was distributed using the snowball method through Facebook and email. 253 participants took the survey and the mean age was 21.98 years and the participants were 18-64 years old. I divided the participants into adolescent (18-24 years) and mature (25-64 years). I divided the participants so I could see differences in media expression and the different attitudes and practices of fandom.

Research Question #1 explores how fans show their participation in a fandom. We can see through these graphs that both adolescent and mature participants have strong expressions through books, television and films- this could be because of convenience or popularity sake. In both areas, there is a strong presence in the technological media through fan fiction, applications and blogging.

The data supports hypothesis #1- that fans will express themselves through many mediums. There were many other unique ways of expression from the open-ended question- fans replied that they expressed their fandom through undergrad classes, music (such as Wizard Rock affiliated with Harry Potter), museum exhibits, video games and art.

Research question 2 explores the point at which a fan becomes an extreme fan. This is done through looking at when the participant believes they THEMSELVES become extreme fans versus when they believe OTHERS become extreme fans. These graphs show surprising data because most participants show the extreme fan at low levels of participant when society has painted a picture of an extreme fan being the attendee at midnight movie premieres, writers of fan fiction and obsessive individuals.

We can look toward a study completed in 2006 by Gantz, Wang, Paul and Potter to ask: if the word “fan” originally derived from fanatic or fanaticus- already describing an extreme role?

In contrast to these graphs, the self-perception of oneself as a fan may be leading to the distortion of when we believe WE become extreme fans.

This hypothesis isn’t supported- perhaps because many of us do not want to be classified as extreme fans because “extreme fans” were described in a survey open-ended question as “obsessive, passionate and stalkers.” This contradicts what the participants define as extreme- are those that love the movies and books- obsessive and stalkers as well?

Research Question #3 asked what type of relationships a fan would seek out.

This question is answered by showing that fans feel more comfortable around fans of the same thing but do not necessarily seek out those fans when developing interpersonal relationships.

Therefore, fans will incorporate their fandom into their everyday life through interactions with others- hypothesis #3 is supported.

The final research question addresses the relationship between fandom and age, gender and education:
Age doesn’t have an impact on relating to fandom although the mature participants have more extreme feelings toward their fandom than the adolescents.

Gender trends show that female relate more to their fandom than males.

There is an increasing correlation between education and fandom although transition years such as from high school to college and college to post-grad show lags in the curve of fandom. These three areas of age, gender and education would be a great area for expansion to fandom studies.

From these results about education, the final hypothesis cannot be determined from this study.

Major challenges to this study were from the broad participant pool especially in terms of age and gender. Different means of sampling could help improve this study in the future. Also, fandom is such as broad area to explore and hard to define. There are many contributing factors to a fan’s feeling and one’s feelings are hard to isolate from social factors and opinions of others.

(Music begins softly behind text) Hopefully this has given you a bit of knowledge about the study of fandom and I want to thank you for tuning in. This presentation would not have been possible without the help of creative commons artists for the photos and Fairytale (a Creative Commons music source) for the great music. For more information you can visit my website at www.rachelwebcomm.blogspot.com.

Thank you and good night!

*Outro Music concludes

Slideshare

I have just finished my first slideshare. I adapted my comprehensive presentation to fit a different style- trying to eliminate bullet points and incorporate creative commons photos, Gimp edited photos and giving image to all the photos taken from the Web.

I uploaded the slideshow to Slideshare.com and I will be using this same presentation for the next couple projects where we will add music editing and sound so when I am done I will hopefully have some awesome music edited to fit my lecture complete with a plethora of different images from the web, from others and from pictures I have edited.

I uploaded the slideshow on Slideshare and it can be found under the title "Fandom: A Look at Fan Participation in the Current Media." The presentation is available to be seen by the public.
The slideshow is available at this link.
I have also embedded it if you would like to view it in this blog.

Fandom: A Look at Fan Participation in the Current Media 2

View more presentations from reiste01.

I had a fun time editing the pictures to fit into the presentation, especially playing around with photos I have taken. I really love working with Gimp. I always find that making a mindmap helps a little bit, but I always end up with a different project than what I was planning on. It does help because I get a look at the whole picture before I start.
The link to my flow chart for this project is my blog post is here.

On the other hand, it was really hard to edit my powerpoint and not use bullet points because I am so used to bullet pointing information into my presentation. I hope that this presentation helps me design my presentations in a more creative way and find new ways to design power points after this.

Flowchart for Slideshow

After doing the flowchart for my slideshow, I've been reworking my comprehensive presentation to fit the requirements of the web comm project. I am trying to make my slide show stand alone, but at the same time leave plenty of room to add voice to the slideshow. Right now the original slideshow is bullet-pointed so I am working toward establishing a different style of presentation for this project and use some of the new techniques of online slideshare, voice editing and others in the upcoming projects.

FATP
Form: Slideshow with audio and visual components

Audience: Communication Studies majors, minors, potential employers, classmates

Topic: “Fandom: A look at fan participation in the current media.” I really want to see if I can take my senior comp presentation and add to my PowerPoint with audio and enhance the graphs and visual that I had for that presentation. I gave that presentation 5-7 minutes to the Communication faculty and want to see if I can make the presentation better and accessible to other students that are looking for information about fandom and how it pertains to our communication today.

Purpose: I want to show my comp project through SlideShare and see how I can expand upon the visual I made for the PowerPoint slide while showing the idea of fandom in the media today and expanding on the idea of my comp.

SlideShare and PowerPoints

Resumes, Cover Letters, and Interview Tips

View more presentations from Vince Ricci.

I thought this SlideShare titled "Resumes and Interview Techniques (North American Style)" was interesting and enlightening. While the instructor was giving good techniques and ideas for resume building, he also included great pictures and diagrams to help stimulate the audience. I think he really agreed with the slogan, "If you can't say it with words, use a picture." But also lightened his slide show with pictures to make the audience more perceptive to his message and presentation.

What I didn't like about this presentation is it seemed the author was trying to market his speech toward a professional audience at a conference, but he used interesting pictures and sometimes eluded to college humor and pictures and expressions that didn't seem to fit with his intended audience.

I found some interesting tips for presentations here that may be helpful in making my presentation for class.
Here were five tips I thought were interesting and this blogger explains them in great detail to make sure the presentation is great.
1. Know your audience well.
2. Learn to study the body language of your audience.
3. Ask friends for honest/frank feedback.
4. Prepare a map of land-mines (or topics to stay away from).
5. Learn the subject you are going to be presenting thoroughly.

With this, I'm going to start on my presentation and brainstorm some ideas for a great topic to cover and get to know SlideShare more in depth.

Photo Editing and Flickr Fun

lemans-pic
Originally uploaded by r.eisterhold

With this picture of Holy Spirit Chapel in LeMans hall, I experimented a bit with Gimp- a photo manipulation tool available for download. This freeware helped me edit my original picture to become the picture below. With Gimp I was able to blur the photo, rotate the image, add color as a blend into the photo, change the lighting, change the perspective and add a caption on the photo itself. The Gimp program itself was very user-friendly and I had fun making a new image out of an already-beautiful picture. Flickr was used to upload the pictures to the internet and from there I sent them straight from my Flickr account to my blog because both are linked through Google sites. I wish I would have worked with cropping the new photo, so the edited picture would be square, but I left me edits at this and have a new image that is very different from what I s tarted out with. I want to keep using Gimp and become familiar with the ins and outs of photo editing to make all of my photos better-looking and more professional. It's a great freeware available to all through a simpledownload and I worked with the program for my video screencast project last week and loved it.

gimp-picOriginally uploaded by r.eisterhold