Baking Way

I chose Baking because I bake on my free time, well when I’m not busy taking quizzes or writing blog posts and papers. I can remember a time from when I was very little, I used to help my mom bake cookies and I would always stand on a dining room chair to help and to see what she was doing. Baking will always something I will be interested in because I like how you start with basically nothing and end up with something. Plus it’s actually pretty easy to mess up, which is pretty exciting, at least to me. I like how there are different methods to baking and you have to figure out what method works for you. You learn from your baking mistakes, from simply adding to much salt or catching your oven on fire, you will learn what not to do. I plan to collect everything I need for this class by actually taking the time to bake. I’m not quite sure what I am actually going to bake, but I’m sure you will find out soon. For the Video assignment I was thinking of filming the baking process, and for the advertisement I was thinking of doing a bake sale ad.  Most of my inspiration comes from other baking blogs. Mostly because it’s not a simple betty crooker  recipe they took from the internet or the back of the box, it’s something that they either created or they started with a basic recipe and made it their own. Baking is just a form of art to me, from the batter to the frosting it’s a piece of art that you created with your own hands.

Here are a view of those baking blogs that I look at for recipes and ideas:

Call Me Cupcake

Vanilla Bean Blog

Top with Cinnamon

Reflection Post

At the end of this class I would have to say that my favorite project was the last one. Not because it’s over but because it was the one I had the most fun making, freaking out over being camera shy I’m really glad that my boyfriend was there to help. I know have a general understanding of all the programs we used, I can put on my resume that I have basic adobe skills and can probably learn on my own more about it. I think this is a good starter class for anyone wanting to learn adobe without being super pressured on getting everything 100% right.

 

My career path I want to follow is be a head hunter, I want to hire the best person for a company and making sure they get their monies worth. I don’t really see how this could really worth with my career path, but it is still a good skill to have in case if I do need it or it becomes useful later on. Sadly, none of the things we did in class really changed my mind about what I want to do, but I’ve always wanted to be a head hunter so it will be hard to get me to change my mind.

 

I wished I would have used Photoshop more to my advantage but I just couldn’t get it to do what I wanted it to. I think audio was the simplest followed by video, the both were pretty straight forward, while others had secret buttons that if you didn’t know the tricks they were hard to find. Overall I’m pretty happy with the results, there wasn’t anything that I thought I was super bad at, I just didn’t give myself the time.

 

I didn’t really use any websites to help me, which would have probably helped me with any questions or issues I had. They could have been useful at 10 o’clock at night when your TAs are sleeping and you are struggling. But I never thought about looking anything up because I thought everything was provided for us.

 

I think the tutorials are a little complicated, I think they should have been for the people that never used the adobe products, like complete for yourself since there was a video provided and you can learn step by step to do different tricks and tips. I just kept finding myself not doing them since they were harder than I knew what I wanted to do.

 

I think anyone on edge of taking this class needs to take a step back, think about those job interviews were they have the same qualifications as the people around them and how these basic skills could help them get the step up. I personally was super worried about this class, but sometimes you have to get over your fears.

Final video Project

 

The idea I had from the start, I kept think how could I do a video based a baking? The question itself was the answer. So I filmed with the help of my boyfriend, a baking show. The fun part was setting it up like the traditional baking shows that you see, the ingredients all measured out, looking all nice and also making sure not to show you the struggle of how hard it is to set up.

 

I had to cut and edit a lot because at one point I just couldn’t keep a straight face and had a problem with saying words without laughing. I just had an issue where I kept thinking about how this was going to be on youtube and how people could probably find it if they really tried.

 

From the draft to final I didn’t change much. I increased the volume so you can tell that I didn’t cut out words, it was just the start of me talking and I kept losing the flow after every pause and didn’t know where to start back up again. I actually paused a couple of time after my boyfriend hit record, to give myself enough time to gather my thoughts and I knew I could cut it out later if I needed to.

 

Overall I think this is my best project yet, I did my best with the skills that I had and the skills that I learned. Using the Peer reviews I noticed the biggest thing was increasing the volume, although I was a clear speaker, I was quiet. They also recommended music which I didn’t add. I didn’t like how it sounded and decided against it.

 

The peer reviews were helpful, since I knew what I said the video sounded fine, but since they had no idea what I said the video was off and the volume needed to be raised.

Draft Video Project

 

For my draft video project I decided to film a baking show, my boyfriend helped film this so big credit to him. I filmed over Thanksgiving break so I really only had one shot at doing this, I actually almost had an issue of making the video too long. I edited out some of the mistakes, I’m still looking for anymore if I need to. Cutting down the video was actually pretty hard, I needed to figure out what was needed and what was just extra. I made a few mistakes but it didn’t mess with the flow, I took a few seconds of pause so I knew that I could cut it out. This was actually really fun to make, editing was a different story.

 

The razor tool was probably my best friend, I needed to make a lot of cuts without changing or ruining the flow. Going forward to I want to add effects and try to make it look like an actually baking show, try to make more clear edits and pull it together more. I don’t have time to film it all over again, so I’m going to have to work with what I have. Which is a nice challenge, I just hope I have time to do everything. This was probably my favorite assignment so far, I can’t wait to see what my group has and see what they have to say, which really helps me.

 

I like having my stuff peer reviewed since I learn a lot about what I can change, what they would have added and what they think I should add. The outside point of view I think really helps everyone, in their own way.

 

I look forward to see what my peers have to say and improving my video more.

Raw video and story board

Sample Storyboard: Baking show

Visual Elements	Audio Elements
0:00-0:20 Introduction of baking show, what we are baking.	Oven preheating
0:20-0:40 What ingredients are needed, start to mix dry ingredents	Whisking sounds
0:40:1:00 Finishing mixing dry, mix butter and two sugars	Sound of mixer
1:00: 1:30 Putting eggs and vanilla into creamed butter and sugars	Sound of mixer
1:30:2:00 adding dry and making cookies

 

 

Premiere Tutorials

I fixed the first video so it is jump cuts.

Audio Final

I honestly struggled with this, I kept pressing to rerecord each time I had a mistake. It got to the point that I had to just take a pause so I knew where to cut out the mistake and carry on. I used the female voice enhancer to help my voice and I used the razor tool to get rid of my mistakes. I tried to take everyone’s advise on making sure that I’m not using “um” or “like” and I think I did a pretty good job this time. It is hard to really say how many times it took me before I was finally happy and knew I had to the skills to edit it. I’m just likely that I found something to relate my topic too without going over time. Although it was hard I really wanted to make sure that I got this done and turned in. I tried my best and I hope for the best, I really did try to take everyone’s comment and try to get into my voice. The sounds didn’t fit because they were either too quiet or didn’t really fit. It honestly just sounded awkward with the sound, like a really bad story put together by a two year old. I’m actually pretty happy with what I have done because I was surprised I could come up with the results that I did with how many mistakes I made. This class is teaching me that it is okay to struggle, there are other people struggling right next to you, the point is to do your best and that’s what I did. I thought I wasn’t going to pull this off, but luckily my laptop showed up in the mail just in time for this to be due. I am truly happy how far I have come in this assignment.

 

 

 

Draft Audio

I had to change from making cookies to how to set up your kitchen before you bake. I realized that you can’t really talk about baking cookies in under two minutes. So instead I talk about what steps you need to do before you bake such as make sure that your kitchen is clean. I figured this would be like a good thing before I do the baking show for the video part. Like an introduction for the show or something. I’m still thinking up the details of everything and trying to figure out how to put it all together. I tried to clean up the audio, but I might record for my draft even with the cleanup I’m still not the biggest fan and this helped me work out the kinks in my script. The reason I didn’t have my sounds is because I’m thinking of what sounds to add since I changed what I was talking about. I could add my sounds of the oven or maybe even a spray bottle to represent cleaning up the kitchen and sounds of pulling out supplies. I just didn’t have time to get these sounds.   I should also add audio about preheating the oven because that is an important part of baking. Overall I didn’t use as many tools as I should have but that’s mostly because at last minute I realized I had to change my subject. I think my subject change does work better than me just sitting here telling how to bake something when I could just show it in the next assignment. The slicer tool helped me clean up the audio in spots that were really bad, still messing with the voice changing and enhancer buttons. So I’m sorry for the quality of this, but I am still without a laptop. I’m so sorry!

 

 

Raw audio

Here they are. I tried to make kitchen noises but might actually bake cookies to get my noises.

 

 

Final Logo

Here is my final product. I would have to say that my logo changed a lot, or at least became more cake like. I used more vector shapes in my final because it was time saving instead of trying to color in each shape and having to worry about going over the lines or missing a dot of color. I made a square using vector shapes and then I used direct selection tool to make the square into the triangle. I know there is a triangle tool but the square gave me the triangle I wanted.I also added a drop shadow to help it standout against the page more, I made the logo small and big to make sure that it would look good on all scales. I took the whole weekend to make this rather than a day like I did for my draft. I would have to say that I put more heart into this one and watched a lot of Youtube videos to find out how I could use different tools and different tricks of the trade to find out how to do certain things. Youtube did help and I should have started using it from the start because it probably could have helped from the start and my draft could have looked better rather than hand drawn by a 5 year old. I would have to say that my final looks a lot more professional then my draft, mostly because I decided to seek help on who to do certain things and sort cuts to help make sure I’m not coloring in the shapes myself and have to zoom in to make sure I don’t miss a spot and to make sure I stay in the lines. In the end I should have used different tools and tried to figure out illustrator instead of just rushing and pulling out a final project out of the ashes.

Draft logo

For my logo I decided to make a cake slice, it goes along with baking and can pretty much stand alone and it would symbolize baking. I decided to freehand my cake slice in illustrator and I kind of underestimated how hard it was going to be, it did turn into a fun challenge and the Undo button was probably my best friend. I really like how it turned out with my freehand, just need to clean it up a bit and try to make it look more professional. I need to look at more tools to try to make the edges neater, but I do kind of like how it looks drawn. The simply I just used a textbox to make the “simply” probably because I didn’t want to free hand that. The whole thing is suppose to stand for “Simply a piece of cake” because that’s what baking should be, a fun mess of well fun. I didn’t do much besides use the pencil tool and the paint brush tool to make my piece of cake. I really like chocolate cake so I used that as the base and then pink frosting so it looked different from the chocolate cake part. I made the pinks contrast since in real life the pinks wouldn’t look the same in the light, it added depth to my photo and made it a little less 3D in my opinion. With the cake part I tried to make them as even as I could while eyeballing it. I’m sure there is a tool that would help with that, but I personally had fun freehanding it I just need a way to try to clean up the edges. I likely liked using this program, it was all you, no photos. This project was just fun all around.