Mission 1 - Picking The Topic

When I first began my research for this first mission, I looked in to each topic. I wanted to pick something that I could understand but that I didn’t know everything about. I wanted to have something familiar to me but also push me a bit out of my comfort zone.

I thought about AR (augmented reality), as it’s something that really fascinates me and makes me think about how the world is going to be in the future. I thought about what I could do within my own skillset to create something that would explain what it is but fell short, so I decided to pass on that topic. I also considered gaming as I have an interest in gaming and thought learning about the behind the scenes magic might just make me appreciate my hobby a bit more. I considered making a game but felt that since it was a hobby, I didn’t have a big enough knowledge of games and that I probably wouldn’t be able to make something decent. I felt a bit out of my depth.

I settled on gifs, however. I had previous experience in knowing how to make them through different channels – online or using software – but I didn’t know the background as to why they are so popular and what the lead up was to creating a gif and having a need for a gif. I wanted to see if they were owned by one particular company or if there was some overall company that made them patent free. I wanted to know if there were alternatives to gifs or similar formats that people could use as alternatives if there was or had been a legal issue. It seemed very interesting to me to figure these things out and then bring this information to the class in a different way.

With this knowledge, I took the prompt questions on the gif page on the introdm website and found some answers. After this, I thought of relevant and related questions to what was there already and began looking into these. I then brainstormed some possible questions and topics that could be discussed in a presentation to give us all a better understanding of what gifs are and why they are what they are.

After expressing my want to do this topic for the first mission, I found another person who wanted to join in on this topic, and after a while, we found someone else to join us. We spent some time researching and picking our interests in the topic. We discussed what we wanted in the presentation and what we wanted to create. We condensed our research and looked through the questions to see if we had similar answers or anything to add.

We picked our theme - Halloween - pretty quickly. We thought it would be fitting and also fairly easy to find gifs and videos to make gifs off from this theme. We wanted to make funny gifs and found a few Vine compilations based around Halloween.