Rachel Deodato

New Yorkers vs. COVID-19 New York, New York - In New York two families are trying their best to adjust to the new normal. With a global pandemic, the city that "never sleeps" has seem to suddenly fallen asleep. Streets that were once packed full are now a ghost town and this change takes some adjusting for these New Yorkers. "It's a trying time." says Matthew Deodato, who New York has deemed as an essential worker. "It's something we have to adjust too. How we are going to fare in the future, I couldn't tell you. We take this day by day. We are very careful and cautious and, you know, we hope for the best."  Source: CDC New York has permitted essential businesses to continuing functioning as normal however workers must take precautions. These precautions include wearing protective gear such as masks and gloves while also trying their best to remain at a 6 ft distance from other individuals. Those essentials b...

Shark vs. Bear The purpose of premiere is to create visuals for certain clips of audio, such as a still image video. I have recently learned about how important visuals and audio can be to a project. Visualization has the power of communicating with the viewer about the topic, which is especially important to those who may speak another language or have impaired hearing. In my final still image project, I tried to visually express what is being said in the audio with the use of animated quotes and images.

My Magazine Story For my magazine story I decided to interview my friend, Sarina Vito, about her journey fighting and surviving Leukemia. Sarina is currently a student here at High Point University and continues to inspire others with her story. In my magazine I plan on sharing Sarina's  story and how her struggles have only made her stronger.  I also plan on talking about where and what Sarina is doing today and her every day life at HPU. Lastly, I want to include awareness for Leukemia and want to inspire others to help and get involved in finding a cure.  The Layout  Regarding the layout of my magazine I learned how the placement of images and texts really affect one another. I had to experiment with placing my images and texts around in order to have my text somewhat relate to the image. Since I do not have any content written for the story yet, I used the "Fill with Placeholder Text" in order to better visualize the layout. I definitely plan on adding mor...

Overview In this newest rough draft of my audio story I made a lot more improvements. I improved my blog by adding animated text. These animations consisted of titles, quotes, and important points that I wanted to emphasize to the viewers. I was also able to replace pointless images with title frames throughout the audio story to improve the quality. As I continue to work on my audio story I plan to add more animations to the images and the transitions between the images to create a more appealing video.  What I Learned While working on my audio story, I had no idea how to add text and animate text when working in Adobe Premier. After watching the youtube video "How to Animate a Title", I quickly learned how and became a pro at creating titles and animating them. Although I mainly focused on my titles moving from left to right or up and down, in the future I plan to use the opacity tool in order to make the titles fade in and out of the frame.

The Image  For this assighment I gained inspiration from my favorite place, my bed! The decorative pillows that are placed on my bed consist of all my favorite colors, which made this project visually pleasing for myself. I based each color I used on one of my pillows. However, I didn't get to use all the pillows since we could only choose three main colors or swatches.  Swatches When I was creating the swatches it was more difficult than I expected. Choosing the first round of colors, as seen in the first column to the left going down, took some time because I had to experiment with different hues in order to find the color that best matched the pillow I was using as my inspiration. However, the difficult part was creating faded colors, as seen in the next two columns, that weren't to drastic of a change from the first color. In order to create this faded effect I had to lower the tint percentages in each box more and more as I made my way to the right. Namepla...

The Animatic This was my first time working with Adobe Premiere CC 2017, besides working with in class projects. The purpose of premiere is to create visuals for certain clips of audio, such as a still image video. I have recently learned about how important visuals and audio can be to a project. Visualization has the power of communicating with the viewer about the topic, which is especially important to those who may speak another language or have impaired hearing. Audio and sound effects helps viewers of impaired vision understand what is going on in the project as well. When working with Adobe Premiere I definitely struggled a lot throughout creating my project. Unfortunately, I could not figure out how to add text to my images. This frustrated me because I had a lot of creative ideas that would emphasize important points that I was trying to reach. I had ideas such as adding bullet points of the interviews plan of action and the reasoning they choose the shark or bear. Howe...

The Five Compositional Elements  I recently have bought the iphone XR which has one of the best camera qualities I have ever seen. Now, when I take pictures with my phone and add filter apps such as VSCO, Instagram, and Snapchat, somedays I really feel as if I am a "talented" photographer because of how well the pictures come out. The use of high quality phone cameras and editing apps can make a picture taken with little effort seem as it was professionally taken. Compositional elements of how a photo is taken has the same effect on photos. The way the camera is positioned and the background surrounding of images has a large impact on how a photo looks to the naked eye. For example, when a photo with a symmetric background is compared to a photo with a messy background, the photo with the symmetric is much more appealing. Compositional elements include negative space, symmetry, layering, angels, framing, lines, shapes, and the rule of thirds. In this blog, you will see fiv...

My Audio Story  A question often asked as an ice breaker growing up was wether or not it would be safer to fight off a bear or a shark. This would create heated conversations and would bring up very knowledgeable points, however there is no right or wrong answer. There are scientific statistics that may show us which one may be the smarter choice, but people still have their opinions. I interviewed students and experts in order to introduce ideas to the audience, enabling them to create their own opinions and theories. 

My Poster  For my movie poster I imitated the infamous movie poster from the movie Mama Mia. In the original movie poster the background was an ocean that was blurred to make it appear as if the ocean was sparkling. In my movie poster, I used an image of light blue glitter to imitate the ocean in the original movie poster. In the original movie poster it had main actress, Amanda Seyfried, in her wedding dress from the wedding scene in the movie. Instead of using the image of actress Seyfried, I replaced her with an image of myself from prom. For my title and the rest of the text, I tried to copy the same font, however could not find the exact one. This project was very challenging in that it was hard to imitate the exact tools that was used to create the original movie poster. This was my first time creating my own movie poster from scratch using photoshop. While creating my movie poster, I learned that it takes a lot of creativity and effort to create a poster from scratch....

My Audio Story A question often asked as an ice breaker growing up was wether or not it would be safer to fight off a bear or a shark. This would create heated conversations and bring up very knowledgeable points, however there is no right or wrong answer. There are scientific statistics that may show us which one may be the smarter choice, but people still have their opinions. Characters and Experts  In my audio story I interviewed my friend, Hannah Brubaker, about her opinion on the topic in order to introduce ideas to the audience. In my final audio story, I plan on interviewing a zoologist and psychologist. I choose to interview an zoologist because they study animals and their behaviors as well as animals interactions with their ecosystems. I choose to interview an psychologist to understand why one might choose a shark instead of a bear, and vice versa. Music Overall, I want my audio story to have a dangerous and wildlife effect on the audience. In order to cr...

What I Did I began by my assignment by searching for funny memes on google to get inspiration but couldn't seem to think of anything funny, original, and relatable. Then I started to ponder as to what my peers and I, as high point students, experience every day that's a struggle. This is where I came up with the idea to make a meme about HPU's parking. If you don't have a car on campus or haven't heard about a friend complaining about parking, it's almost impossible to find a spot! Hundreds of students have asked the university to add parking for students, however we see that there are just more graduate buildings taking over these parking lots instead. I choose a picture of a filled parking lot and a picture of Nido Quiben to mask on top of it. I then used the quick selection tool to edit out the surrounding area behind Nido. After this I created a layer mask in order to just have Nido overlaying the picture of the parking lot. As I looked closer I noticed h...

Audition This is my first time ever using an app in which you can edit audio. I was really intimidated by how audition was set up, especially with the display of the audio wave forms. When I began watching the videos assigned to me for homework, it made me a little more comfortable with the idea of working in audition.  As I began to practice more in class and work on my short ended story, I learned that it is not as difficult to work in audition, despite how intimidating it looks. What I Learned  While working in audition to create my short audio story, I ran into numerous issues. The first issue being that I couldn't seem to figure out how to make the audio clips flow into one another. I finally figured out how to make the clips flow better by overlapping the clips at the very end of the first clip and the very beginning of the clip that comes after it. However, when I overlapped the clips the audio intertwined with each other. After playing around with the audio I l...

My Own Instagram Filter I have always filtered my pictures before posting them and all it took was a tap on the one that looked best. This assignment has taught me how much detail it entails in order to make a filter and how it is much more work then it seems. What makes creating your own filter so difficult, is the fact that each little detail effects one another. For example, If I add to much saturation and then add vibrance, it may make the colors to bright and ruin the overall picture.  In order to achieve this filter, under properties, I added brightness/contrast, vibrance, hue/saturation, and color balance. Specifically, under brightens/contrast, I decreased the brightness to -26 and increased the contrast to 63. Regarding the vibrance, I increased it to 62. Under saturation/hue, I decreased the hue to -8 and decreased the lightness to -3. Lastly, under color balance, I decreased the cyan to -22,  decreased the magenta to -15, and increased the yellow to +4. If you...

Four Kinds Of Audio The only time I listen to podcasts are during long car rides or a long flight. After reading “10 tips for using audio more effectively” by Casey Frechette, I learned that podcasts are much more than just a discussion between the interviewer and interviewee or two people sharing their thoughts about a specific topic. Now when listening to podcasts, I am able to identify the four kinds of audio: interview clips, voice overs, natural sounds, and ambient sounds. These four types of audio are what makes the podcast enjoyable to the listeners. When listening to a podcast from Radio Lab, where they discussed American Democracy, I noticed how they interviewed a student in order to portray the audience with more background information on the topic. Throughout the podcast, a specific type of audio that I noticed was used often was the use of ambient sounds. Ambient sounds are usually a  background noise that sets the tone or mood. For example, in the podcast they playe...

My Background Hello, my name is Rachel Deodato. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York by two loving parents and grew up with two brothers. I went to a small all girl private academy during my high school years, making High Point a big change for me. Growing up I was very athletic, I swam competitively for twelve years and was a member of the cheerleading team all throughout high school. Having the opportunity to travel and spend my summers in Montauk, New York, my brother and I learned how to surf and eventually began to surf competitively. When I graduated High School I decided to retire from swimming and cheerleading to focus on my studies. However, I had developed a strong passion for surfing and could never give it up.   Where I Am Now I am currently involved in greek life as a member of Zeta Tau Alpha. Recently, I had the honor of receiving the position of Panhellenic Assistant. With this position I get to work with other sororities and  fraternities ...