Assignment 6: Semester 2 Core Competency Reflection

The Power of Music: An Analysis of Eminem’s Darkness

The instructions for this project read as follows: ‘For this assignment, you will choose a song that was written in response to a significant event or social issue and create a visual poster (either digitally or hard copy). You will present your poster to the class.’ I had in mind a couple songs. Most of them, however, had its message rather blurred in the writer’s attempt to tastefully present it. But Darkness did not have this problem.

The song is an event-detailing of the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting. Eminem narrates the shooting from the perp Stephen Paddock’s perspective. Some things that were required in the project was identifying certain things in the song and the connections that could be made back to the message of the song. Things like the literary devices and whatever quotes to name but a few. To make this poster, there were a few steps I took. I first started by filling each requirement with information. This wasn’t done with bullet points: I made sure that the text was able to be pasted directly when I began the visual section.
To make the visual part of the project, I used Gimp. I had already used it previously for another similar assignment–as shown below–and I was satisfied
with it in the end. I hesitated using Power Point. It’s an easy tool and it definitely has less, to an extent, less bugs than gimp, but it was ultimately more limited than Gimp. It was invariably the case for me that choosing the images took the longest time. I spent a while scrolling to find fitting images. However, the hardest things for me was deciding on a layout and the overall composition of all the images and their accordant images. The layout had to accommodate for the big blocks of text. Throughout the process, there were several times I just decreased the fonts to do so. I have to say the research part was the most interesting step in this whole project. Stephen Paddock, the shooter, was an interesting case study. Because of that, there was plenty to write about. I honestly really liked the format of this project and the project as a whole. After all this, I presented this project to the class. I don’t know what I think about that part.