I decided to recreate the Titanic because it was one of the first movie scenes I thought of. I thought it was a movie scene that everyone would be able to recognize, and that it would be generally easy to recreate. The balcony at the student center reminded me of the setting of the movie, especially at sunset. The railing is similar to the railing that was on the boat. I had one of my teammates help me reenact the scene; she was Rose and I was Jack due to our height differences. Our outfits are different from the ones that the characters wore in the movie due to the fact that neither of us have old-fashioned clothes like the ones that they are wearing. Overall, I think I made a good recreation of this scene and I feel as though everyone would know what scene we are recreating based on my photo.
I chose to recreate an image from Baby Driver because it seemed manageable and I recently watched it again. My friend has a car on campus and I used my own sunglasses and earbuds. I tried finding another pair of sunglasses that were all black but was unable to. This assignment made me realize how difficult being an actor is. I attempted doing the same facial expression depicted in the image, but with the sunglasses, I realized how hard it can be to convey emotions effectively.
I decided to recreate a scene from The Big Short which is one of my all-time favorite movies. This scene was very feasible to recreate since I had similar clothing, notebooks to scatter around my dorm, and a desk to include. However, when trying to capture the scene I encountered some challenges as I had to set my phone up on a timer which was balancing on a stack of books on my bed. Additionally, due to the phone being on a timer, I struggled to position both of my hands accurately in the scene due to the rush of lying down and getting into position. I enjoyed this activity as I had to be very resourceful and creative about what scene I chose with the materials available to me.
The moment I saw this assignment, I knew exactly what scene to recreate and how I was going to recreate it. The high school musical during my senior year was Mamma Mia! where I was fortunate to play the role of Tanya. The costumers were incredibly generous and allowed me to keep the white jumpsuit I wore when we performed the show’s finale: “Waterloo”. I brought it to school with me thinking of it as nothing more than a Halloween costume, but I was excited to find potential other uses for it, including this assignment.
The only obstacle I faced through this assignment was what to use as my microphone in the recreation. I ultimately decided to use a bottle of dry shampoo, mainly because it was white and matched my costume. I then photoshopped the recreated image onto a sparkly silver background and put it side-by-side with the original scene.
This has definitely been one of my favorite assignments by far, and I loved being able to revisit one of my favorite movie musicals!
For my data viz charts, I tracked the relationship between my overall stress level from 1(no stress) to 10(severe stress) and five essential factors of my daily life(socializing, creativity, sleeping, exercising, and studying. I calculated these factors by how many percent of twenty four hours they take.
I observed that stress is correlated with creativity(reading and writing) ina way that the more time I spend on creativity, the more stressed I am. I think that this is partly due to the fact that most of my creativity tasks are assigned by my Creative Writing First Year Seminar class, which brings a lot of stress for me. More studying time, which indicates upcoming exams, also contributes to increased stress.
More socializing seems to lessen my stress level. For example, when my sociali time increases toward the end of the week and during the weekend, my stress level seems to decrease.
Surprisingly, exercising does not seem to decrease stress for me. On Mondays and Wednesdays, during which I spend the most time exercising, I feel relatively more stressed.
For the data viz charts, I tracked my overall stress level out of 10 for the day, my top 5 music artists for the day, and what I was reading that day. Overall, I wanted to see the correlation between what I consumed creatively compared to my stress levels.
I noticed that certain genres of music correlated to my stress levels of the day. I was listening to a lot of Kendrick Lamar and Jasiah leading up to my chemistry midterm. It made sense that I listened to Rachmaninoff, Berlioz, and Shostakovich leading up to my orchestra concert on 10/29/2023 as we played Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture, and Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
For reading, the most notable difference was that the days I was less stressed, I read my current (re)read, ‘The Master and Margarita’ by Mikhail Bulgakov. As it got closer to the concert date, my stress levels increased as well as the percentage of my time spent reading music. I really like the graphs, mainly because of the pretty colors and how organized everything looks.
The peaks in stress were definitely associated with major events that I had going on in the past two weeks, so that was interesting to see. I would keep doing what I am doing if I continued to do this project but maybe make the excel sheet a bit more streamlined, so I didn’t have to keep creating new series and data points. I really like working with excel spreadsheets, and I didn’t realize that it could be so useful in self-analysis as well.
Throughout my whole life, I have been most inclined to think about life from a scientific and mathematical point of view. So, I was excited to hear that I would essentially be able to run an experiment on myself for the next two weeks. I decided to split the data points that I would be collecting throughout the week pretty evenly between categorical and numerical with the intent to use them to analyze each other. My main goal was to single out some things in my life that I believe make me a better overall person (working out, reading my bible, etc.) and compare them with different evaluators of my mood (happiness, anxiety, etc.). I assumed that these things that I have always strived to do daily improve my mood and overall well-being, but I wanted to put that up to the test in this study. My first area of visualization includes five simple graphs showing fluctuations in my numerical evaluators of mood throughout the week. It was interesting to look back at some big things that happened in my life during these two weeks and see how my mood was during that time. For example, my parents came to visit during homecoming weekend which is represented just before halfway through these graphs. It is very clear that my happiness peaked during this time and my anxiety bottomed out. The next four areas of visualization were what I was most looking forward to examining when I began this study. As expected, talking with others and taking time for self-care had a positive outcome in many different categories throughout these two weeks. A friendly conversation with someone in the class had the largest statistical impact on my mood, dropping my discouragement level by about .5 on average. Surprisingly, there was no correlation displayed between the number of people I ate with at a meal and my anxiety levels during a certain part of the day. Looking back at the way I conducted this study, I think it is interesting that my happiness levels were on average a 6-7. I consider myself a usually happy and “glass-full” person, but one thing I realized from this study is that there are still many levels to my happiness. During the normal times this week when I was thoughtlessly going through life, I would put a 5-7 for happiness even though I was still happy. In my mind, there was nothing that was going on that deserved an 8-10 at the time. But during the few times when something bigger happened, like my parents coming to town, I decided it was deserving of a higher rating. Essentially, I feel as though I was more than a ~6.3 happy over the past two weeks, but at the same time I feel that I rated myself pretty accurately which is very interesting to me. This introspective study was one that I enjoyed analyzing and I could see myself doing something similar in the future.
The main question I wanted to answer was whether if there was a correlation between my sleepiness and stress level. Throughout the two weeks, I gave myself a level from 1 to 10 for both my sleepiness and stress level each hour.
From the first two graphs, which each represent my sleepiness and stress level, I could not find a clear trend since the data was not organized. Thus, I created a graph that averaged the numbers I placed each day. From the third graph, there isn’t a clear correlation between my sleepiness and stress level, but the numbers slowly become similar in the afternoon and later the day. I chose to visualize my raw data using line graphs because I wanted to find trends, and since I recorded my data every hour, it would make sense to keep the data consecutive. For the third graph, I decided to use a bar graph because I wanted to compare the two numbers, and a bar graph shows a comparison most clearly.
During the data gathering, I initially had trouble determining the right number that represents my current state of sleepiness and stress. However, I did realize that there was no proper way since I am the only person who knows these feelings about myself. I trusted my instincts and just wrote the number in my mind. Also, there were times when I took a nap in the middle of the day. I decided to exclude these hours as it would not be reasonable to make sleepiness and stress values while being asleep.
From the results of my data, I realized that my stress levels grow with my sleepiness, with the exclusion of mornings. I have always known that I am not a morning person, so it was not surprising that I feel very sleepy in the morning. However, I did not expect my stress levels to increase with my sleepiness. I believe this may be because I know my productivity throughout the day, so when I feel sleepy on a time I should not be, I would feel obliged to work, causing stress. If I were to continue this project, I would include another variable: how long I am focused. I believe sleepiness and stress level are complete opposite variables that affect my ability to focus, so it would be interesting to test the relationships of these variables.
The question that I wanted to answer was how content I am with my life, and I measured “contentness” by utilizing five different categories: social life, productivity, outside time, inside time, and creativity. I chose to track those categories every other hour, only filling in the category that I indulged in the most for that specific hour. At the end of each day I reflected on how I felt, giving the day a number from one through five. Based on those numbers, I was able to conclude that my “contentness” is mostly dependent on how much I have socialized that day. On days where I rated the day a one or two, the amount of time I spent inside was measured the most. While gathering and evaluating the data, I had to consider other external factors such as developing a sickness towards the end of week one, which definitely impacted how accurate my data could’ve been for trying to measure how content I feel in life. I chose to visualize my data by using a colored bar graph, because I think that it’s easy to understand and interpret. These visualizations tell me that I feel most content and fulfilled when I hang out and socialize with friends and people, which is surprising because I consider myself a huge homebody, and that I get energy/appreciate my time spent alone. If I were to continue this project in the future, I would narrow the categories down to one in order to get more thorough results where I’m able to focus on one aspect of my life. I found this to be a valuable tool for self analysis as I was able to visually see a correlation between the feeling of fulfillment and my everyday activities.
