My name is James Kaleb Combs and I am a Sophomore at North Carolina State University. I was born and raised in Charlotte North Carolina which is where I attended Hopewell High School. My major is Communication Media and I am interested in becoming a television producer or technical director for a television company one day. Here at NC State I have taken courses such as Media Writing, Critical Analysis of Media, Communication Inquiry, Television Production, and Technology in History. These courses have led me to obtain aspirations of becoming a successful Producer in the future. As well they have furthered my curiosity on the matter of Communication and Media.
The course that is responsible for this work is COM 267 Electronic Media Writing: Theory and Practice. This course has required me to start a professional blog, create an audio visual project, and a podcast with a group of fellow classmates.
The Blog
My Blog was on the North Carolina State football team and my opinion on how the team was doing. Throughout this project I tried to complete a blog or two every week through the entire semester. My goal was to give an insight on the game that the team was playing that next weekend before every game. And after every game give details on the game and my thoughts on what happened. I tried to make the blog interesting and informational for the readers. As well I wanted to be a credible source for the readers of the blog. To do this I had to watch and attend almost every game as well as do research on stats and names of players in order to be credible. In the blog there are links to other sites that gives the reader an opportunity to go and read more on what I am writing about. As well each blog post had a relevant picture that depicted what the blog was written about. This blog gave me a great opportunity to see what writing in a professional community atmosphere was all about as well it let me write about something I am very interested in.
Audio Visual Project
My Audio Visual Project was on the Cattle competitions at the North Carolina State fair. We were required to make the video anywhere from two to four minutes mine was right around three minutes. In the video I got plenty of footage of many competitions and things around the fair. The video it self has to interviews in it. The first interview was with a girl who has cattle farmed for many years and been a champion in numerous competitions at the North Carolina State Fair.In the video you see her interview then her actually winning the competition she entered this year. As well I interviewed a judge of the competitions. This project was my first experience with shooting and editing film. It was a great experience and showed me that although I have work to do on editing techniques I am very interested in this kind of thing.
Audio Project
The Audio Project was a group project where everyone in the group had to come up with an issue or interesting topic to talk about for 5-20 minutes. My group did the travels of a North Carolina State athlete and how they got there. As well everybody in the group had to create a commercial that was either 30 seconds or 1 minute long. My commercial was on I Love New York Pizza a popular restaurant on Hillsbrough Street. In order to make this commercial I had to do research on the actual restaurant and deals that they had. In the podcast it self I interviewed Taylor Gentry who is the fullback on the NC State football team. This interview was edited down in the final project for time purposes. This project was a real learning experience working with others to create an actual podcast that sounds like it could be on the radio. It helped me understand editing on the computer and how to use background music.
The work I did in this class has really gave me a great starting point to where I eventually want to be. All of the main projects that are described previous to this have given me great knowledge on where I am and where I need to improve in order to reach my goals. COM 267 was a very informational course that has shown me every aspect of being a COM major from the broadcast aspect to the production aspect. It has been the first class that has really shown me what I want to do. To be a television producer one day all of the information and techniques I learned in this class will be utilized.
