Ostia Rewind

Working in the Ostia group I realized I'm more conceptual and more theatrical when trying to plan a presentation. I like the idea of skits or movies instead of powerpoints. We each divided up an area that we were interested in (I took art). From there we researched our individual areas. I found that Ostia has tons of Mosaics in a lot of their baths and other dwellings. They also had frescoes which is a mixture of plaster and pigments (in same cases egg yoke) that they use to paint on the walls. It seemed like if the colors hadn't faded that Ostia would have a lot of reds, oranges and browns as their color palette. Logan researched the construction of the buildings and discovered a material called tufta that they used. Brian did the history of Ostia and how it went from being a predominate city that people had to travel through to being sacked and deserted. David researched the excavations of the city and just how far the city has come from being looted to being restored. Abby reported about the lives of the people in Ostia and how their schooling was similar to ours and their daily chores.

Abby suggested that we be a travel agency trying to convince people to travel to Ostia. So since my computer has illustrator I created the brochure and the all the postcards. I also complied a video of pictures of Ostia to play while we passed out our travel packets. I also burned everyone cd's of Italian language so they could get excited about going to Rome and Ostia to try and learn the language. I also had everyone send me their pictures that they wanted in the powerpoint and complied the powerpoint presentation. (For the next project I'm not going to be the only compiling everything together)

Everything went pretty smoothly for our presentation and I think most people got a good understanding for Ostia and are interested in visiting.

From other presentations I know I learned interesting things but at the time it's hard to recall everything because the presentations were packed with lots of information and there were so many back to back that it makes it hard to decipher which fact went with what group. I liked how a couple of groups created games for us to play (jeopardy and the board game) and the trivia questions at the end of the group on the roads helped to have to remember what they said. It would be nice to have 2 days of presentation if the groups are going to run over but since our class only meets once a week it'd be hard to do that. I agree with the professors to shorten the time. It's hard to try and present about all of our topics because there's so much information that it's hard to pull our the most important, relevant and interesting facts to present on. I think every group had that problem of editing and knowing what to edit. Because I may find something so fascinating but no one else could so they won't remember what I told them. I could through a lot of facts at them but they might not remember any of them because they'd been overloaded with information. So I think the hardest part in presenting is trying to know the audience and knowing how to edit one selves. That's something that I even have to deal with constantly in my studio classes. It's so easy to keep piling on design after design but it actually takes skill to know when to stop, stand back and take things away.

For our next presentation I think we'll be better at being able to edit ourselves. We'll still have all the knowledge of the problem but not maybe have to share it all unless asked a question that way we can portray the most important information in the time allotted.