My First E-Poem

When I was thinking about what I should do for my first electronic poem, I had all sorts of ideas running through my head but I am really happy about the one that i chose to do. I chose to do my first poem on how powerful a smile can be. I had a really good image in my head when I started to work on this poem and I knew exactly what I wanted it to look like. I saw many other electronic poems and I had so many great ideas to what i could have done to express my true meaning, Then I started. I logged onto power point, started a new slide and realized that even though I had all these great images of what I wanted to do, I had no idea how to work this program and that it was going to take me a long time to get comfortable with it. I knew that I wanted to start it off it something dark and gloomy and work from that. after sitting and thinking for a bit, I realized the direction I was going to come from. I was going to start the poem with all of the things that make me frown and upset and end it with how a smile can change all of them. so I brainstormed for a some time thinking about all of the things that make me frown and which one would be great to start with. after some time it hit me, Rainy days Suck! the worst feeling is when its a beautiful day out and big gray clouds roll in to steal all of the sunlight. so I decided to have my poem start as a nice sunny day that gets destroyed by some big gray clouds that roll in and spill rain drops all over my beautiful day. I had no idea how i was going to do this i just knew that is what i wanted and I was going to do anything to make it happen. I looked in the shapes on power point and to my surprise, there were clouds. I selected three of them and colored them gray like big ugly rain clouds. now that I had my starting point, it was time to start playing around. I looked at all the animations and I was pretty comfortable with power point before we started this so I knew what I was looking for. I wanted the clouds to roll in slow and gloomy so I just chose slide in from left and selected slow. once I saw how good that worked, my mind started to jump all over the place with ideas. once I was done with the clouds I wanted to make it rain but I had no idea how I was going to do that. I tried the rain drop shape bit that looked to corny for me. I eventually came up with the idea of blue lines slowly coming down and filling the ground with water but I had no idea how I was going to do that. After trying a bunch of animations, there was one I especially liked because it actually looked like a rain storm, not just lines appearing, they slowly get longer from the clouds to the ground and once they hit the ground I made a blue circle fade in so it looked like the rain was collecting in a puddle. I was really proud of the animation that I had just created and then it hit me, Poetry usually has words in it. I was wondering what I could put to express how these rain clouds made me feel and why they made me feel like. after sitting there puzzling myself for a half hour, I decided to go with a lot more simple approach. I then typed in "Rainy days" and after that my first slide was finished.

After my first slide i realized that i could do a lot more on power point than I had ever imagined. I thought that my poem was going to look like a bad slide show with words flying all over the place randomly in some ridiculous pattern with annoying power point sounds going off, but I was wrong. I was actually able to create a poem that expressed how I feel. I can show visuals that I never would have been able to put on paper in a million years. if i had typed the poem that i am making in this power point and turned it in people would think a fourth grader typed it. The first three lines are, rainy days, getting bad grades, creepy little snakes. That does not sound like a college student wrote that but with the animations, the poem has a complete different feel. After creating my first E-poem I am very excited to see what is in store for the rest of the semester and i can not wait to make another.