Regent Park Focus

Friday July 29th, 2016 Today we focused on working on our “Pokemon Go!” RPTV episode. Although most outdoor video shoots are quite productive, some, like today’s wasn’t. We had a lot of issues with our microphones, camera batteries, and even the memory card. Eventually we decided to cut our losses, and came back to Focus to spend the rest of the afternoon productively working on our radio shows. We finished working on our scripts, and decided on timings for the show. We really had a hard time making it all fit into our 1 hour schedule, but after a lot of collaboration, we made it all fit. We are really excited for our radio show on Wednesday.  By: Saeema Saifuddin

Thursday July 28th 2016 As every other Thursday, today was another day of video game design with Eddie! For today, we decided to move away from 3DS Max a little bit and get into the Unreal Engine. He taught us a number of things like how you can create so many different types of games with Unreal Engine like first person shooters, third person games, vehicle driven games, birds eye view games, 2D games and a whole lot more. For Todays lesson, we just used the third person style. We started off by learning how to use the controls in Unreal and what all the basic options are. We then started modelling standard primitive objects like tables, chairs, etc. and then he taught us that we can actually enter the world as a pre-built character as we’re building it to test it out. He went to teaching us how to build stair cases and ramps for our characters to interact with. Once we got used to the basics of the Unreal Engine, we went back into 3DS Max and he taught us how to build somethi

Its Friday Fun day!! Today we didn’t have any workshops, but we filmed the studio shows that all our groups prepared for. We did 2 episodes on hairstyles and one Girls Talk episode. While one team was in the studio shooting their show, the other teams were in the media lab preparing for the next shoot. It was a very productive day, and a good way to conclude our week. By: Saeema Saifuddin

For today, we had our third game design workshop with Eddie. Last week all we did was model a snowman, which was super easy but this week we got deeper into how modelling works in 3DS max and Eddie introduced us to animating. We started off by learning how to use a whole bunch of tools which are very useful when modelling and then by the end he showed us how to create an airplane. Once we finished modelling the airplane, he had us actually animate it to make it look as if it is actually flying. Something else we did was, we started filming a documentary of Regent Park Focus and how things work around here. I got a few shots of outside Focus as well as a bunch of footage of the inside of Focus. I was also lucky enough to get an interview with Eddie to ask him some questions about what he does at Focus, which will be included in the documentary. By: Pierce Holmes

Today, we took part in another very fascinating audio engineering workshop! Heather came in again and guided us through the steps of putting on a radio show. She gave us a radio show checklist listing every step that needs to be completed while producing our shows. She also had us do a mock radio show to practice our sound engineering and to get us used to using the studio. After each of our groups finished the audio engineering workshop, Michael, one of the staff members at Regent Park Focus, conducted a short workshop that taught the participants about the basics of editing sound on Audacity, a sound editing program. The information learned in today’s workshops will be very beneficial to the participants when they do the sound engineering for their own radio shows. We are all very excited to hear what the participants produce for their shows next week! By: Alicia Anglin

On June 21st the first half of the show addressed the unprovoked racially motivated attack on fellow Radio Regent contributor . Suresh Ommi. During the second half of the show the crew discussed National Aboriginal Day and the social movement to make it a National Holiday with Liz telling harrowing stories of her time in the Northern Territories of Canada and the comments she heard directed towards the Indigenous Populations therein.

On June 14th, the show was focused on the Orlando Shooting. The concept of Toxic Masculinity was presented in depth and references were made to Donald Trump and American Gun Culture. The very notion of whether someone could justify owning a gun was so engrossing that the question was debated up into the very end of the program.