Hi, my name is Adham and I'm a Computer Science and Interactive Media student. In the fall of 2016, I hadn't even heard of 'Interactive Media'. That's When I ran into a friend who was leaving the arts center and was talking about how amazing a class called Communications Lab is. Later on, quite a few of my friends shared that sentiment, so when I had a free elective to take, I thought I'd check it out. Here's my journey through the class!

During the first class, our Professor, Craig, gave us 30 minutes to go out and shoot and edit a short film, and then we had a film festival (we won). Over the next few weeks, we learned the basics of frontend web development, and our first assignment was to make a website for the short film. For me, coming from a CS background, this was basically heaven. I was already starting to fall in love with the class

We checked out professional microphones, and went on a journey to record and edit a story. My group and I loved shawarmas, so what better story to record than the story of the shawarma. I'm actually getting hungry writing this thinking about shawarmas but I digress. We went to the vegetable market and interviewed people there and heard some amazing stories. We then headed to a shawarma place, Lebanese Flower, and interviewed the general manager. He gave us free shawarmas, god bless his soul.

After reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, we were tasked with creating an interactive comic. This was right after a few facebook fights happened on campus, and we wanted to hightlight those conflicts in a light that will remind us how privileged we are as a community. So with Pedro's unbelievably artistic talents, we set off to do that.

The last project was pretty serious, so why not lighten up the mood? We checked out cameras that are way too fancy for what we needed them for, and explored the idea of being a good roommate! I have to point out that at the IM showcase, everyone was watching this video. People were talking about it like it's made by a Kardashian. Yes, it's that good.

The last aspect of the class was animation and stop motion. We had to record an interactive story. While we were brainstorming, one of our group members was eating an apple next to her Apple computer. Genius idea comes to our minds, why not have the apple fall in love with the Apple computer! That does not sound cheesy at all! I think we executed it well though. After taking about a thousand pictures (thank you Google for the unlimited Drive storage) and editing them into a stop motion format, we were satisfied. Also the apple's name is Al by the way. Was Al successful in seducing the Apple?

Communications lab ended up being one of my favorite classes so far in university. I mean how many classes ended up in students getting free shawarma?