"Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night, till it be morrow."
Well, this is it. My last blog post for DMA. Kind of bittersweet, really. I did enjoy the class this time around, but it will be nice to have my free time back. I just want to say how great it was getting to see everyone's work these past few weeks. Great job to everyone.
I learned quite a lot about the concepts and principles of new media from this class. Since I already know about most of the media in its physical form, it was nice to learn about the ideas that gave rise to the creation of these things I see and interact with everyday.
In addition, the class gave me a really fun excuse to make some videos, which is something I've been meaning to do all summer, but haven't had time to. While I'm not really proud of everything I've made in this class, it was a good way to keep from getting rusty.
All in all, I just want to say that I had a lot of fun here and I hope everyone else did too. have a good rest of the summer! Below is my trailer/preview/teaser thing for the class. Enjoy:
Alright, alright, alright! Gimme a second! Geez...
Okay, but anyway, this week has been fun. Audio and video are two mediums that I really enjoy composing in. I've been working in Audacity for quite some time, so I know how to circumvent a lot of the problems that the program poses, which is pretty conducive to an enjoyable time composing audio.
As for video: Second verse, same as the first, as they say. I've been editing for a while as well. Though this did give me a really fun opportunity to work in Adobe Premiere CS6, which I recently downloaded. Great program. I think UNCSA made a good choice switching to it as the primary software for editing students.
Both video compositions were pretty easy to make, based on my knowledge of both editing and previous versions of Premiere, not to mention the blinding speed with which Premiere operates. So, in that context, I had a lot more brainpower to devote to the compositions themselves.
Speaking of that, heeeeeeeeeeeeeeere they are!
#1:
This first one is all about the 60s. I used the "Wave Speech" from "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" as I feel it most perfectly encapsulates the zeitgeist of the 60s. In addition, I tried to juxtapose the images with the words being said. I tried to add some contrast in that way.
EDIT: Alright, so Blogger doesn't seem to want to show this video on the actual blog, so here's the link to it: http://youtu.be/il-iyvlTrbI
And now for #2:
This one was a real treat. I opted for a really random set of clips that relate to me. When I decided I had what I needed, I still felt like there was something missing, so I opened up Adobe After Effects and decided to make this mamma jamma look like it was being played on a very old, broken, tube TV. And this was like candy land to me. One of my favorite things that modern technology is able to do is imitate older technology. It's never perfect, but it gets the idea across, and I'm very happy with how this turned out.
As I said, I got a lot of valuable practice with some new technology that will be invaluable to me as a filmmaker. As such, I would be happy as a clam to do more video compositions.
This clam, specifically. Look how happy he is :)
In terms of reflecting topics and themes, I would love to do more audio compositions. There's a certain quality to sound that makes it so effective at developing a theme or story. Something like making a whole story with just sound, and no dialogue. I think this is great for developing themes.
I can't think of any specific type of composition that involved combining any of the others, however, I think it would be fun to experiment with making interactive YouTube videos. It's aways something I've wanted to experiment with, but never had an excuse.
So yeah, that's my two cents. Just adding my suggestions to the thought potluck. Check back later for more bloggy fun!
Copyrighting is something that we're all familiar with in some form or another. For me, I have a very personal relationship with the issue based on an incident I had with the folks over at YouTube around a year and a half ago.
For a while, during my high school years, I had a moderately successful anime parody series (part of what is known as the "abridging" trend on YouTube). Things were going well. I was getting some fun editing and voice-acting practice, and people liked the work I was putting out.
However, four episodes into the series, the original publishers of the show I was parodying decided that I was infringing on their copyright, and registered a complaint with YouTube. This was perfectly fine, as they were well within their rights to be wary when it came to copyrights. Unfortunately, they managed to register complaints with all of my videos but one. Apparently, such a large volume of these requests caused YouTube to simply remove all of my videos.
Here's the annoying part: they stated that I could file a counter-claim, to get my videos put back up. When I went to do so, the part of the site where I would file the claim, as well as my videos, and my user page, were completely off-limits to me. All I was allowed to do was watch this video:
Now, it's bad enough that that is the least funny Happy Tree Friends video, probably ever. But what's worse is the fact that I was mandated to watch it. YouTube would not let me into my own account until I watched the video and answered questions about it.
I would like to draw attention to a very specific piece of the Fair use article we read as part of today's work:
"The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: 'quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied'"
I just thought that would be an interesting thing to share from my experience with copyrights.
On a less obnoxious note, my current favorite sampling artist is a trip-hop artist known as Blockhead. If you've never heard of him, it's okay; he handles a big part of the producing for underground rapper Aesop Rock. If you don't know who that is, it's okay, but here's one of his songs, because you should know him:
Anyway, Blockhead: Blockhead, as I said is a trip-hop artist. The interesting thing about him is that all of the titles from his songs come from the various public domain voice samples he uses in his music. These are often bits of dialogue, with few musical samples. He has a really interesting and eerie kind of sound, which is aided by the ambiguous context of the samples used. Below is one of my favorite songs of his, "Long Walk Home," which is a great example of his eerie tones and a rare case of his musical samplings. It makes me think of lost souls wandering an abandoned purgatory manifested as a foggy city at night. Anyway, without further ado, "Long Walk Home" bu Blockhead:
Basically, I had downloaded a bunch of sound clips from the game Portal 2 (which is amazing) from a character named Wheatley. Wheatley is an artificial intelligence core that was specifically designed to be a moron in order to dumb down the maniacal, monolithic, central AI unit called GLaDOS that was killing off the scientists that built her. As such, Wheatley is hysterical. He is voiced by Stephen Merchant (one of the creators of the original "The Office").
Listening to the sound clips, I was rolling on the floor laughing at the character's attempts to passive-aggressively threaten the player character. And then I imagined him constantly pestering someone over the phone, thinking they have left the party they were both at. I really like the way this turned out, especially how it actually sounds like a call made from a party somewhere. I like to imagine the point in the middle is the point where I just walked out of the bathroom at the party, and Wheatley realizes that I've been there the whole time and tries to play it off as a joke. And the ending. I think the ending is pretty funny :P
Anyway, I hope you all enjoy listening to my answering machine as much as I enjoyed making it.
Day 2 of audio exercises! Huzzah! Well, as my Facebook post indicated, I didn't really have any trouble using Audacity, since I was already pretty well-versed in the program. Anyway, here's my audio composition:
I guess I should mention the purpose of this thing and how it relates to me. Basically, The people you hear cheering are meant to represent my desire to make other people happy. I love when I do or say something that puts a smile on someone's face. The weird instrumentation you hear (sampled from various Slipknot songs) is representative of my often blunt nature. I'm not really one to sugar-coat things. And then the abrupt ending is meant to draw attention to the composition's meager length. I'm 5'4". Add it up.
basically this whole piece, like pretty much everything I've ever done in Audacity came about through experimentation, which is why it sounds so weird. This represents a lot of how I conduct myself creatively. If I hit a block, I just try different things until one of them works.
I learned that sonically, my house is pretty boring. In fact, a lot of the area around my house is boring too. That's why I had to sampled so many things. Fortunately this is something I'm very used to doing and something I enjoy, so it wasn't that big of a deal.
Well, that's it for this, oddly short blog post. Here's hoping the next one is longer, eh?
P.S.: here's the song I referenced in the title of this post. Just in case anyone is interested:
Limitless. FIlmmaking was created as a way of making the impossible possible. That's why I like making movies: there's nothing that I can't do in that domain, so long as I can imagine it.
--Is this different from what other people think you do?
Probably. Most people hear "filmmaking" and they probably think of big-budget summer blockbusters, or "Oscar movies," or whatever. While these can be great, they're not really my style, or what I aim for.
--How do you know if you're on the right track with a project?
If I stick with it to the end. I'm a person who is easily led by my own excitement. Sometimes I get really excited about a project, and partway through it, I realize it sucks, so I dump it. If I can make it past the excitement stage and keep going, I'm doing well.
--How do you go about making choices?
Creatively? Gut instinct. I like to think I have enough of a grasp of the creative things I undertake to know what will work, and enough of a vision to know how I want to tell a story.
Otherwise? Pure logic. I try to weigh all the components, the pros and the cons, to try and make the best decision I can.
--How do you know when you're done?
When I'm happy. Once I look at the piece as a whole and decide there's nothing I could do to make it better, then I'm done.
--What's your workspace like?
Messy, next question.
--What are your essential tools?
Other movies, for inspiration. Friends, for critique. Music, to set the mood. Obsessive compulsive tendencies, to get me as closes as possible to being right the first time.
--What's the most surprising tool you use?
Cartoons. Cartoons were such a big part of my life, even beyond my childhood. They taught me how to act, and more recently, how to do crazy sound design. For example, one of my favorite cartoons "Courage the Cowardly Dog" has many episodes that are nothing less than works of art. For example, this is a piece of the original score for the show, entitled "The Tower of Dr. Zalost:"
Amazing.
--What was your biggest mistake or the one you learned the most from?
Going to NYU's version of UNCSA's summer session. It was terrible. We had a week to write and produce a short film. A WEEK. It was expensive and the film I made was terrible. It tought me the importance of pre-production.
--An example of your work:
This is the first film I ever made. It was for the Radio and TV class I mentioned in the last post. Working on this was the first thing that made me want to be a filmmaker.
Art. I'm made of art. Ever since I was a small boy, I've had an interest in art. One day I just started drawing, and it all took off from there. And it never stopped. I stuck with drawing most of the way through elementary and middle school, until my sophomore year of high school, when I discovered acting.
Acting was an entirely new beast. I had always known I had the ability to act. It was something that just came naturally. I had always done cartoony voices and memorized scenes from cartoons, movies, etc. it wasn't until high school where I actually did anything with it. In a moment's decision, I tried out for my school's production of "The Wizard of Oz."
I ended up playing The Wizard.
Bad picture, but here I am in costume.
From then on, for the rest of my high school career, I was an actor. It was through my school's theatre program that I was introduced to the world of film, but more on that later.
Actually, right about...
"Who influenced you?"
...Now. This man:
Sorry ladies, he's married.
This man is Scott Paynter. He was the director for my high school's theatre program. This being the case, I ended up working with him a lot. He's the guy that made me an actor and a filmmaker. not only have I learned a tremendous amount from him about both acting and directing, but he's the reason I ever even considered film as a career option. He taught a class at my school called Radio and TV. I bet you can guess what it was about. But it was here that I began to learn the language of cinema (Camera angles, lighting, etc.) and where I became fascinated with the world of filmmaking. I can't possibly thank this man enough for everything he has done for me.
And also...
This man:
GENIUS!
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is the first film I saw that really put me through an experience. It was something more grand and important than a story could ever be. It was so different from everything I had seen, and in that way it was perfect. In my eyes, something so delightfully twisted and beautifully ugly could only be inspired by the mind of a genius. Thompson was that genius who, to this day, inspires me to embrace the weirdness inside. This is my favorite moment from the film. Gives me chills every time.
"Where influenced you?"
This one's kind of tricky, since there really is no one place that inspires or influences me. I can often be inspired by particularly interesting rooms and such. Like rooms hidden behind bookcases, those are usually pretty cool. Or something like this:
Awesome.
So a room with a particularly interesting layout or characteristic can intrigue and inspire me, but there's no one place that is a source of any significant inspiration for me.
Well, that's all for this post. On to the next one! Wherein I am interviewed by myself O.o
This week's work has overall been very enjoyable. Makes me heistate to call it work, really. But anyway, now's not the time for chit-chat! Onward to today's image compositions!
First up is my Jackson Pollock "painting" created over at jacksonpollock.org. Check it:
So obviously, I Photoshopped this a little bit. Though in truth, all I did was add the canvas texture over the image to make it feel more like a painting. I actually really like this compared the the usual fare I churn out on that site. Unlike past experiments, this one seems to have more of a structure and color scheme to it. And I really like the way some of the strands of paint look and just the dynamic of all the shapes.
Up next, my multiple exposure picture. BAMMY WHAM:
This one's neat. Surprisingly, with all the tinkering I've done with photography, I've never done any multiple exposure stuff before. You can get some cool images. Plus, since you can see my eyes so many times, the lights in the background call to mind various things extra-terrestrial.
And now, my first ever GIF! Huzzah and Hooray!
It starts with a normal shot of me, then goes to black and white, then to a very warm-tinted picture, then a very cool-tinted picture, then a funky inverted picture. Fun, cool looking, and I like the color palettes I came up with for the warm and cool images.
And last but not least, a fake ad for composition and really just creating in general:
I've always loved these types of "interactive" ads. ones that encourage people to do their own thing with them. And what better type of ad to be interactive than one encouraging people to make something? I say none! There are none better! Also I had a lot of fun composing and formatting all the text the way it is.
Well, that's all for this week! Have a great weekend and stay tuned!
Ahhh, images. I love images. Being a filmmaker, I suppose it makes sense for me to be more predisposed toward the visual side of things. Today's work was very enjoyable. I love finding new image manipulation websites like Face of the Future. Plus, I think everyone wants to know what they look like when they're ancient, at least as a curiosity.
On that note, here are the results of the time I spent with Face of the Future:
From left t right: Me as a fully grown man, me as a ba-- AH! OH! GOD DAMN! Wha--? Geez. Oh. Uh. Whew! Wow, okay.
Uhm, then it's me as an ape-man... thing, and me as an old man. Whew, that was creepy...
Overall, the Face of the Future site was interesting, though very clearly imperfect. I do love the idea however.
Next up in my adventures for today was the Warholizer tool from BigHugeLabs.
I don't really love this one. I couldn't seem to get colors that really pleased me. That and the original Warhol piece on which this website/program/script is based uses more than a monochromatic color palette. Again, seems like an interesting idea, but it's far from perfect.
This is my image manipulation for the day, representing my soul. Now being a staunch Atheist, I don't necessarily believe in the concept of a soul, so I opted instead to represent the things that tend to deeply move or affect me emotionally. They are (I'll let you figure out what's what) the happiness of others, imagination, music, filmmaking and just expression in general, art, and women (in a purely emotional way, I swear. It's weird and I don't feel like explaining it).
Anyway, I think this piece is okay. It was a little rushed, and I'm not 100% satisfied with the composition of the image. I may go back and tweak it in the future. I do really like the background and the picture of myself that I used.
Well,
I personally have been using StumbleUpon for quite some time now, and discovered
something interesting: after looking over another classmate’s journey, I
noticed that they were less than pleased with what StumbleUpon had to offer. I however, more often than not find the
site’s results most satisfactory. For
example, the first site I was taken to in today’s “stumbles” was a list of “25
Spectacular Movies You (Probably) Haven’t Seen” (www.highexistence.com/25-spectacular-movies-you-probably-havent-seen/). I have already seen and love roughly half the
movies on this list, and almost all the rest of them I have been meaning to see
for some time, based on reccomendations.
What
this leads me to believe is that one’s own personal StumbleUpon account evolves
over time in a very interesting ways, starting first with some very base
interests, then gradually filtering through them based on what you like or don’t
like to bring you much more relevant, interesting content. Personally, I must nothing but the most
exuberant kudos to whoever coded the site, because that is truly a stunning
feat.
Next
on my StumbleUpon journey, I was taken to Drinkify.org (no doubt referencing
the popular music library program Spotify).
Basically, you type in the artist you’re listening to, and the site
suggests what alcoholic beverage should accompany you on this sonic adventure. The site doesn’t feel totally finished, at
times suggesting things like “1 Schlitz, garnished with an umbrella.” However, it’s certainly worth a look.
Next
I was taken to this:
Color me intrigued, heheheheh... I'm sorry for that, truly I am.
I’m a sucker for
street art, so I was pleased.
Next was a short
tutorial on how to make chalkboard paint (paint that dries into a chalk-able
surface) in various colors. Not much to
say about that, but it sounds fun.
I have no
words. That looks delicious. Now I’m hungry…
Lev Manovich’s Principles of New Media:
Numerical
representation: All new media is made up
of code, whether it was created on a computer or transferred to a computer from
an analog source. Basically, if it’s on
a computer, it’s new media, and if it’s new media, it’s on a computer.
Modularity: New
media is represented by repeating modular structures on various scales. They can be made up of pixels or vectors, or
what have you, but each modular piece is more or less the same. They all come together into a larger final
piece of media, but retain their individual status as pixels or what have you.
Automation:
Pretty self-explanatory, computers are a great outlet for modern media, because
hey are able to flawlessly handle numerical representation (principle #1) and
modularity (principal #2) because they remove the possibility for human error.
Variability: This
means that because a piece of media exists in one form, does not mean it can’t
exist in other forms. I could watch the
same video on YouTube, posted by two different people. The content is the same, but there are likely
variations, like the image quality of the video.
Transcoding: The
idea behind this one is that since new media exists mainly in computerized
form, it has multiple ways of being decoded.
We as humans assign value to an image on our computer screens based on
what we can see in the image. However, that image also exists as a bit of data,
easily interpretable by a computer that is unable to discern the intrinsic value
we assign to the image based on its content.
Also!
As a last little offering to those reading, I present to you Noah
Guthrie. Posted below is his cover of
the atrocious musical mistake that is “Sexy And I Know It” by LMFAO. However, something you may notice upon
viewing of the video below is that this is actually… *gasp* Good. Yes, Noah is an up and
coming artist on YouTube (recently featured on The Today Show), who I like to
consider the male Adele. His voice is
truly a spectacle in this day of male tenor vocalists. Anyway, I’ll stop jabbering. Here’s the song:
"What is composition in general, what are the differences and common features of various types of composition, and what is unique about new media composition specifically?"
Generally speaking, composition is the purposeful arrangement of different pieces or elements for the purpose of creating one cohesive whole. But speaking generally makes you look stupid. Composition can be any number of things to any number of people.
This guy likes to "compose" his toenail clippings into mosaics of his dead relatives. Different strokes... I guess?
For example, Ludwig Van Beethoven was a composer, and the professional video editing software Avid is called "Avid Media Composer." Both have the name of composer, but both are entirely different. One is a world famous, long dead, deaf classical music composer, the other one is Beethoven. Or, maybe it's the other way around, I may have messed that up.
Give me a break, alright? They look, like... almost completely identical.
But the point is, "composition" is merely a blanket term in which lie innumerable meanings to be discovered by the individuals who have so chosen to compose. By my count, that's everyone.
Yes, EVERYONE.
You see, everything everyone wants to do is made up of different pieces and parts. Even small things. Let's say, I want to go out to dinner. I can't just say that and it happens. I need to bring together, a car, gas to run the car, money for the food, a restaurant at which to spend the money, and myself, to taken by the car, fueled by the gas, to the restaurant at which I'll spend the money. All those things need to come together in order for me to go out to dinner. Also, I should probably have some company.
Pictured: company. Sigh...
So obviously, just saying what composition means is not enough, and the important part is what it means to those who do it. Uh-oh... Sounds like a segue into...
Talking About Myself!!!
For me as a filmmaker, composition means many different things. For example, on the screenwriting side, composition could be as simple as the formatting of the script. Is it right? Does it work towards telling the story I want it to tell? Composition can even refer to the story of the script. Do the elements of the script come together to tell the right story the way I want it told?
As a director, composition could mean the way the actors are placed within the frame of the camera. Are they where they should be? Is their placement conducive to the tone of the scene? How/where are they going to move? Will it offset the established tone? How should I correct or work around this?
All these choices that I have to make about my film come together to create what I consider the best possible iteration of the idea I want to express. To me personally, that is composition.
