"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.
