Blog Central
Final Project: The Man. The Myth. The Paul.
Have you ever experienced a person, an ENTITY, a being that was so out of this world?? For instance, a legend.. Someone, or something, that many people could speak of but never truly understand? How about the man, the myth? I’m sure you know of him. He has even pervaded the DS106 culture… now, he must be unleashed, unveiled, to inspire, to amaze, to, well… do all of the above…
Now would you look at that smile. It seems he could brighten up any room, push away the rainy clouds, and leave just clear, blue sky.
However, even the Man, the Myth, the Paul has his flaws. For example, he has a tendency to go overtime on his work, and forget about deadlines. He has been meaning to work on this shortcoming, but justifies the ends with the means; the means of exalted work! maybe…. anybody?
Now, if you were to ask The Man, The Myth (yes that’s required when mentioning him) what exactly motivates him, you might hear any number of things… However, the single most important thing that The Man, The Myth would say, is that inspiring other people to do great work is what motivates him down to the core. He loves to see people inspired by his efforts and greatness. So, below is a fitting motivational poster, where The Man, The Myth, is motivation enough for anybody. All you need to do is take him in, and experience the newly-arrived motivation, success, and much, much more.
I know The Man, The Myth may seem like a very mythical creature, where extensive fables don’t even do him justice. In reality, however, he is quite a humble, and generous gentleman (no this is not a joke). Every morning when he wakes up, he sends a good morning text message to every single person in his contact list. Now if that doesn’t describe the likes of a selfless individual, I don’t know what does.
I want to take a moment here to really unveil The Man, The Myth. It is important that you gain a fuller knowledge of what goes on in the exalted life of The Man, The Myth. When he is not engaging is selfless activities such as creating extensive tutorials for friends, he can be seen in the Cave of his residence working tirelessly on Remixed Assignments and Audio mixes, one of which is found below…
He is also known to spend considerable time immersed in the psychological literature, mastering the sub-fields of Personality, Cognitive-Behavioristic, Humanistic and countless other offspring from the original field.
Here he can be seen deeply engaged in study, a steller intellectual indeed..
Before the day is all said and done, The Man, The Myth, The Paul would not feel complete and satisfied, without having given advice to future scholars and DS106-ers. Here are some key things that he wants you to think about:
1) Blog Early. Blog Often.
2) Stretch your limits to the max. He does this before breakfast is over.
3) Don’t leave your assignments until the last minute. However, the Man, the Myth, the Paul is guilty of this every ONCE in a while…
4) Remember to eat your wheaties.
And Lastly..
5) Even the Man, the Myth, the Paul gets inspired by others. In the words of Shaun T., “DIG DEEPER!”
In all seriousness, thanks to the wonderful professor Alan Levine, whose support and feedback throughout the semester have been very helpful. If it wasn’t for his watchful eye, and persistent check-ups, I don’t know if this would be possible. I’d like to say that I enjoyed this class, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to take it over. I’d also like to thank Jim Groom for his constant support, along with Martha Burtis. You guys are great!
Until next time: The Man, The Myth, The Paul, is officially signing out.
Second Created Assignment: A Dose of Family Recollections
For my second created assignment, I wanted to explore the aspect of childhood memories. The assignment can be seen here!
Here is my example of what this assignment might look like!
For my version, I went back to the year 2000 when my family and I took an amazing trip to Paris, France. I thought this would be a cool memory to reflect on and construct an assignment out of because it entailed such a cool experience and one which I’m sure I will never forget. I think it is an interesting idea to reconstruct a very fond memory in the form of a visual design, where you really have full control about what you want to be included and how you want to organize everything. That is the inspiration for the assignment.
In executing my version of it, I wanted to give it a sketchy look, and I thought a black and white visual element would go well to kind of represent it as something that has passed by and is cemented fairly deep in my past. So off I went, searching le Google (which can be a dangerous thing sometimes) and found some images that I wanted to include. These were an image of the Eiffel Tower, a sketched plane and a head with one of those French hats with the thing sticking up on top. I’m pretty sure that’s the actual description so. One of my first memories in Paris was sitting in this breakfast place, and it just had such a different feel to it. I was in a completely different culture than in America and one of these hats came up quickly in my memory bank.
Of course, I can never forget going up atop the Eiffel Tower. It is certainly an incredible landmark, but I feel that it has also grown ever tourist-y at the same time, but nonetheless, it was a great experience. Anyways, since this was one of my most memorable trips of all time, I figured that I would incorporate it into an assignment, which I hope you all enjoy! Thanks!
My Two Created Tutorials: Christmas Came Early ;)
My first tutorial is found here, where I detail my process of completing my EMRE 5807 assignment that I created, which is linked to in the post.
My second tutorial is meshed in with the Growing Up with Drew Barrymore assignment post.
This was a good learning experience for me because I never really enjoyed doing tutorials, but this process helped me understand the importance that they serve, as well as the heights other people travel to help people in their creative endeavors, so it was very positive in these respects.
Help Take Down EMRE 5807! Tutorial Example
This post will go through a nice little tutorial for my created EMRE 5807 assignment.
This first step in my creation process was to track down a Kim Droom image. Since I didn’t think any of these existed, I did a google search and it brought me to a class video from a Spring 2012 section taught by Jim Groom (no, the similarity in names are not a coincidence lol). Once I had this video up I wanted to freeze frame Kim to get him looking the way I wanted. Below is what my screen looked like when I did this.
So as you can see, I had Kim Droom just how I wanted him here, so my next step was to take a screenshot with the program Jimg, and save the image to my desktop. I took the screenshot by simultaneously clicking Command-Shift-1, after which I clicked on the screen to lock in the image, changed the name of the file and clicked on “Save”. At this point a box will pop up asking you where to save the file to. I chose to save it to my desktop.
My next step was to convert the image to a .jpg (or JPEG) file. I simply just clicked on the file name until I could change the text from .png to .jpg. I then imported the photo into iPhoto.
While in iPhoto I clicked on the “Edit” button at the bottom, and started playing around with some different things, such as the Sharpness, Definition, Highlights, and Exposure. There is obviously no “end all, be all” way to manipulate an image, it is basically depending on what you are going for. I didn’t want to make my resulting Droom image too extreme, or too boring, so I choose to make him look a little sharper, along with highlighting some of his features, like the crazy hair and awesome aviator shades.
After I did these edits, I decided to crop the image down to get it more zeroed in on Droom. You can do this by going to “Quick Fixes” and then clicking on “Crop”. From there it is pretty self-explanatory and easy to play around with. my resulting crop looked like this:
Once I had my image all cropped and how I wanted it, I imported it into GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, which can be found here. It’s not that GIMP is a terrible program to use, it just makes some tasks more complicated, and obviously it can’t do everything Photoshop can do, so there are limitations. However, for an assignment like this, it serves its purpose, so not TOO many complaints ha! Once I was in GIMP I selected the Scissors Tool, which helped me cut out Kim’s attractive figure.
Once I had Droom selected, I clicked on the image and the dashed lines flickered around his body. I then right-clicked and selected “Edit” and then “Cut”. Here is what my screen looked like afterwards:
Next I wanted to paste Kim Droom into a new layer so I could edit him more finely:
Next I used the Zoom tool, followed by the Eraser tool to get it looking more clean, which is what you see here:
So now that I had Droom looking all sexy and clean, my next step was to make a background copy of this layer with Kim Droom, so I could rename the other layer, “Layer 1″. This Layer 1 would be where I would set the background color that you see in my example. In the image below, I also show some other tools I used in the design, such as the “TextEdit” tool, and the “Mode” tool, which I used to create the cool effect that Kim Droom’s image has.
Once I had all this cool stuff sorted out on my poster, I wanted to add a detective’s badge image underlying the Kim Droom text on the left hand side. To do this I dragged the image of the badge that I got off of Google into the GIMP icon, which then opened it up in a new layer. To cut it out, I used the Scissors Select tool that I highlighted earlier in the post;
..and then followed the same “Edit, Cut–> Paste Into…” and then Selected Layer 1 to paste it into.
I also selected the “Burn” effect from the scroll down menu “Mode”..
This gave it a cool look among the other design elements of the poster. To move the badge over to underneath the selected Kim Droom Text, I simply chose the “Move” tool and centered it. This image illustrates this.
So, this was my overall process, and I hope that I laid it out clearly enough, which I feel that I did. If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to ask! Enjoy, and happy blogging!
Creation for a Community of Creators: Kim Droom and EmRe 5807
My first created assignment can be found here!
The idea for this assignment came from an occurrence at the beginning of my Spring 2012 semester of DS106 with Jim Groom. One day, I was sitting in Blackstone, about to do some work for DS106. I pull open my blog and see an overbearing black screen with color text, mixed with caps and lowercase. The most distinguishable feature of the screen was the name EmRE 5807, the hacker. many people in our section got hit by this guy, and we were all equally freaked out.
The next class meeting, Jim Groom comes in with this ridiculous wig, sunglasses, and a cup of coffee. He introduced himself as Detective Kim Droom. The video for this class can be seen here. It was a great class to just laugh a lot at the situation, which was overall very frustrating. So that’s the backstory for Kim Droom and EmRe5807, who inspired this assignment.
Here is my own example of this assignment:
As you can see, Kim is a pretty intimidating dude, one which I would not want to have coming after me.
The idea here: I thought that in creating this assignment, it would give people a chance to be creative with their design skills, whether it be in the form of a wanted poster or some type of announcement, whatever. I had a good time with the assignment, and tried to include everything that would look intimidating and that seemed necessary to meet the needs of a wanted poster. For example, bold fonts, threatening statements,etc. I took an image of Kim Droom from the recorded video of a class session. I also added a cool “Burn” effect to Kim Droom to make him look brighter and sort of on fire, so to speak. I felt that this would make him more intimidating and alarming for EMRE. I was working with GIMP, which can be quite challenging at times depending on what you are trying to do, so I will have a tutorial for how I made this assignment. Anyways, hope you enjoy!
Remixed Assignment- Seuss’ed Up Fast Food!
Here is the link for this Remix assignment which really allows for a ton of creativity 
The assignment is to take the original assignment of creating a ridiculous, absurd, impossible fast food order, and adding an element of Dr. Seuss to it. To do this I first decided on what my order was going to be. I kept it simple, a Coke with ice. The next thing I did was write a script for the order, which I impressed myself with. Here it is:
I would like a coke with ice
I would not like a coke with lice
I would not like it with some mice
I would not like some lice and mice
i would just like a coke with ice.
I would not like a coke with spice,
i would not like one with some lice
i would not like it with some mice,
i would not like some spice and lice
i would not like some mice and spice
I would just like a coke with ice.
I would not like a coke with rice,
i would not like one with some lice,
i would not like it with some mice,
i would not like one with some spice,
i would not like some spice and lice
i would not like some mice and spice,
i would not like some rice and spice,
i would not like some mice and rice,
i would not like some lice and rice,
i would just like a coke with ice,
Yes, I think this will suffice.
Not to toot my own horn or anything, but how is that for cool?!
Opposites Attract Mashup Assignment!! 4 Stars and Many More Hours
This assignment is a difficult yet fun one, and can be found right here! The assignment forces you to dig up two different songs that have similar beat structures but are in very different genres, and herein lies the greatest difficulty. Of course audio editing can be tedious and cumbersome, but once the final result is out and hours upon hours are behind you, the feeling of accomplishment is great.
After struggling for a long time with what songs to use in my mashup, I went over to Witt LeFew’s version of the project and was impressed. He did a great job of making the two songs mesh very well, which is not easy to do. He also included a great point in the write up, which is that the songs should have similar beat structures, which is something I hadn’t thought of while in the pre-production process.
For my version of this assignment, I used the songs Lady Madonna by the Beatles, and What I Got by Sublime, two altogether great songs, and also a couple of my favorites.
Lady Madonna
What I Got
Now, here is my remixed version of these two songs, which I worked very hard on.
In this mix I also used a record scratching records sound clip from FreeSound, which was pretty useful.
Now, these two songs aren’t that highly alike in terms of tempo and such, they do have much in common, if you just stop to listen to both for a few seconds each. Both are great songs in their own respect, and as such, I wanted to see how they would fare in a mashup together. At some points it was quite difficult to get the transitions to be smooth, and I hope this doesn’t take away too much from the end result. That being said, it is a pretty tough task to take on, and I worked hard and tried to do the best I could with transitions, and with the points in both songs that I felt would be useful to put together. Anyways I hope you enjoy my final result and feel free to provide criticism and such because I need it! Thanks!
Growing up with Drew Barrymore Assignment/Tutorial! 4 Stars
Firstly, this assignment can be found at here, and I certainly recommend it because it is a lot of fun.
For my assignment, I used Drew Barrymore, although afterwards I realized I could have chosen someone else, so I hope this doesn’t affect anything, but I had a good time making this project. I used clips from some of her major movies, including E.T., Scream, 50 First Dates, and Music and Lyrics.
Below I will include the clips that I used.
So again, I could have chosen any actor/actress who had been a child star or started their careers early, but I think Drew Barrymore is such a great example, as well as a great actress, with an interesting past. I started the assignment by going onto IMDB to get a fuller picture of the movies she has acted in, which was also very helpful for the timeline aspect of the project. So after I chose the movies that I wanted to use for my mashup, I went and found the clips on YouTube, which I assume I don’t need to explain how to do.
In order to download the videos from YouTube onto my desktop as MP4 files, I went to KeepVid, which is a pretty easy way to do this sort of thing.
As you can see in this photo here, I copied the youtube video link and pasted it in the bar. After this you want to click on the Download button beside the text bar.
After you click the download button, you will see a pop-up box that asks you if you want to run the application, so you need to click on “Run”. The next step, you will see a screen similar to this…
The best thing to do at this stage is to right-click on the Download as MP4 link, which is highlighted in blue, and click on Download Linked File As, and save to wherever, but it’s easiest to save to Desktop.
The next thing you want to do if you wanted to edit stuff out of the various clips, is open up the program MPEG Streamclip. Using this program you can Trim clips, copy them, cut pieces out of them, take out the audio or video from a clip, and all other sorts of fun things.
Abover you see a picture of MPEG Streamclip open on my computer, and I have highlighted the Open Files option under “Files”, which is one way to open up a clip into the program. Another easy way to do this is to just drag a file from your desktop right into the window where you see the five blue dots. From there you can edit the clip by going to edit, where you’ll find numerous options, such as “Trim, Cut, Copy, Select In, Select Out” and others. The ones that I used for my assignment were the Select In, which is how you select a point in the clip that you want to start from, and Select Out, which is how you end the selected clip. One you have a clip selected you can do a few things:
1) Cut the selection out of the clip that you are editing.
2)Trim the clip to include ONLY the selection.
3)Copy the selection.
So now that you have a pretty good idea of what goes on in MPEG streamclip, it will be useful to learn how to export the edited clip. 
Here you see a list of options (although some are grayed out because I am not actually editing anything). The option I used was Export to MPEG-4, which allowed me to export the new, edited clip to my Desktop, which I then imported into iMovie.
This photo above shows you how to import movies from your computer into iMovie. For my project, I did this 4 times since I used 4 clips for the Mashup. As you can see there are two levels, the one on bottom being where the clips import to, and the top representing where the clips for the project go. Once I had each clip imported I dragged them into their appropriate slots up top. One of the major editing things that I did in iMovie was add Fade-Ins and Fade-Outs for the audio to make it flow more smoothly. Below are a few pictures of how I did this..
As you can see next to each option (Fade-In or Fade-Out) there is a little box that says “Manual”. I clicked on this box which allowed me to edit the length of time the audio would either fade in or out, which was useful. It is best to use your own judgement for these types of things, so it really depends what the clip is and how you feel it should sound.
Overall I really enjoyed this assignment because I think that it had a cool idea behind it. In order to really show the progression of Drew Barrymore’s career, and her physical growth, it is necessary to include all of these clips from her movies as a way to illustrate this. I also enjoyed this assignment because it allowed me to experience more video editing, which is challenging but rewarding in of itself.
So after all of this time, it is probably time to show the actual final version of my mashup, so here it is and enjoy!!
gnihtyrevE sI A ximeR!
The first thing I did for weeks 13 & 14 was check out Kirby Ferguson’s web video series, Everything is a Remix, which is a really interesting take on how original concepts or pieces of media are used and used and used over again. His videos can all be found here!!
To start the process of remix analysis, I want to start with the quote Kirby used in Everything is a Remix part 2. He said, “Creation requires influence.” This is an important point here, because the Star Wars trilogy would not have been nearly the same without all of the pre-existing films that transformed the movies into what we know today.
A phenomenon from the third remix video really struck me as powerful: this phenomenon is known as multiple discovery. One example of this that I could really connect with due to my background in psychology and science, is the proposals of evolution by natural selection around the latter half of the 19th century. Two major figures proposing these ideas at roughly the same time were Alfred Russell Wallace, and Charles Darwin. The idea here is that multiple people or entities can unleash content of a very similar nature at around the same time and this has some very unique implications. One of these that many great figures have postulated, is that invention or discovery is inevitable because of momentous work done beforehand that has put all the right factors in place to make it possible.
Remixing is a phenomenon that is natural in my opinion. It is necessary to learn something through imitation, or modeling, at times. As Kirby mentions, we need to copy, before we can move on to transform and combine elements and/or media to make something unique. It is interesting that the line between original and unoriginal are quite fuzzy, indicating a subtle nature of the art of remixing, and one that is successfully done by constant research and further work to manipulate elements into something beautiful and worthwhile.
Finally Kirby’s fourth video is one that really speaks volumes about the evolution of remix, and how he perceives it as an art form.
I really liked the idea of this Intellectual Property that was created, that really conflicts with the much more realistic concept of ideas meshing and sharing bits and pieces of each other. The mention of the concept of loss aversion really brought me back to a research article on Environmentalism that found that people found it acceptable and easier to deny harm to the environment rather than doing good for the environment, which sort of plays into the emphasis we as humans place on loss and having things taken away from us, especially when they are our original ideas or creations.
I really thought the one example of the 2-second sample of the hip hop song was really absurd, and really illuminates how far entities and lawyers have gone with the issue of copyrights and patents. The figure that Kirby presented about the number of patent suits involving software being as high as 62% with as much as half a trillion dollars being lost as a result of these suits. All of this data illustrates the detriments of seriously restricting the use of media for remixing purposes. As an idea of how much things have gotten twisted since the late 1700′s, Kirby presents the original Copyright act and the original Patent act, and what I took from them is that they both aimed at harboring the art being created and desired the education of different people.
Another resource that I looked at that was pretty cool was the video trailer for Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist.
He also emphasized that creativity is not a magical talent, but it is really a result of combining different resources and elements in unique ways that makes it what it is. Next up are some examples of remix…
A Few Remix Examples
Above is one really cool example of a remix/mashup. The person who created this video took a song featuring Kermit the frog and mixed a Miles Davis tune in with it to kind of slow it down and bring more jazz into it. The funniest thing is that these two elements are so unlikely to go together normally that they really flow together nicely which is odd, and amazing at the same time.
Another example, which I found pretty humorous, was the Don’t Tase Me Bro mashup seen below:
This news event was funny in itself, but to intermix MC Hammer with it is just legend, wait for it… DAIRY!
Something like this is definitely a remix because you are chopping up a specific video to include something that is meant to say like MC Hammer’s “Can’t touch this”, which in this case is, “Don’t tase me bro!”. Obviously it is a pretty crude and absurd example, but it accomplishes something unique and is a good, silly version of a mashup/remix.
And for a final example:
This clip takes a scene of Hitler and portrays him as a producer of “Downfall” and just does a great job of showing someone as evil and vicious as Hitler and changing the storyline to a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown for use of parodies and such, which is totally ridiculous for the context of the clip, but really has some level of truth and seriousness underlying all the madness of the remix. This was really well planned and carried out, and I can definitely respect this as a remix and appreciate the different characteristics that make this a successful copy, transformation, and combination.
Final Project Proposal: A Day in the Life
Here is an episode from A Day in the Life, which is a very unique show that documents a lot of behind-the-scenes action on different people and/or organizations. This video documents a day in the life of an auction center.
For my final project I was thinking it would be awesome to try my hand at making a video for a day in MY life. I haven’t decided whether I want to make it like a spoof or more serious, but I am leaning towards the funnier side. I want to keep my fans entertained, and although my life may be busy, it isn’t always the most exciting. I will probably do much of the filming without audio, and do the add-ins at a later time, to make it easier. I like the idea of the production of a web-isode like this, because it gives me the opportunity to be as creative as I want, and allows me to interact further with mediums like video and audio. Would love to know what you all think about this! Along with the video I will include a tutorial for the techniques that I use in the video and the process of putting it together, and all of that good stuff. Look forward to making it hopefully!
Week 10 Summary
Analyzing a great movie scene in three stages
Return to the silent era preo-production!
Welp! That’s about it for week 10/11 (Ha)
Play by Play: Pre-Production Work
This assignment seems like it would be fun; I think announcing a pro sport like soccer would be an incredible job to have, both because you would be interacting and engaging your knowledge around some of the best players in the world, and also because you have that power to influence and connect to people through what you say on the air, and how well you get the message across. I started out by looking at a some examples that would actually bring me to a completed assignment. Many of the links found through the Play-by-Play assignment page were no longer working, so I just got an idea of what some people did through the ones that did work!
The first example I viewed was done by a guy named Andrew Johnson; he used an NFL touchdown pass play as his video for which he would do commentary. He did a decent job on it, but his commentary was a bit off at one point and this took away from the quality of his assignment, but an overall good effort. I realize that video editing can be tough, along with getting the audio to match up well. One downside here was that he did not underline his process at all, so I couldn’t really gain any new knowledge concerning what he did or what his inspirations were really.
The second example I viewed was done by a former DS106 student James Cruz. His assignment used a Halo clip from a professional gaming circuit, which I thought was really cool. He provided a bunch of off-the-cuff commentary, and sort of used past experiences to augment his explanations and inspirations for interacting with video games. He provided some input to his inspiration to do this assignment and the process that he used to create it. It was an overall helpful source to look at, and I enjoyed watching it!
I started searching on YouTube while thinking about what I wanted to give a blow by blow analysis on. Here is what I came up with… CUTE PENGUINS!! Check it out!
I am probably going to chop this video up a little bit using MPEG Streamclip first off, and then strip it of the background audio. I will probably add a base layer of some type of audio which will work well to complement the scene and my commentary, so it’s not completely boring and solely my voice, so I think that doing this will make it more enjoyable to listen to. I haven’t decided whether I want to use iMovie or Audacity to record my audio. Right now I am thinking Audacity because it is built for doing that, but I will do some research and see what other people have done! Anyways, this is about it for my pre-work for this assignment, and I hope you all watch it when I am finished!
Return to the Silent Era: Pre-Production
One of the Video Assignments that I would love to try my hand at is the Return to the Silent Era assignment. My plan for this is to take the Ultimate Trilogy trailer for Batman: The Dark Knight Rises and turn it Silent style. I think this will be absolutely so cool!
I found an awesome Silent Film Score named Villainous Treachery from Royalty Free Music that I want to use and think would go great as the music for this clip. It is Dark, Intense, everything that fits with the Dark Knight Rises, so it should work out well.
For the Text Cards I am using this layout, and will probably try to find a way to put it into iMovie as the theme, and enter text that way, or use GIMP to do it.
I looked at a few examples of this assignment and definitely liked what I saw. The first one was done by Brittany Parsons, and here is her Finding Neemo in Silence project , which is really awesome. She actually sped up the trailer and the music really reflected this fast motion. It worked really well for the project; another interesting thing that she did was overlay the text onto the trailer, which is something I wouldn’t have thought of doing, but I certainly like the idea.
The next example I checked out was Ben Rimes’s fantastic transformation of the train chase scene at the end of Back to the Future 3 which can be found here . Ben used many of the effects that I would strive to use to make my movie really aesthetically antiquated and believable. I really have to give it to him though, even though he calls his efforts “sophomoric“, I thoroughly enjoyed his Return to the Silent Era assignment. He illustrated his techniques in a tutorial that is incredibly detailed, and I will thank him very much for it. He also really talked about a past experience in a 5th grade class that I found humorous and which was easy to connect with. So I encourage everyone to go check his example out!
I consulted this man’s helpful tutorial on how to convert a video to Black and White in iMovie, which seems to be pretty simple…
Overall, I think that this will be a fun assignment to do, and I hope to Wow you all and add in elements that you did not see coming! You will see more soon, I promise!!
Some Interesting Tid-bits on the Making-of Good Will Hunting
I found a really interesting piece of information concerning the development of the movie from the Wikipedia:Production section. Apparently, the movie was supposed to originally be a thriller, where Damon was being targeted by the FBI to become a G-Man. However, this original plot was curbed by the president of Castle Rock Entertainment, and molded into the plot we know today. Just to think, I’m pretty sure that if the movie had stayed as a thriller, it would not have left the same impact that it did with the real movie.
It is also pretty interesting that many of the locations that were played off as in Boston in the film, were actually filmed in Toronto, Canada. It is curious why they wouldn’t just shoot the majority in Boston, MA.. MIT and Harvard in the film were actually at the University of Toronto, but nevertheless, did not interfere with the story or believability. IMDB Trivia
I also found it really interesting that Roger Ebert posed a question as to who all of Damon’s brothers in the film were named after. In a response to Ebert, they were apparently named after directors that both Affleck and Damon would like to work with. IMDB Trivia
I would definitely classify this movie as a Drama due to many of the “deep” emotional content and storyline of the film. AMC Dramas lists Good Will Hunting as a great drama that was made after 1960, and I also used additional evidence from this AMC Dramas page to supplement my reasoning. Under the Dramas category page, it lists these types of films as “serious presentations or stories with settings or life situations that portray realistic characters in conflict with either themselves, others, or forces of nature. A dramatic film shows us human beings at their best, their worst, and everything in-between.” According to this definition Good Will Hunting certainly qualifies, as it shows Will at a stage in his life where he is conflicted; he is faced with someone else who is challenging him and he is forced to make some changes and major decisions in his life.
For the montage assignment, I used a few very good scenes from the movie and I am very content with how my final product came out. Here is the It’s Not Your Fault clip, a very emotional yet groundbreaking part of the film. The other clip I used was the Failed Therapists part of the movie, which I used for the beginning parts of my montage. The last clip I used is included in the three step scene analysis post , which is the scene of Matt Damon and Robin Williams at the park.
Here is the final version of the montage!
I had a lot of fun making this thing, it felt good to get my feet wet with some basic video editing. MPEG Streamclip is really a nice, kushy tool to use, and allows you to cut certain pieces of the scene of from an entire movie, extract audio, trim a scene and all that good stuff. In picking the parts of scenes that I wanted, I would start watching, go to Edit , and then click on Select In at the point where I wanted my trimmed clip to start, and then do almost the same thing, except hitting Select Out for the end of the clip. After I followed these steps I would go to Edit yet again and then click on Trim (I know, so hard right?!). It’s pretty simple to Export these trimmed files after you have messed around, and sliced them up within the program. All you have to do is go to File and then Export to MPEG-4 and save it to wherever you want (I saved my clips to the Desktop).
To do the actual organizing and final editing I used iMovie which is a great resource for people who use Mac. I basically put my clips in the order I wanted them and fiddled around with transitions, volume levels, fade-in’s and such. When I first put in transitions they were way too fast, so I went back and edited them all to last for 1 second, and edited my audio fade-ins to be 2 seconds, which turned out pretty well. The quality for these clips were not all perfect seeing as how I took them from different videos but I did my best to make it look good and flow well. Anyways, that’s about it, and as always if you have questions or want ti leave some comment love, go right ahead!
Reading Video: A clip in three stages
I’d like to start off by saying that this movie is one of my favorites: the acting, production, story, all come together to create a beautiful movie. I chose the park scene from Good Will Hunting starring Robin Williams and Matt Damon..
For this little task, the idea is to look at a particular scene, isolating certain elements, and them bringing them together into a whole. It can be found on the Reading Movies page.
Step 1 was to study the visual elements in the scene without sound. Step 2 had you listen to the auditory elements of the scene without actually watching it. And as you may have guessed Step 3 brought these previous two steps together, to get a sense of what each Step of the process comprised of and then how they all came together to form a cohesive whole.
Step One: Visuals – While I was watching the scene without sound, Roger Ebert’s How to Read a Movie kept running through my head. I was very concerned with where the characters were positioned from left to right, who was at a seemingly higher position than the other, if any. and so on. His article really got me thinking about elements that I had never thought about before while watching movies. Here are the details that I gathered from the first step: It starts out with a shot of the two on the bench, at sort of a neutral stance. The camera then moves onto Robin Williams from the front, and very slightly moves to the right side (at least that’s what I thought that I saw..), and switches onto Matt Damon, who appears to be at a lower position, and to the right of Robin Williams. It is interesting that the frame seems lighter when the camera switches to Matt Damon, and the overall lighting on Robin Williams is darker. The next thing is a switch back to Robin Williams, who appears to be at a higher position than Matt. The camera focuses on Robin for a long while, and appears to be moving to the right side very slowly while he is talking, and then almost mirrors his eye and head movements. At one point he looks up to the sky, and the camera follows him slightly but noticeably, which is interesting. The next interesting thing that happens is that while the camera is focused on Robin and moving to the right, Matt Damon comes into view in the forefront, yet is blurry. Robin Williams maintains this clear focus, and is obviously the dominant one here. The camera then switches onto Matt Damon, and both him and the background is lighter and clearer, with Robin Williams now in the forefront, and blurry. Although it appears that he is probably not the dominant one in this frame, Matt is coming into a level of acceptance and deeper divulgence with Robin and this is a positive occurrence, which could possibly be signified by the lighter appearance. After this point, the camera does a lot of switching, first back to Robin Williams, then onto Matt Damon again, then to Robin, to Matt, and back to Robin- this is probably a part in the conversation where the two are rallying like in a tennis match and going off of each other fluidly; the next thing that happens is that Robin gets up on the left side, he walks away into the background and out of view, and the camera shifts fully onto the face of Matt Damon, down and to the right; playing off of Ebert’s article, usually the camera moves into the diagonal with the lesser angle, which holds true in this part. The last part of the scene reverts to the neutral stance some twenty feet behind the bench, and Matt Damon appears to be slightly left of center.
Step Two: Audio – I really enjoyed just listening to the audio. Pure sounds and nothing else can be a unique experience; it makes you really pay attention to the auditory layout of the scene, without looking for visuals and so on. There is some real emotion coming through this scene with just the audio. It starts with background noises such as the sound of the air and wind, birds, noises from the sky and so on, and Matt Damon’s dialogue, both fast and sarcastic, which is then followed by a substantial pause. Robin Williams thinks, then starts speaking slowly, deliberately… At first Damon snaps back, still fast, and Robin Williams proceeds with his speech. He is showing that he is the dominant one, and trying to show Damon how little he really knows, even though he may purport to have a lot of knowledge under his belt. The background noise, yet quieter now, is always steady and lingering on. Robin leaves spaces in between his pieces of dialogue, he starts steady and then inflects his voice as he progresses through his examples and truly expresses his emotions. Robin’s tone is dark throughout this part of the scene, which is a substantial part of it, he is illustrating what he has gone through… As he gets more intense towards the end, he speaks louder, with less spacing, he is making his point! Next, Robin speaks more calmly, a slower pace, with more spacing between, and the tone of the speech gets lighter, more hopeful, with emphasis on Matt Damon as the decider. It is his choice about what he does, what he lets out and in what he confides to Robin with… Background music, beautiful music starts, at first behind the speech, then carries on by itself, getting louder, perhaps communicating a crossroads, and a transition from both the scene to the next, and from maybe one part of Matt Damon’s situation to a totally new stage.
Step Three: Visual and Audio – The result of bringing these previous two steps together is quite remarkable. Although each stage offered something quite unique, this third stage is where you really appreciate how well everything works together to create a scene that is so beautiful. The visuals come together to create the setting, they connect the audio really well, especially when the focus is on Robin Williams face but yet Matt Damon is there in the forefront, blurry, yet very distinguishable. You can tell that what Robin is saying is really affecting him. At one point you see Matt swallow and you notice his neck protrude some where the Adams apple is. These types of things are noticeable when the two aspects are combined, but not necessarily when they are working by themselves; or at least this is how it was for me. And this is the beauty of a task like this; you get to get a look into how other people read into and recognize what is happening in a particular scene when various elements are at work.
Summary week 9!
All the links are here! Enjoy!
Web Storytelling Assignment
The link for this assignment is here: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/storytelling-within-the-web/
Here are my screenshot images for the Washington Post page that I remixed :p
The standalone URL for my remixed Web Page can be found here: Washington Post front page re-done
What I did, and I thought it was pretty clever and lead to an overall theme, was I converted all Hurricane Sandy posts to Sandy the Reaper, and gave this overall theme of a serial killer on the loose. My idea with this was to create several different angles. A Maryland woman on the beach anxiously looking behind her. I made it sound like there was a killer tracking her and she could feel the killer behind her. There was another post that gave tips on how to stock up on weapons and prepare for Sandy coming into your neighborhood. D.C. schools would be closed on Monday due to the madness that was ensuing by Sandy’s terror. All of these changes led to a terrified and a very on-edge feeling of this newspaper front page. Especially being constructed out of Washington, D.C., politicians would have much to say about this topic as well.
To complete this assignment, I used the Hackasaurus tool, which can be used in any browser I am pretty sure, but I used it in Firefox just to be safe. Within this tool, there exists what is called the X-Ray Goggles, and these allow you to scroll over elements of the web page you are looking at, and allow you to make edits to the page right then and there. You can view the actual HTML and CSS code while at the same time, seeing what it will look like when completed, which is very helpful. While editing the Washington Post web page, I used the goggles to see the underlying code to whichI would be making changes, and made edits to the text, some of the pictures and so on. I know I could not have edited the raw HTML so I was super thankful to have this tool available. Anyways, enjoy this, and I hope it came out as a pretty cohesive story!
“Storify it” Assignment- 2 stars
The link for this assignment is found here: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/storify-it/
Here is the link for my Storify post.
I really enjoyed this assignment because I could take things about my story topic for multiple different sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, and so on. I also really liked adding my own input alongside of the input from various people. This was something that I had never done before. I really will consider using Storify in the future for various purposes. It allows me to string together multiple outlets of information, especially ones with different perspectives, which will help create more effective and enlightening stories for readers. Enjoy the assignment I did, featuring Breaking Bad!
Hidden Story Within a Page Assignment- 2 stars
The link for this assignment can be found here: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/hidden-story-in-a-page/
Here is a screenshot of the page that I worked on.
PostSecret- Hidden Story within a Page
For this assignment I used Hackasaurus tool, which is really cool and pretty easy to use. When you put on the X-Ray goggles you can see through to the underlying HTMl code and allows you to gain an understanding for the framework of web pages. For the excerpt that I created, it was a
A Dose of Brick House Panel Radio Show: Halloween Edition
Here is the link for Brick House Panel Radio Show! http://ds106.us/wp-content/uploads/2012/10radio/brickhouse-panel-showl.mp3
- Quality of audio sound -e.g. is the volume appropriate? are the levels even? Is the sound clear, and free of noises not needed (e.g. mouse clicks, background)? For the most part the sound was pretty clear and you could hear what was being said. The interviews were held in good quality. Some inflections, however, were ear-shockers and could have been adjusted. One of the bumpers was very low in volume and made it difficult to enjoy.
- Quality of audio editing – use of effects, transitions, are the edits clean? The edits were pretty clean, you could tell when there was a caller on the show and when they cut to a bumper. There were few effects however, not that many are absolutely necessary to create a powerful radio show, but overall it was pretty dry.
- Use of sound effects- how are they used? Is it effective? They implemented a thunderous effect at the beginning to set the halloween tone, which worked out well, however, this was really the main effect that was used, aside from the sound of the phone being lifted from the receiver to indicate calls coming in. Therefore, these effects served there purpose, but it seemed as though something was missing.
- Use of music- how is it used? Is it effective or distracting? The use of music as used pretty well, especially at the end of the show after the last interview. One of the bumpers was so low that the music was not effective because it could barely be heard, and I think that this is something that should have been targeted in editing.
- Does the show have a structure? Is it cohesive or does it feel stitched together? The show has the basic structure of a radio interview program, but it really does not feel cohesive. It sounds as though there were three separate interviews, that didn’t really come together as a whole for me, but just stood on their own as a separate entity.
- Does it tell a story effectively? Is there a sense of drama, unknown? I really can understand where the producers were going with this show, but I just don’t really receive any type of story from this. It is a lot of talking, most of it meant to be humorous, and doesn’t communicate a cohesive story like it should. What role did the other two characters have in relation to the Mummy presidential candidate? What made what they were saying important? The show really didn’t answer these questions for me and I was lost. The last part, although pretty damn funny, didn’t communicate anything to me, which it wasn’t meant to, but I felt took away from the story. There is this Mummy presidential candidate, and you can’t hear a word he is saying to the interviewer. Again, hilarious, but doesn’t advance the story at all. Overall, however, it was a very funny show, and was worth listening to, but there are ways that could have made it a more cohesive story. Also, I really didn’t sense any sort of drama within the story, underlying or not, which I found peculiar especially because it is a Halloween edition show. I found this to be lacking, and contributed to me zoning out a few times during the show.
- If you would star this radio show, how many stars out of five would you give to the show? I would rate this show 4/5 stars, because it was indeed a good effort by all, the audio editing was quite respectable, and it made me laugh a lot. Props to Isaac for always playing to the funny side of life.
- So here are my suggestions if this show were to be done again. I would definitely suggest that the writing be done in such a way so that the characters were better related, such that one interview transitioned beautifully into the next interview. There has to be a reason why these other two individuals are chosen to be a part of the radio show. Make this evident within the content. This doesn’t mean that it has to be explicitly stated, but just make the story clear so that the listeners really understand what is going on. I also think it would have been more effective to have a Mummy-translator available on the show, so that the listeners wouldn’t be nearly as lost while listening to this interview. Anyways, I’d like you guys to know that I did enjoy your show, but this is just my constructive criticism! Good job!
Now, turning to my own show…
Radio WRTZ:
Quality of audio sound -e.g. is the volume appropriate? are the levels even? Is the sound clear, and free of noises not needed (e.g. mouse clicks, background)? For the most part, we tried to keep our volume levels pretty even and didn’t want to blow anyone’s eardrums out. We actually found a really cool effect on Audacity, called telephone, which was really useful for the various calli-ins that we had. We were also about to get pretty clear audio through using a microphone that we borrowed from DuPont! (Thanks to anyone and everyone that made this possible; Jim Groom, Martha Burtis, Tim Owenns, etc. You guys are awesome!) There was one section of our show that worked out awesome acoustically. Crystal and I were having a conversation in the radio station, and all of a sudden the rest of the crew bursts in and drowns out our conversations with their voices, and it just all sounded so realistic and worked out awesomely.
Quality of audio editing – use of effects, transitions, are the edits clean? Obviously we had an expert audio editor at the helm in Daniel Zimmerman, so our audio edits were damn near perfect. I find it a little awkward judging our show along with someone else’s, because there were most certainly always be this kind of bias. I am trying to be as honest and fair as possible in doing this write-up and evaluation, however. I will admit that, perhaps, some material could have been cut out in our show, because it was kind of long, and there could have been essentially the same story but with less material. Other than that, our transitions were smooth, such as with the time-passage bumpers. The radio station also had an automatic bumper loop, so it would cut in every so often to a bumper, hopefully this was understood among the listeners. It may have seemed funny, but this was meant to be like this in the creation of it.
Use of sound effects- how are they used? Is it effective? I feel that our use of sound effects were pretty appropriate. We didn’t rely on the effects at all, but they were useful at certain times. For instance, the shotgun blast used by Rob such as when we first entered the station and were looking around, as well as in his radio commercial and at the end, were particularly effective to illustrate our zombie killing. We also implemented our own sound effects, created by Haley Campbell, Matt Wease, and the rest of our team, such as in the footsteps heard and so on.
Use of music- how is it used? Is it effective or distracting? The use of music in our show was necessary to an extent, but in a few instances I think that the music went on for too long, such as in the Taylor swift- Young the Giant- Queen progression. In most of our bumpers we used music as a supplement to make it interesting and acoustically appealing, which I thought was effective. However, in some parts, like I mentioned, it went on for a little bit too long. It can be difficult to decide the right amount of music, because, everyone loves to listen to music and the amount that you think is good may be taking away from the story and point of the radio show.
Does the show have a structure? Is it cohesive or does it feel stitched together? Our show has a pretty succinct structure. It starts out with Matt doing his thing on the radio station, him being the DJ and all. It is then assumed that something bad has happened to him since the rest of his stuff is all pre-recorded audio. Then you hear the five of us come into the station and start observing the surroundings. So it happens that we came from the outside environment into the somewhat safe harbor of this abandoned radio station, which we then proceed to make our own and live out of. We tried our best to make it flow as smoothly as possible, and I feel like it does a pretty good job of this. Sure, the show gets silly at some points, and there is a chemistry between the five of us that you get to imagine through listening, and I think that this is part of the success of the show. It is important to be able to understand and connect with the characters.
Does it tell a story effectively? Is there a sense of drama, unknown? I know that it is my show that I am commenting on, but the storytelling aspect of the show is there. We are there for a reason, which is a zombie apocalypse. Basically the world around us is ruined. We have happened upon the shelter of this radio station, where we find a dead radio DJ. Therefore, we make this station our own and try to survive amidst all the horror outside. It is the common story of trying to lead a somewhat normal life and maintain some close relationships, done in a somewhat different style. We are all confined to this relatively small space, and try to make the best of the situation from day to day. There is always that underlying drama that the place could be overrun at any time, but we try to leave that on the back-burner, and enjoy what we have. At the end we have a few talks about what we were doing before all the chaos ensued, and this gave people a sense of there being a precursor to all of this madness. At the end of the day though, our show has clear stages of a story and it moves through these stages with fluidity. The ending has an unspoken but pretty clear message. The listeners know what happens, although it is not explicitly said.. Do you know? Maybe you should go listen if you dont!
If you would star this radio show, how many stars out of five would you give to the show? I would give our show a 4.5/5. We covered a lot of the elements of a good radio show, and spent a good amount of time recording, editing, and so on. We understood that it is not effective to drag something on, and how important it is to keep your listeners interested, and I think we did a good job of meeting these criteria.
Radio poster Courtesy of aether_bunny, http://www.flickr.com/photos/aether_bunny/ , also, sometimes referred to as Haley C .
Here is the show!
The link for it is here! http://soundcloud.com/dzim1/wrtzradioradtastic
Two Week Summary: 7/8 Audio/Radio!
Recycled Media: http://blog.themanthemyththepaul.us/2012/10/22/recycled-media-ds106-sonar/
Daily Creates: http://blog.themanthemyththepaul.us/2012/10/22/week-7-and-8-daily-creations/
Radio Project: http://blog.themanthemyththepaul.us/2012/10/22/radio-show-team-rad-tastic-my-contributions-experiences-and-such/
Chipmunk Assignment: http://blog.themanthemyththepaul.us/2012/10/22/mainstream-chipmunkd-one-direction-style-3-stars/
May I take your order? http://blog.themanthemyththepaul.us/2012/10/22/may-i-take-your-order-wait-what-2-stars/
Dr Seuss it! http://blog.themanthemyththepaul.us/2012/10/22/seussin-it-up-the-butter-battle-3-stars/
Over-Dramatic Reading: http://blog.themanthemyththepaul.us/2012/10/22/over-dramatic-reading-2-stars/
Recycled Media: ds106-sonar
Here are the names of the files that I uploaded:
1) torn- design.jpeg — This photo is one of the ones from the Design Safari that I ended up not using but really enjoyed.
2) designpicture-baby.jpeg — This photo was also one that I found during my Design Safari, demonstrating the use of color as a Design element.
3) photo (8).JPG — This is from my designblitz. It is the picture I took that blurred something and made it unrecognizable.
4) photo (1).JPG — This is a picture from my designblitz that went unused. It was the picture that required making something look abnormal, almost supernatural.
Radio Show! Team Rad-Tastic: My contributions, experiences and such…
Here is the bumper that I made for our radio show!
Here is a bumper I made that went into our Zombie apocalypse-themed show, consisting of a few different songs: ones that are both pretty good and recent, and that I also deemed fitting to the theme, or at least somewhat. I worked pretty diligently on this in Audacity, and was pleased with the final result, albeit when I exported it to mp3, it moved around and messed up one or two of the layers that I had in my .aup file from Audacity. I’m speculating that this was because when the file got exported it also became compressed and therefore moved some of the things to places that they shouldn’t have gone. If you guys know any good ways to avoid this in the future, I’d love to hear!
Anyways, the songs I had in there were “Save the World” by Swedish House Mafia, “I Remember” by DeadMau5 featuring Kaskade, and “Take Over Control” by Afrojack featuring Eva Simons (Extended Club Mix). One of the aspects about the editing process that is so frustrating but so essential, is deciding what material should be left in and what material should be taken out. Due to how much I love all of these songs, it sounded great to just put all three full songs in there, but obviously that would take up way too much time. Therefore, I tried to pick out highlights of each song, and transition them smoothly so it would sound almost natural. Even though the final .mp3 file got somewhat messed up, we were able to delete some dead spots in Audacity after it was added to the show, in order to fix some of that up. It ended up fitting within the show very well, and was made to sound like DJ Matt’s kickin’ radio teaser, at least while he was still alive. The way that the show was set up, we wanted to emulate a real station, in that commercials and bumpers would be on auto cycle, while we continued to carry on with our activities and shenanigans within the station.
My Commercial:
Another one of my creations for this show was the “6 Hour Energy” commercial that I created, also using Audacity. I found a cool House music file from FreeSound to layer my recording with. The url for it is here: http://www.freesound.org/people/Flick3r/sounds/48543/
I decided to go with a Pauly D style for the commercial. My reasoning behind this was pretty simple. These 5 people are holed up in a radio station, trying to stay alive, and all the while, a complete imbecile named Pauly D is on a commercial advocating for people to try an Energy product that will keep them going for longer than ever. He uses the phrase, “If you’ve been feeling like a zombie lately..”, which is a funny little cue that is subtle enough but has a purpose. The commercial I made may not be exactly advocating for our radio show really, but it accomplished a good purpose in that it was able to be sewn into the fabric of the show and made to feel like it belonged but at the same time, was out of place in a world that had fallen to pieces.
My teammates were all appreciative of these creations of mine, and offered me some good feedback, especially for the radio bumper. I let everyone have a listen after I thought I was finished in Audacity, and they gave me comments saying that they liked it a lot, thought it had good feel, but it could definitely be shorter, which was one of my main concerns after I had made it the first time. It is always super useful to share your work with your peers or group members, to gain insight that maybe you hadn’t thought of or thought was an issue whilst in the process of putting the work together.
The process, in all, went very smoothly I thought. We met pretty regularly, and got at least a decent amount of work accomplished whenever we met. I tried my best to offer input at the first stage of it all, when we were all coming up with different ideas for the show. I wasn’t the one who came up with the zombie apocalypse theme, but I ran with it, and offered up a possible escape from the radio station ending. The others seemed to think it would work much better if we stayed in the station the whole time. I am pretty easy going though, and I like to go with whatever seems like it will work. It was actually an interesting process at first, because the four of us, Daniel Zimmerman, myself, Haley Campbell, and Crystal Rose all had met for the first time and were getting a pretty good feel for each other, and all of a sudden we gained a fifth member, Rob Scolyzsas, or something to that effect :p Sorry rob! Haha. However, he caught up to speed very quickly and hit the ground running. He made some excellent contributions through bumper, commercial, and overall progress, and helped create that fifth element to our show which I think made it more interesting. I had a bunch of recordings of myself from our meetings that were used to contribute to the overall show and helped develop myself as a character. I was the one who might have said some off the wall things, and made my partners question me, but I was part of the team, and got to really connect with the people that I was with in the station. It was really fun for our first few meetings where we were all going over how we thought the script should go and making an outline, which turned into a script which had some meat to it. These group meetings really helped us get a feel for each other, and most of all, gain comfort around one another which was essential for us working cohesively.
The Easiest/Hardest parts of working as a group:
What I gathered to be the hardest part of all of us working together was trying to coordinate schedules. My schedule is extremely busy this semester, and for a project like this, it was pretty important that we were able to get meeting time for us to record in a good location together; even if it was a bad location it still would have been preferable to all be in the same spot!
The easiest thing was the work we did individually, for instance, working with Audacity to create bumpers, commercials, etc. All that was required really was to create something, anything, preferably with cohesion and quality to it. Our minds were the guide here, and that was one of the things that I found most enjoyable about the process. It was like we had to stick to a topic that our professor had assigned to us. It certainly was not a dry topic either, so that made it a ton of fun to work with.
With all this being said, I’m not that experienced with zombie material, so I honestly WAS a little bit outside of my comfort zone, which was a good thing. It is almost impossible to all agree on something that you would find the optimal topic, however. In real life, the way things pan out will not really ever be optimal, so it is something to get used to.
At the end of this all, I think that our show flows pretty well and holds together as a whole. There are parts that we made to be somewhat vague and not overtly revealing so to speak, which was the point. A questionable part for us, is whether listeners would be able to tell that the station was on an auto-cycle, and that we did not realize it at first. Overall, the show communicates the concept that we were going for, but some of the individual pieces may take a little explanation for it to be clear like we were understanding it. Overall, our goals that we set at the beginning were reached, and I feel comfortable with the final product, because we indeed worked very hard on it. One of the things that helped during the edit sessions was that we were all on Google Hangout and able to give feedback and let Daniel (primary audio editor) what we thought worked and what might be more useful another way.
So, at the end of these two weeks, a lot has happened, but I feel more confident with my audio and radio skills. They are nowhere near perfect, but I can go into Audacity, layer some tracks, adjust settings and play with effects, create a short little story, etc. When we did the first Bumper, it honestly stressed me out working with Audacity and trying to get my sounds to flow together. Part of that was not knowing how the effects and such worked, same with trimming. There are plenty of tutorials online, which really help cure this relatively simple ailment.
May I take your order?! Wait…. WHAT?! 2 Stars
The link for this crazy little assignment is right here! http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/may-i-take-your-order/
To start this assignment off, I found a clip of a woman saying “May I take your order?” from this website: http://soundbible.com/tags-drive-thru.html , which was a super helpful kickoff to help me make this sound realistic. I also took a white noise clip from this website: http://whitenoisemp3s.com/turbine-hall.html . I used the Turbine Hall clip, which was super helpful to layer under my voice.
I basically just recorded myself in Audacity using the most obnoxious Southern accent that I could muster, and just went off on this poor, fictional drive-thru attendant. I’ll take every opportunity to act like a fool and be difficult, so this was my chance to do it, and therefore, my inspiration