Final Blog

I had no idea what to expect when I signed up for INFO 303.  A co-worker suggested the class to me because he was taking another section of it so I took his advice.  As an English major I thought learning how to write across a number of media could be very beneficial to me.  I did not know that the media we were discussing was not exactly TV and Radio, but yet it had to do with the emerging new media of the twenty first century.

The first project, the Sweded Movie project, was one that I really had no interest in.  It seemed fun, but I wasn’t exactly having a blast when creating the film and I think that kind of set the stage for my sub par performance.  I found many of the readings to be quite interesting, but as someone who’s quite lazy, I found keeping up with the blog to be quite a hassle, even though it certainly should not have been.  I’m not the most artistic person in the world, so some of the projects were a bit raw- and I didn’t complete the stencil project which was probably the worst move of the semester on my part.

After the first few projects though, when we started to work with audio and video I became alot more focused on the course and started to have a little bit more fun with my behind the scenes creative license.  The podcast was the most fun part of the semester for me because I got to use skills that I work on every day, and I enjoy working by myself a bit more than working with others.  It’s not that I don’t like working with other people, I just tend to get on better by myself.  Anyway, the podcast was something I was really proud of and even showed my parents, who didn’t understand what the big deal about Bonnaroo was.  This class helped me try to explain that to them, which was a huge bonus.

I also enjoyed working on the video project, but I had a bit of a hard time collaborating with Bridget, and an even tougher time trying to figure out how to draw the line between subjective and objective documentary creation.  I was a walking example of Hampe’s essay.

There are certainly a ton of regrets that I have with this class, I think I could have worked harder than I did.  I didn’t turn in the stencil project which is going to come back and bite me.  I was lazy in turning in 500 word rationales (which there is really no excuse for) and I feel like I should have given a better effort to an instructor who took the time to help us learn things that will be beneficial to us in the future.

I wish we could have workshopped a bit more in class instead of brief discussions, but with the time given, I thought Hannah did a great job with us.  I had fun this semester in WAM- I enjoyed my classmates and their projects, met some cool people that I think I’ll at least be able to consider acquaintances next semester, and I think I finally learned how to use iMovie after unsuccessful attempts before this class.  All in all, if I could take this class again I would, and I’d do it alot better.

Ede/Lunsford

1.  Is collaboration on projects in an academic setting worthwhile for students?  Why or why not?

2.  Take the survey presented in the readings about the professor and student collaboration on a project yourself, and decide what answer your would have been and why.

3.  “Teachers often do not practice what they teach. That’s a sentiment no one would deny, but I have recently been especially struck by the gap between theory and practice when it comes to collaboration.”  Do you agree with this quote from the text regarding how teachers at U of I teach?

Answer to Steven’s question: “Do you prefer to work alone on projects, or do you like collaborating ideas with classmates?”

I prefer to work alone in most of my work.  However, in this class especially, I find it extremely helpful and sometimes rewarding to work with a partner.  It is easier for me to run with my own ideas, however.  Sometimes during group collaborations I may think I have a good idea, and everyone else will kind of throw it to the wayside, or vice versa – I am not immune to doing the same thing.  It really depends on whether or not I can get along with my group members.

As far as how Ede and Lundsford’s ideas of authorship went along with my video project, I found it interesting to have to put both names on a project that we did pretty much separately.  I also feel like I shouldered a bit more of the load by getting the interviews and stock footage that was used, and I also am the only one in our group to have actually posted the video on the blog.  I haven’t seen the final copy of Bridget’s work.  I think the poll of whether or not the professor or the student gets major credit would be especially pertinent to this situation.

Hampe Questions/Response

1.  Why does Hampe say that even though you may record footage with a camera, if there is no visual evidence, it is not a film?

2.  With that being said, discuss how Hampe describes visual evidence.

3.  Is there ever a time when fiction footage is acceptable to use?

Response to Julie’s question  “Give an example of how you can lie in a documentary, or give an impression of lying?”

Hampe suggests that if one were to use fictitious sequences of film and pass them off as legitimate the creator of the documentary has essentially lied to the audience.  I can’t think of a real life example of that off of the top of my head, but of course it has probably been done.  Consequently, fictitious footage that is shown to the audience can be used for the good of the documentary as well, and is not always considered lying, if the audience knows it is not real footage.

Response to Hannah’s Question:

No, I don’t believe documentary can be completely objective.  There is always an angle that the director wants to portray, whether or not they are good intentioned, they have some opinion formed on the topic and it is going to show up in the final edit.  Even if there is no formal opinion on the topic, there are going to be scenes and interviews that the director uses that may not end up showing the documentary in a completely objective light.  Hampe discusses use of interviews and even behavior as visual evidence.  The use of this evidence is going to, at some level, show one side of what is being documented and may not be a completely objective view.

Wall-E Sweded

Pre-Production -  This was a fairly easy job.  We decided to do an animated film because none of us are particularly adept at acting and we thought hiding behind drawings would be a bit easier.  We decided on Wall-E because the vocals were limited and we each agreed that it would be a fun project to undertake.  We sort of had ideas of how we wanted the movie to be shot, but it hinged on location and where our artistic endeavors regarding the creation of the characters and scenery would take us.

Shooting – We did alot of adjustments on the fly during shooting.  We basically shot the movie in order without changing much scenery and using actual garbage in the junkyard scene.  The most difficult things to portray were the evil steering wheel thing and then the enormous human.  Both were the wrong size for what we were trying to create, but it was a sweded movie so we decided that a bit of humorous inconsistencies would be appreciated by the audience.

Editing – There was relatively little editing done, mostly just cutting out the end of scenes and curse words that we thought would  take away from the actual movie and of course that were inappropriate for class.

Critique – I think we did a pretty decent job at making a live action animated movie.  It was a lot of fun and I think the class enjoyed it.  We tried to stay as close to the plot as possible and I think we pretty much got the gist of the film in our short movie.

Final Project Rationale

Pre-Production:  This was the most difficult phase of our project as neither of our schedules could sync up until the week the project was due.  However, once we were able to get together and decide where are project would lead things went smoothly.  We sat down for a few hours and outlined our entire video; we created a script that included everything from who would say what, to clips of videos that we would use.

Composing:  In terms of creating this project Amanda and I kind of went our separate ways after creating the script.  We recorded audio separately and exchanged them in emails.  I eventually was responsible for compiling all of the video, and audio into Windows Movie Maker to create our final movie, and Amanda was responsible for the in class wrap-up discussion.  The biggest problem that I ran into in this process was trying to save the file in Movie Maker.  I eventually had to save each file I used individually and transfer them into another computer and re-create my original movie.

Presenting: The presentation went well, although I had hoped we would  be able to use the Final Destination 3 DVD to include the class in an interactive display.  Unfortunately, that was not the case and as some of the other groups included the class in their presentation I felt as though our group could have done a little better in that aspect.  Other than that, I think Amanda’s portion to wrap things up was pretty solid in explaining what our focus on the project was.

Critique:  I thought that the video was well received by the class.  Our focus on New Media in film is something that can keep people’s interests because most people have seen movies that use computers to aid in their production and distribution.  I tried to infuse humor in the subject as well, because the ending of the movie was kind of boring, there wasn’t much video that related to Quantum Project but we felt that it was a very significant piece of New Media.  In all, I felt pretty good about our work together, and I am more impressed with myself as I’m not the most adept movie maker.

Final Project

New Media is any form of media that involves computers in the process of distribution and production.  Included in this are DVDs, video games, websites, internet radio, etc.  This project discusses how New Media has been fusing with Old Media due to computer related technological advancements, especially in the realm of film.

Computers are now used to animate live action sequences in film, create video games that look real, and also to help distribute them as in the Internet only movie Quantum Project.  In the project we use examples from the Matrix, Transformers, and both the Tomb Raider game and movie.  All three examples show how computers are used in relation to these different forms of media.

Video Project Blog

Pre-Production: Bridget and I thought we came up with a great idea during 0ur brainstorming sessions.  We thought about presenting cover music and how it compares to the original, the artistic value of cover music, etc. That quickly shifted into more broad discussions about copyright law and creative licensing issues.  Obviously cover music was discussed, but so was sampling in hip hop songs, and the use of other people’s creative property for performances.

Shooting:  Shooting was rather straightforward, although most of the interviewing was done before the shift in ideology we still found them to work.  The interviews were done by me in the WPGU studios, and I was able to interview Steve Plock, a drummer from local band Santa and DJ Funktopus a local hip hop DJ.  In the interviews we discussed copyright law, different versions of cover music, sampling in hip hop, cover music in general, etc.  Each was very helpful and gave us alot of material to work with.
Editing:  This was the toughest part for me.  First I had to select clips that would be useful in describing cover music and hip hop sampling.  That was a fun task at first, especially finding old Chuck Berry and Beatles clips amongst others. But then ripping and converting the files to the right format so that I could use them in iMovie was extremely tedious. Once I converted the files I still had to cut them up and fit them together to mix cohesively with the audio.  Again, another difficult task was trying to get my voiceover to work well with light background music from the videos.  I tried to strike a chord with viewers by playing Pat Boone right after Fats Domino when describing some of the origins of cover music and how it related to race relations.  It was a difficult task making sure the lengths of the videos synced up with my voice.  Also using some texts and fade-ins and outs was difficult to sync up as perfectly as I wanted with my voice.  This process actually took me a few hours because I was trying to make this very short video perfect.

Post-Production/Critique:  I was pretty happy with my final cut of the video.  I think there were some things I could have done alot better with my script.  But I was happy with how the splicing of videos worked out as well as how the interviews fused with the videos.  Unfortunately I think some of the point gets lost because the music was a bit too loud in the background and I didn’t take into account how it would transfer to regular speakers instead of my headphones.  Unfortunately, due to a number of reasons, we never got to show the videos back to back to the class so it wasn’t really able to get critiqued.  I would like to think that hopefully the point was well received by those that watched the video and if not, hopefully the viewers were at least entertained.

Video Project

Unfortunately, I forgot to post this in a timely fashion, although it was added on youtube awhile back… apologies…

 

Podcast Upload/ Reflection

My Podcast is linked here:   https://netfiles.uiuc.edu:443/tpauly2/tom%20paulyfinal.wav

Pre-Production: The easiest part was to decide what I wanted to do the project on.  I knew I wanted to talk about Bonnaroo, and being a fairly avid listener to NPR podcasts I thought I’d be able to do a decent job.  The toughest thing was to come up with a script and using sounds other than my voice that would help get my point across.  It took me awhile to narrow down my experience and still capture the environment and buzz about the festival.  I decided to focus on the people that I saw and went with, and how they related to me outside of the fest.  I tried to make it obvious that my experiences were positive ones and that experiencing Bonnaroo is a more positive experience than the doldrums of daily life.  I thought that if I talked too much about the bands that I saw it would alienate people who don’t have the same tastes as I did.  I thought that my voice and silence would capture a sentimental feeling, and the intro music should provide a nice observation of what goes on outside of festival grounds.  That’s why I chose the Japandroids song.  To wrap things up I thought using Bruce Springsteen and a sing along crowd would describe the environment on the festival grounds.

Recording- The recording didn’t take me very long, as I’m an advanced user of those kinds of programs.  I recorded it in one take in the WPGU studios on Adobe Audition and adjusted the levels of my voice enough to make it sound a little deeper and more sincere.  The more difficult part was cutting up the audio of the songs to get them to fit, and fading each one in and out.  I think I played too much of the intro song to where it became a little dragging to people who weren’t fans of Japandroids.  But in all, this wasn’t an extremely straining process.

Editing:  As I said previously, there wasn’t much editing as I recorded everything in one take.  The only issues I had were with editing the Springsteen and Japandroids tracks to work well with my audio.  I had a bit of a tough time deciding what the level of fade for the Springsteen track should be so as to not have me talking over Bruce.  But I think it worked out pretty well.

Critique:  I was happy with my finished product.  I think the most telling thing of how well I did was that some classmates had told me they felt like they were at Bonnaroo or at least understood the purpose of my project.  Also, Hannah knew right away that I had gone to Bonnaroo and I thought that was even more telling of how well I described the scene, as she had been there before so I think I captured the energy of the festival quite well.  Again, the only thing I would change is probably the intro music and how it combined with the rest of the podcast, but other than that I was very happy with my final project.

Shipka Questions

1.  How did the use of sounds in the Museum project prove to be useful? Do you think they could’ve harmed the project?

2.  Shipka proposes that students stray from bracketing the individual senses in their projects and try to incorporate each of them together, in what ways could this prove difficult?

3.  Explain what Shipka means by multimodal soundness.

Response to Vince’s question: “Do you think most people are consciously aware of the relationship between sound and text?”

I don’t believe that most people are consciously aware of the relationship between sound and text.  I think that some people are, but most tend to not think consciously about how sound or music affects the way they read.  For example, commercials use plenty of music that may subconsciously affect how consumers react to their prices of fast food or other products.  Subconsciously, a catchy tune could influence someone to buy the big mac instead of the Whopper.  I think people are so bombarded by sounds with texts, like news packages for example, that it just goes over their heads.