For this project I wanted to continue exploring themes that I have played with throughout the semester but in a new way. I selected the topic of war again for this project but instead of looking at an older war I decided to examine our ongoing efforts in the Middle East. Additionally, the video features footage appropriated from released footage of what I believe is a coordinated drone strike on Taliban targets. This is intended to also raise questions about the ethics of using drones to engage with our enemies, a topic which has become a focus of the media in recent years as the number of drone strikes has increased. I also attempt to subtly bring up the controversy surrounding civilian casualties associated with drone strikes and the fact that American citizens have been the target of some drone strikes.

This project attempts to imitate the increasingly popular “Let’s Play” style of video predominately featured on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. These videos feature a broadcaster walker viewers through or previewing games in entertaining ways. The videos have grown extremely popular in recent years, especially in younger demographic and can be spotted across all forms of social media. Popular online personalities, such as famed YouTuber PewDiPie, are making millions of dollars and have become vital marketing outlets for brands to reach younger customers. The videos seem to all follow a similar format and depending on the notoriety of the channel will have various levels of advertising and sponsored content.

In this way I hoped to again examine the realness of war and our relationship in understating it. If hollywood representations can seem more realistic or familiar to us than real footage taken from a drone what does that say about our understanding of the real conflict and what our troops or enemies experience?

In terms of creating the video, I spent a great deal of time watching Let’s Play videos since I had never really seen too many before. I found them to be fairly boring and unfunny, but they all follow a similar format and illicit millions of views and the personalities accrue hundreds of millions of followers and follow a similar format. In addition I was also trying to draw influence from the YouTube performance artists we looked at during the beginning of the semester. Imitating the YouTubers was a bit difficult because I am not much of an actor and just talking to a screen and pretending to speak to an audience was pretty hard. The footage from the drones was actually incredibly easy to find and appropriate. The footage is surprisingly readily available on YouTube and had well over 1.7 million views. In the end I hope this communicates a critique on the topics of the war, our use of drones, our misperception of modern warfare and video games and how online personalities are creating uninspired videos that target and exploit young viewers around the world.

This video is a recording from a local sports bar. My friends and I went out to go watch the final game of the March Madness basketball tournament. We were really expecting a bigger crowd at the bar considering a team near by made it to the finals. This can be seen in some of the shots away from out table which depicts how empty the bar was. The game ended up being incredibly close and one of the best finals the tournament has ever seen. The approximately 5 min long video captures the last 15 seconds or so of the game which included an amazingly lucky 3 point shot by UNC to tie the game and a perfectly executed 3 point buzzer beater to seal the deal by the champions Villanova. The video captures the incredulousness of the onlookers as we witnessed one of the most clutch ending of a basketball game ever. This historic moment is captured using only my phone and features many of my friends who were more or less oblivious to my filming or this project. When a game is a close as that it is not uncommon for individuals to pull out their phones and record reaction videos. However this one was rather mundane considering the emptiness of the bar which stands in contrast to the tremendous athletic feats displayed throughout the game and particularly at the end.

Time and again the media re-portray historic events, perhaps World War II more than any other. In the years following the end of the Second World War an enormous amount of movies and television series have been focused on the war. Their content was vastly varied covering all aspects of the battles fought on the land, air and sea. However, as the stories of the war are retold or created, we lose or obscure part of the truth of the war, which is what I wanted to explore by contrasting media representations of WWII and a primary source from the war. For the primary source I selected the recording of President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressing a joint session of Congress the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. This extraordinarily powerful speech perfectly addressed the mourning nation and quieted their fears while simultaneously encouraging the nation to find their strength to bring the fight to the Japanese.

Contrasting this I have sound clips appropriated from a varied landscape of World War 2 media portrayals. This included musical elements such as the theme from the Steve McQueen movie “The Great Escape” and the defiant whistling of British P.O.W.s from “The Bridge at River Kwai.” Piercing these layers are the dramatized explosions and gunshots from shows and movies such as “Saving Private Ryan,””Tora! Tora! Tora!” “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.”

While these movies represent the battlefronts of World War 2 I also wanted to utilize other movies that contained plots that were related to, but not directly representing in entirety, the war. To do this I took snippets from a movie about women playing baseball, “A League of Their Own,” and the musical “The Sound of Music.” I wanted to include these to represent the range of media inspired by the war and how playing them at the same time would sound a bit absurd. On the matter of absurd, I wanted to include the Quentin Tarantino film “Inglourious Basterds” to illustrate how historical fiction is very much a part of the media surrounding every major conflict, in some way or another.

As for creating the piece, I utilized my DJ software and equipment in order create a live recording of all of these elements. Parts of the recording were planned but for the most part the piece was improvised and could never be performed the exact same way. In addition to giving the recording a sense of chaos it allowed me loop sections of individual tracks and apply effects to various tracks and the same or different times. This often has surprising and unexpected results as in the instance where the phrase “dastardly attack” begins to sound like “bastardly attack” when looped