For my final project I wanted to work with GoPro footage that I had taken in the summer at home, and appropriate it into a new video that has a new storyboard and overall idea. I had first started with the idea of taking out all of the existing sounds and change them to irrelevant sounds that created a new story. I found this challenging to create and focus on a specific topic. After I had discussed and brainstormed new ideas I decided I wanted to create some sort of horror movie with the same footage but adding my own sound files and music. I succeeded in doing this but felt it needed a direction or plot because the video built up and up and then suddenly ended.

I wanted to try and incorporate an issue such as global warming and some how tie it into my overall theme of a horror movie, but was unsuccessful in finding fitting footage that could blend well with my existing clips. We then discussed the idea of using a natural disaster in the movie, I found that Hurricane Katrina had a lot of content on the internet and fitting clips.

I think if I had more time I could have created and thought of a more fitting idea that relates to myself and had a stronger message, but overall the final project turned out pretty well. All of the sound files were added and blended into the video files to make it flow smoothly and act as though the sound was coming from the GoPro. I showed many of my friends the video and they were shocked at how well the sound fit to the video and needed proof that I did that myself with unrelated clips from youtube, because of how well it flowed. I tried to make it as realistic as possible and bring the audience to a point where they were curious and intrigued as to what was going to happen next. The end clips are very shocking and hard to believe a natural disaster can do so much damage. With that being said, I think I did a good job of blending the two and kept the audience at the edge of their seats.

Citizen Journalism

For this project, I struggled to come up with an idea because I didn’t have a lot of time over these past two days to find an event occurring somewhere on campus. But, I thought of the idea of filming the “public” laundry in soles hall because one of my pet peeves occurs here. I live in soles hall and there is a large laundry room for off campus housing and the courts to utilize the laundry room, but this causes a high volume of traffic. Not necessarily on a Monday or Tuesday night but Saturday and all of Sunday becomes a bad time to want to do laundry. One of the pet peeves that happens is that people put their laundry in and then leave it there for hours on end, taking up machines that could be used. This behavior leads people to have to move the clothing from the machine to the dryer or to leave the clothes out on the counter. This becomes a problem when people start randomly moving clothing and misplacing items and I end up with so many missing socks, (and at most I have been a minute late to come and pick it up or move to the next machine so people just assume.) It’s also an issue when people just throw your clothes into the dryer because I have a bunch of clothes that don’t go in the dryer so this is also an issue for me. So, I decided to film the laundry room to hopefully capture someone moving someone else’s laundry and dropping items, but like I said tonight was not a high volume night for laundry so there was nothing suspicious occurring,

As the citizen journalist, I felt kind of awkward standing in the laundry room filming random people doing their laundry, because they weren’t doing anything wrong and its not typically something you see in that room. As soon as I started filming someone walked in and put their clothing into the washer and could tell I was filming but we didn’t know each other so it was definitely uncomfortable for the both of us. I wonder what would have happened if someone did come in and move someone else’s laundry while I was in there filming, if they would continue to do so or maybe choose not to because of the camera. I waited around to see if anyone else would come in but there were multiple washers and dryers open, so there would be no need to touch other peoples stuff.

For this project I knew I wanted to record one of my field hockey practices in the indoor court, because I am always surprised at how loud we get and all the different sounds coming from the sticks tapping on the ball and the ball smashing into the metal goal cage. I decided I was only going to pick my idea of what it most sounded like through the recording after listening to the track multiple times. After hearing it I automatically thought of a loud storm at night while you’re lying in bed listening to it hit the shingles on your roof. The sounds were quite loud so I thought it represented a hailstorm, where large chunks of frozen rain were hitting your rooftop or the ground. There were also sounds that came from the goalie saving the ball which represented thunder, as well as the background sounds of the soccer team practicing in the court next to us.

One thing I struggled with was the amount of voices and talking that was picked up with Iphone recorder. I recorded this before we had the demo of the library recorders in class, but those may have helped with the background noises and the voices. (I really found out how much my coaches talked during practice!) Another issue was clipping a 2 hour practice into a 5 minute video, where I had to try and clip out the best sounds and try and make it into a nice flow of a storm. While also making parts choppy where necessary which was the way I heard the storm and thought went well together. If I had more time with the project I would be able to cut out most of the voices which would make the idea much more believable and realistic.

I uploaded this track to my Soundcloud where I used relevant hashtags, but I have no followers on there. So, I posted the link to my Facebook wall to see what feedback I would get. I am still waiting on any comments or feedback but I will give it time!

#hail #thunder #storm #lightning #roofshingles #hailthesizeofgolfballs

I struggled to come up with an idea for this project as performance art seemed to have such a broad spectrum and I couldn’t quite grasp an idea that fit my initial understanding of the concept. When I think of performance, what comes to mind are sports and dance performances that have photos taken of them. Having Clifford Owens come to our class and show us those videos of people performing in front of the camera and his talk later that day opened up my understanding and also confusion about the topic.

I finally wrote ideas down about my interests and narrowed it down to performing my interests while using my body as the performance. I sketched up drawings of what I wanted to portray and then drew enlarged versions of my sketches in the studio to have my body proportioned to look realistic. It was difficult at first to find the right angles to fit into the drawing, some had to be taken from the ground with a bird’s eye view shot.

I uploaded my five images to Facebook, which is more open to posting multiple photos at once, unlike Instagram. My closer friends in particular liked and commented on the photos and thought they were quite amusing. I am very impressed with how the photos turned out and happy I finally decided on an idea I liked. These images were based off of an Instagram account I found called “abstract sunday” in which the artist used objects like scissors and fruit and drew off of the objects to turn them into something they were not supposed to be.