Music is always an interesting thing to discuss in media. I went to Coachella music Festival in California. It is a pop music festival, which has a lot of artists coming. I like it very much. Besides those great artists and musicians, I found that audiences are also really interesting to look at. Since this was my first time being in a music festival in the U.S., everything was really exciting and new for me to see.

I noticed that there were various people, listening to a same singer, but reacted totally different. I also noticed that some people were trying to get into that “fans” group, although they may not know the artist very well. Those observations inspired me to make a project about listening music privately and publicly. I got a lot of footage after coming back from the festival, but I really didn’t know how to make them into a video art piece. After talking with Professor, I realized that I need to embrace the “Randomness” of those footages. We figured out a way to make a video of me responding to those festival footages instead of only showing the difference between listening music in private and public spaces.

I chose two really old songs to give a contrast between old classical music and pop modern music. In music festival, most people listen to those pop songs rather some old songs, but for myself, I listen to a lot of old songs from movies privately.

In conclusion, I would say that listening music in public with other people might be exciting and great, but listening music privately gives us more freedom without being judged by others.

My sound project is called “Profanity”. It is about the great number of cursing words on media, including songs, cartoons, and movies. Cursing words are hard to listen, but easy to speak out for people. As an international students, I found out that American medias use a lot of cursing words in different works, especially films. As a film major student, American films are sexual-oriented and very violent compared with films from other cultures.

This observation inspired me to do a project about profanity on medias. I did researches about famous American films that contains many cursing words. I reviewed several of them, and chose some pieces that I found interesting to put into my project. I used Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dog, Scarface, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Full Metal Jacket. They are all great films done by great American filmmakers. They are good films, but each of them has many cursing words. Some of them are even famous for the big number of cursing words, such as Pulp Fiction.

So I want to illustrate the large use of profanity words in American films and other medias. I collected those audios together. It went well, the rhythm and the quality, but after asking the Professor and other people, I realized that I didn’t have a clear private exploitation/theme of the project. Somehow, I had the theme, which was to show the American films’ addiction to profanity words, but it was not enough.

Then, I tried to reorganized my works. After thinking and revising the project, I realized that I wanted to show two themes in this project. First, I want to emphasize the public’s addiction to those profanity words in media, although people don’t use them as much as in real life. I found out that my friends sometimes laugh a lot at those profanity words on TV, so I add laughters to the project. This makes the audio sounds like someone is watching the movie and laughing at the scene. Second, I want to illustrate that those profanity words are essential to those films and works. Films would be dull and bad without those words. I used a lot of “censor beep” to create an annoying and disruptive feeling of watching those films without profanity words.

After doing this project, I feel that sometimes, it is even harder to appropriate other works than create original pieces. It could be easy to lose direction while appropriating many other works.

I posted the work on social media. Many of my friends thinks that it is entertaining at first. They know that there are a lot of profanity words on media, but they barely put them into one piece of work. They said that those words are everywhere, but emphasized much more on media, especially films and pop songs. Some people think that it is bad to use this big number of cursing words, but many people agree that cursing words are somehow necessary for films and other media works.

1. People talking
2. Wind
3. Coughing
4. Toilet
5. Clock
6. People moving
7. Macbook Touchpad
8. water tap
9. Birds
10. Cars passing
11. Motocycle
12. Pot
13. Rubbing skins
14. Couch
15. Lamp switch
16. Rolling down the curtain
17. kettle
18. Boiling water
19. Cracking sound from bones
20. Breathing
21. Touching a stone

I love thriller films, so I came up with an idea of doing a thriller sequence. I watched  many gangster films and thriller films, such as Scorsese and Hitchcock’s films. I thought that it would be interesting to do a small film sequence for this project. I dressed up as characters in many gangster films. Lighting is a key element of my project. I use a dramatic lighting for this sequence to build the cinematic feeling of a thriller film. There is a clear narrative in my sequence. I also did short films before. There are some differences between this project and short films. For this project, the character, me , mainly interact with the camera since there is no other characters, but for short films, characters usually interact with other characters or settings without addressing the camera directly. I think it is more effective to address the camera for this project. After seeing the sequence, some people said that it has a cinematic feeling, but different from cinema.