The most annoying part of working on this video is rendering BY FAR. every time i make ANY sort of change whether it be opacity/location/length, the entire clip becomes unrendered and i have to wait for it to render all over again. i cannot figure out why this is happening but it sucks. In the meantime.. while i wait for the render bar to finish.. ive been enjoying the benefits of grooveshark.com, way cool, based out of gainesville yay!
Kelsey Olson i wish the beginning wasn't so ashy/grey, so i could see better. but it didnt last long. scary fire related ritual.. subjects looks drugged/impaired. the "morning after" along with the music is fraught with flashbacks and is reminiscent of when someone is acting under some sort of spell or against their own knowledge/will. did jen sen turn into a doll?? kelsey- youre pretty good at this whole intriguing detailed film process. the way the doll crawls/moves away on the road is creepy and grotesque-looking. i feel like her limbs are broken so she cant move properly. feathers stuck on the face.. did she eat some sort of animal? tribal ritual/sacrifice/magick/voodoo. dog! the toy dog would make the whole thing more laughable/humorous if it werent for the ominous music in the background and the continued filming style/hazy happening.
Nicole P why the song choice? is the video just highlighting the ritual of bathing/training/your relationship with your dog? if so, what are the cords/wires for and the extra camera/tv? it seems irrelevant to the project.
Joel R horrendously painful and amazing at the same time. a trip into every part of my brain that i avoid like the plague. i wanted to run screaming from the room but also stare openmouthed while my brain was cringing. this was definitely about excess. aghhdhhdh all the videos starting to be the same, the music was the same, the idea of the "formula" is DEF apparent. all the faces are so exaggerated/in your face/flawless/very very obnoxious. gosh pop is awfullll
Olga B girl is creepy indeed. why is it that we've come to associate creepiness in our videos with "well done"? i felt some anxiety for the girl- something about to happen? its kinda like, the girl has a dream for a future.. as every little girl does, and something makes me think its not gonna happen for her. most of the time i was just thinking about the same thing i think about when i watch movies with child actors. what are they told before being put into a role? and what are they thinking while acting, and do they understand whats going on or was someone just like "stand there and whatever"
Will the ritual of recording your trip? everyone does that. remember the good times, take lots of pictures, very touristy. i dont like the discontinuity of the music, its like a badly made trip video. some footage is expected, other footage, like filming the back of a girls dress and the picture of a shower are more unexpected and break the cliche factor of a trip memoir. titanic footage. now it looks like your cruise sank and it was a tragedy. but youre here, alive and well. i feel like that was just thrown in there. Leslie D was my favorite by far. the unexpected interaction between all the people was excellent. i think the most successful element was that every time there was a different sound coming from a different place it shifted your attention accordingly. also i found myself wondering where everyone was because they all had the same black background but you wonder whats around that. also it was a good choice to leave them alone because that way there wasn't any external stimuli and the subjects were self involved.
So, today i started laying down the initial video for my previous audio project. This is the way.. i *think* it's going to work. My track has a base song, a sound that carries throughout the piece. To mimic this, i will have a collage of clips from the same video source/related topic to create a video version of that base song. The clips will move, change, and coincide with the changes in the audio part. When i'm done laying down the base video, i will take other videos plus my own footage and start creating layers. These layers will mimic the other components of the audio piece, such as the phonograph scratches, the radio transmission static, etc. In this way, the video piece will coincide with the audio and the viewer's brain will be able to make an actual connection and in a way, be 'taken and lead by a hand'- every time they hear a new sound, they will have some sort of visual change to accompany it.
So, i've decided to go with the option of adding video to our previous sound project. I was thinking about the crit and how people said the track reminded them of being suspended in time, or being suspended in liquid, as we are in the womb. I liked how the sound gave the effect of moving through time- ("old radio transmission coming to us after a long time"-victoria)
the voice can be soothing and relaxing but they're also low-pitched and therefore slightly creepy.
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pollution: air noise
womb
being born in fluids
being born, suffocating, coming into ourselves, made to breathe oxygen
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so i found clips on youtube of Planet Earth- they showed deep sea creatures moving through the dark depths of the ocean and the movement went nicely with the sound..
the manipulated betty boop tune at the beginning makes for a good intro, i could start with images or something more stimulating then a slow moving video, and then cut to a different scene when the song shifts.
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cymatics- the study of visible sound and vibration.
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collaging of footage, slow motion, sections that fall out of/ break up the pattern..
So... our group picked the area in and around the spooky old fashioned elevator on the second floor-- In the beginning, i mentioned how i used my second loop (from the first part of the project) as a base for an experiment in volume, so i kinda ran with that this time. i added noise from a phonograph that i found using the links provided on the class website and took parts from my two first loops. I decided to omit words except for the lyrical content of the slowed-down base song (cover of "if"). While working on this part of the project, the track started to remind me of sound interference, and how as our technology improves, we find better ways of extracting pure, clear audio. I wanted to exaggerate the scratches and imperfections of older sound technologies and along with differences in volume, distort my chosen base track enough so that it would become slightly unpleasant and confusing. I tried to imagine how the new creation would come out of spaces such as the inside of that elevator, and travel down the hall, taking into account that the audience would probably be listening to different sections of the track the whole time due to the volume and balance (L/R) changes. If one listens closely for the entirety of the track (4 minutes that actually seem a LOT longer because of the slow pace) one can catch subtle changes in the base song, and also the much more noticeable additions in background noise that keep the track dynamic throughout.
**note: this is not a statement about promoting new technologies and how they make everything better- actually, i rather like the scratchy imperfections of a record player and the characteristic distortion effect that comes with using a 1970s amp.
The space a sound occupies, along with the speed, dynamic, chords, intervals between pitches, rhytm, etc, all these characteristics define the moment.
Types of Moments
M-moments (in which melodic characteristics predominate). The M- moments emphasize heterophony, which is a way of articulating sound-events around a line. Several sources can be following this same line but not necessarily at the same time, so the interferences of the several lines combine to produce something new- a heterophonic event.
K-moments: having to do with sound quality. They are characterized by everything that functions as components of a complex sound: homophonic music.
D: duration; moments based on measured durations of different lengths. These give rise to two important characteristics of music: silence and polyphony. Cutting lines of music/sound means one has to deal with different durations of either fragments of melodies or silence. These pieces can be separated or superimposed, which produces polyphony.
I-moments: 'I' stands for informal, or extremely indeterminate. They are vague, static, without direction, they are also the longest moments in the piece and they help neutralize the three other main categories of moments.
These moments are capable of inter-relating on a variety of levels.
Emily Sneeden 1. cacophony! the backdrop beat becomes overwhelming REALLY quickly, which i guess works for the tension between chaos and order, order being the speech which goes from the forefront to the background, im much more interested in the hollow rain drop sounding drum beats than the man talking, and i wish all the extraneous noise would just go away. haha *note: the following is NOT the clip i was responding to above!*
**Victoria: check out the parts where the dude drags the heel of his hand on the drum, and it makes that droplet noise that is very typical to this type of indian drumming. i looove it :)**
i like the end section when the 'ff' voice sounds better with the new electric keyboard/synthesizer (video-gamey) noises.. 2. hip hop circus. plus some wonderful butchery of classical music in the background. a little schizophrenic. every time the rap starts up i feel like its about to get really good in the way the beats relate, but its a little tease, because it always stops right as you feel it starting up. the end gets a little frantic and annoying.
Ryan Rudock 1. soft strings, creepy overtone, gets really dramatic, faster, sounds a little arabic, then stops suddenly and gets soft again. high pitched drama starts again.. 2. rolling voice sound waves
Joel Ramnaraine 1. pop. pop. so much pop. 90s commercial pop. scratched 90s cd. really annoying. but that kinda what we all expected for the first loop. what i like the most is the beat on the background of the 'yeah' parts. 2. haunted house! breathing/beating in the background. cups being overturned. walking through the house. anxiety. twilight zone. very movie like. not experimental but more what youd expect in a video, except the main 'creeper' sound is very repetitive and prevalent. oh, i looked up to the title, and it is the twilight zone. =)
Kelsey Olson 1. they were starting up the film audio and the tape caught or the record was scratched and everyone was running around trying to figure out how to fix it. its got the old sounds, which i love. then it segways into a repetitive sound wave loop which seems to be having severe technical difficulties i dont feel like someone created this, it feels like the file was corrupted when downloaded, so great job! its obviously much more fascinating knowing you created the loop. 2. Didgeridoo sounds for SURE. flamboyant man with shitty spanish skills, that was amazinnggg. strange monkey noises and random altered sounds. yay for humour!
Leslie Dulfer 1. really? is the sun really going to blow up? because that cheesy techno backbeat is taking away all possible credibility. DDR at an arcade. epic sounding, its a video game adventure. 2. downpour! you were under a tunnel hearing it from afar then the car exited the tunnel. the repetitive rain loops sounds like windshield wipers that start wiping the window over again before they get to the other side. schizo wipers!
Nicole Pennington 1. perfectly illustrates the social networking craze right now. i like it because it helps me visualize the amount of people that are buzzing about things like twitter and related topics. it emulates the feeling of channel surfing and finding some dude talking about the same shit on each station. very effective, mostly because of its role as social commentary. 2. someones trying to really hard to communicate several ideas and is totally failing. of youre not paying attention you brain tells you its completely coherent english, and when you listen closely its completely confused, muddled, you cant make out ANY words. pretty impressive if you ask me.
Jim Kirkwood 1.interesting mix between semi- recognizable religious preachings. 2. jabberwocky!
Kirstin Anderson 1. uncomfortable breaks and transitions. messed up exercise video! 2. hawaiian ukulele and faucet drops as well as a really nice background voice. nothing is very jarring so far, its a new kind of background music. beachy, so obviously i love it.
KT Stemper 1. whenever the woman starts to sing i think either opera or a tidbit of a moby song (because of the other sounds in the track) the light instrumental aspects make it like the soundtrack to a play or scene in a movie. 2. I LOVE the beginning of this. the strange beats at the beginning make it extremely interesting. then it becomes a little more mysterious and electronic, theres a light shower in the background, some spooky robot shiiiat, and more amazing beats. this has got to be one of my favorites. Sara 1. the piece of song almost seems really out of place but it kinda works.. i wish that wasnt the repetitive element though. it also sounds like part of a movie soundtrack, the song in the background over some kind of exciting/motion-rich scene. 2. messing with bass strings in an unusual manner.. a weird space video game plus pinball machine, the guitar is lovely but doesnt seem to fit too well. vibrationsss,, vocal chords? (supposed to be heartbeats..?)
Melissa Bonnewell
1. piano introoo, irish somethings, separate clips, repetitive line about sausage, irish country folk singing,.. something.
Will:
1. art of war.. i read that book in senior year of highschool hehe. i was also gonna use a clip from it but didnt.. i like the beats mixed in near the middle with the voices.
