The Making of my awesome video

This is the first time I’ve ever undertaken a project such as this and while not having done it myself, I’ve watched people numerous times in the making of videos, mini-clips and montages. So while the concept of editing and the basics that go into it weren’t completely strange to me, all the small little interesting and slightly more difficult bits of production were new and exciting. Making a still image mash up was great for exploring all the effects and options one could use in Imovie and was a great learning tutorial in terms of creating a video mash up using still images, video clips and audio.

I took a lot of what I had learned from the still image mash up and from that I was really able to run with it, and pour an extra little bit of creativity into my video mash up. Trial and error, like with most of my learning, helped a lot with Imovie because your imitations are practically endless with all the cool effects a person can use for editing. These effects really helped me capture many of the things I wanted to explore and wanted to make the viewer feel. My goals were to take someone through the decision making choice, the feelings and thoughts that go through a person’s mind when choosing to drink and drive and also to show the possible repercussions of what could happen. I used the ken burns effect to make the viewer think heavily about decisions made (really worked great on the handcuffs slide) and to zero in on the most important part of a certain photo so the viewer would see it as I did. I also used blurry transitions or kind of funky psychedelic transitions at time to literally place the viewer in the driver’s seat; this coupled with the beginning images snapping so fast coupled great to display how quickly things can happen.

Some of the transitions played an important role, such as the blurry effects, but others were implemented just to make the transition from clip to clip or video to make the mash-up have an effortless flow and professional look.

I also played with the audio features quite a bit and while I only used one song, the ducking feature, and at a certain point silence, were used to display the finality of such a dangerous decision at its worst outcome; death.

Video Mashup With Sound!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-MQKJciRtY

dRuNKK DRiVVinnG

Music and Art to Combat the Bad Things

Until this little artsy- remix-message project that we began, I never really thought to far into how powerful a message an artist (no matter what the media) could send out into the world. I picked a message that would be simple enough to easily transform into a sort of tragic tale, that also spoke an important message about an issue that plagues humanity every single day. It has been a valid argument for quite some time in this digital age of ours that the current copyright laws in place have outlived their original meaning. As Bob Dylan once said, “times they are a changin’ ” and that change has come and gone, but the copyright laws remain the same. In this new digital age, as Lessig argues, the laws must be adapted to the growing digital art. This would mean legally allowing artists to build upon what has already been created, building something into a piece they can call their own. If these laws aren’t adapted, remixes and projects (such as ours) could not exist and some lawyer would be out after us to prosecute and throw us to the wolves. Lessig also talks about the opportunities and importance of change in the digital age and “hybrid economy”. “The hybrid economy will become ever more prominent in every creative realm- from news to music- and Lessig shows how we can and should use it to benefit those who make and consume culture.” (Overview of “Introduction” Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy”) In Lessig’s “Hybrid Economy” remix and new digital art opens up a whole new realm for which artists to explore and create and for children to learn from, the only question is, will the law allow it?

Freishtat and Sandlin on Twitter

While Twitter may be as equally public and exposing as Facebook, it does not allow nearly the amount of information that Facebook does. Twitter is more of a series of “status updates” and that’s about it. It somewhat reminds me of a mini-blog in a way, a quick glance into the life of someone famous, a group or your friends. Facebook, depending on the user, exposes pictures, what may be going on in that person’s life (whether they want it online or not) contact information, etc. Now while Twitter may also track URLs visited by the user, it does not make it apparently so and does not advertise as heavily as Facebook.

They are similar in that I believe the same learned social norms and taboos are applied on both sides. Users do not want to see information that is overly personal or controversial, yet some people are drawn to it which is probably why they follow certain people or celebrities. I also think that because Twitter is relatively new, most of these norms were already learned by the majority or Twitter users because other social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace had already been predominant for some time.

Facebook… fun or fake??

“Facebook uses a rhetoric of control to attract, maintain, and discipline users, and to help shape a public environment that appears to foster, but in fact is hostile to deliberative possibilities” (515-16).

From an outside view, or even the view of most who have Facebooks, Facebook seems an innocent way of expressing oneself through pictures and information about that person. On the underside of this innocent facade is world of information that is much more public than the average user knows and what can sometimes even be harmful to the users themselves. With this burst of social networking more and more people are using social networks in different ways depending on what the site may offer. Facebook, the most popular of these social networking sites, connects itself to the user’s server and literally studies the likes, dislikes and activities of the user, making them a walking, open source for advertising and even more serious consequences such as identity theft. Not only are there the the implications of being followed so closely, but social implications are also a danger to a user who is to “public” on his/her facebook. Within the article Freishtat and Sandlin talk about the study of social implications and the ramifications of how youth act and respond in this new digital age of new social taboos, respect and “unwritten” rules.

This study coincides with the principles of habitus, which is ” the formal and informal curricular components that constitute public education or the ways in which we learn, about learning and about culture in general” (Giroux 1983,88-9).  This is a study in how youth come about the phenomenon of automatically learning the unspoken rules and etiquette of social networking.  The article states also that, ” Public pedagogy is a crucial arena for studying how social norms are encoded, transmitted and taught.” I personally believe that these norms are self taught through time, trial and error. Since the age of the typical facebook user has gotten younger and younger, social norms and taboos are learned over time just as humans have learned through time; by making mistakes.

twitter/ snapfish

While both are widely used, I believe their use (or uselessness) is something that is up to debate. Twitter, to me, basically seems to be a constant stream of nothing more than facebook “status” updates, which is completely pointless. People need to find something more productive to do than check out how johnny “just made the most epic sandwich” or see what’s going on in Mike Tyson’s life. Snapfish to me seems so much more useful. It is literally an online picture album, where a person can store the hundreds and hundreds of photos they have and have them neatly organized in easy to find virtual “albums”. In addition to just being an online photo album, Snapfish offers services such as goods (blankets, posters, coffee mugs, tshirts, etc.) that can be made with the image of your choice printed upon them. They also offer studio quality hard copies of selected pictures of your choosing.