Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?

I agree that with Henry Jenkins that Star Wars is now more than just something created by Quentin Tarantino, it is now something that fans are using to create more films. Quentin Tarantino created a universe and the fans of this universe is expanding it by filming fan fictions that are gaining traction. Fans are no longer just passive consumers who have no power over how Star Wars is viewed. Fans can go out and create their own parody films to expand on Star Wars and express their take on it. For instance, the Star Wars parody “George Lucas in Love” outsold the DVD of the first episode of Star Wars. This is the kind of momentum that can allow other fan digital films to taken more seriously.

The internet was something big. It was a game changer. What the internet did was become a place of cultural participation that allowed people to produce and distribute cultural goods such as fictional films and stories. The internet made it so that product owners no had absolute control over the cultural impact their product had on consumers. The balance of power has been  completely changed. Take Star Wars for instance, Hollywood tried to shut down fan fiction, thinking that they still had control. However, they later learned that they can at most work with fan fiction creators to influence what they make.

Our two big milestones!

Alright, so my team consists of Bryan Le and Dustin He. We ran into problems right from the start of the project. Problems included things such as clothing props, lighting, filming times and scheduling times. Our first big milestone may sound a little weird but it was when we were finally able to meet as a team of three. We each had very different schedules that made it quite difficult for all three of us to meet at the same time. However, when push came to shove we got things done. Our second big milestone was filming about 90% of the video in a single afternoon that took over 3 hours. As the director/cameraman, I could really tell how much effort they put into it. Virtually every line took about five takes to complete. I remember some scenes taking up well over ten takes to get it right. The actors (Bryan and Dustin) were both clearly nervous but determined at the same time. The video editing is going to be a hell of a hurdle to get over because it could make or break our entire project. I personally dread the paper portion of the project due to my lackluster writing abilities.

We just about used all the digital tools that were taught in class for our project. We’re using Audacity to dub over certain portions of the video. We’re also screen casting some footage into the video as well as using Movie Maker to put the whole video together. We’re basically using all the digital tools we have available to optimize our creative process.

Our team did get some feedback on our storyboard and it wasn’t pretty. We were originally going to do some hardcore, dead serious tutorial of a guy just talking into the camera but the professor told us to change it and gave us some tips. We ended up using more dialogue and acting than what we on our previous storyboard.

3 items for final project

For this final project, our topic is about helping our viewers get an internship. Therefore, all pictures, songs, and movies will have to somehow relate to this subject as closely as possible. For my image, I thought that this image was the closest thing that could give off the illusion of an intern feeling due to how formal everyone is dressed and posed. As for a song, even though it was quite difficult to choose a song that has anything to do with internships, I chose this song because it captures the feeling of an internship. Internship are suppose to open doors and allow you to feel free and opportunistic. This song captures those feelings and is even called “hopeful”. I will definitely not be incorporating a movie into my project but I do plan to mention movies like “The Internship” (2013) because despite it being a comedy it does hit a lot of sore spots of new interns. It shows that internships are just a gateway, the first test. But it also shows how important internships are.

Storyboard thoughts

I’m quite happy with the current circumstance my group is in. Even though we don’t have a finished product in mind, we have an idea of what we want to do. Basically, we know what we want to do just not how we’re going to do it. Ideally, I want to keep the video as simple as possible so as to make sure it’s obvious as can be what we want the viewers to know and do. I know everyone’s excited about filming techniques and what not but I honestly think we shouldn’t try and force it too much. My storyboard will be quite simple. Start the video with someone in an empty classroom introducing the purpose of the video and what we want them to learn. Next we jump to a scene of that person meeting with a (fake) counselor and the counselor will then explain the entire process to us in the video. Finally, we’ll end with the student back in the classroom making some final conclusions and take home messages.

Top 5 Midterm Projects!

When I first started thinking about the topic for my midterm project, I had a bunch of ideas but nothing that really stuck, such as politics and tennis. I ended up choosing League of Legends because I knew there it gave me the most options about what I could do with my video. I could choose to cover the North American League Championship Series or a explain upcoming Patch Notes. In the end, I chose to do Patch Notes mainly due to the fact that I had a better grasp on how I would format the video part of the project. Initially, I thought of showing game play footage of the champion was I talking about in my video but after actually looking results, they looked too flashy and distracting. So instead, I pieced together splash art animations as the background of my video while I explained changes made to those champions. A more subtle but important decision I made to my video was the background music. I needed music that League players could recognize and enjoy while also not violating the copyright policies. Therefore, I chose a song called Concussive which every League player has heard and popular enough that they can enjoy it. This song was also allowed by its creators to be freely used.

My own project aside, the top 5 midterm projects I liked were:

1. Lovelylilkitten took the first prize to me. At first, it doesn’t look so impressive. However, when you get to the video, you see how well done it actually is. When I compared it to other videos the biggest difference I saw was how natural the video seemed, as if they had done something like this plenty of times. The editing and music also fit the guide perfectly. However, what really made it the best one was the humor that allows people to actually sit through the whole video.
2. GiancarloMagic. I was really tempted to give this blog first place but there was one thing that slowly killed me on the inside throughout the video…the fact that the video was taped taller than it was wide. I hate vertical videos. They are the bane of the internet. Anyhow, the magic and smoothness of the video made me really like the content but that vertical taping skill seriously killed me. Aside from that I admired the way he acted like nothing happened and just moved on when he messed up breaking the egg with one hand. xD
3. Single Guys Cook Too was awesome. It was funny, while designed, and actually looked professional. Maybe the reason I didn’t put any higher was because the content didn’t really resonate with me but the design and editing skills still let me enjoy the video. They went the extra mile and wrote more than what was necessary, showing me that they were actually passionate about their project and not acting like it was just another chore. All in all, a very well done blog that I believe could really kick off with the right audience.
4. Rufmaescrimador was a blog that stood out to me. It was not as outstanding as the top 3 blogs above, but it was much better than the rest. I especially liked the video editing. However, what really dragged the blog behind the other 3 for me was the fact that the blog design was a little everywhere. The header colors didn’t mash well with the colors of the rest of the blog. I can’t exactly pinpoint what was about it that seemed off to me but I just had this subconscious problem with it. However, other than that, I found the blog to be quite interesting and truly enjoyed it.
5. Surviving College In 2016 was great. The most attractive aspect about the blog would definitely be the video editing skills. The fact that the blog background was pitch black (unlike the other blogs) allowed it to stand out when I considered what the top 5 blogs were. You could really see the theme they were trying to set. Background black as night and a header with night lights. It was clear to me that they had a clear plan in mind for the blog.

Video Editing Experience!

First off, I had a hellish experience with video editing. I’ve had just about zero experience with Movie Maker and it took me hours just to get the most basic mechanics down. Fortunately we weren’t required to do any crazy editing or else I don’t think I would’ve made it. The worst part about the whole experience was actually recording the voice over. I was even half thinking about just recording my voice separately but convinced myself it would probably be even harder. It took me about five tries to get the audio part down. By the time I was done, my video was four freaking minutes long. So I had to spend another half hour cutting out bits and pieces of irrelevant videos. Then I ran into a problem uploading the file onto YouTube because it wasn’t in the right format. That took me about another half hour to figure out how in the world I was going to get a mp4 file instead of the Movie Maker project file.

How can a game convey politics? It seems pretty simple. Games of CS:GO are all about terrorist vs military. That’s in a way connected to politics. I would imagine that there are also political games out there about how the main character can climb from an average guy to being the president. I could imagine people willing to play a game like that, after all, I’ve seem a lot worse games.

Podcast experience

My podcast experience was a little rough. Right from the start, I ran into a problem while editing the songs. The problem I ran into was that I couldn’t edit just one track because whenever I would try and do something to one track (i.e time shift a specific track) the application would apply the tool to both tracks. It took me about half an hour to figure out what I did wrong. At first I thought I was selecting multiple tracks while applying the changes, but the problem remained even after I fixed that. In the end, I realized the problem was that audacity had “Sync Lock Tracks” on by default, making it impossible to edit just one track. After that hic up everything else went pretty smoothly. The voice over part was a little weird for me though, since I’m not used to recording my voice. Luckily, the video we had to watch last week on audio editing taught me how to edit out any awkwardness or weird pauses in my recording as well as silencing background noise.

So I watched this video off of Red Letter Media. It was a pretty short clip that packed a lot of content. This is how I think the producers put this video together. First, they recorded the lines in some studio separately from the acting and then edited them together after everything else was done. They also edited in a song as background behind the voice over and clip. Much like what we had to do in the assignment with our voices over the music. Then they recorded about 15 different scenes with edited special effects. They then edited little bits of those scenes into the audio as a visual. I would say they recorded all of the clips themselves and only borrowed the music.

Audio Editing In My Future

After watching the video I already know what part audio editing is going to play in my future. You see, I have a weird way of studying. Instead of taking notes in class, I find that I learn more from just listening and not distracting myself with note taking. So instead, I always bring my laptop to class and record the lessons (only audio). This way I can completely concentrate on the class without worrying about forgetting the information later. I then spend the weekends listening to those recording and jotting down notes I deem important.

The problem I always run into a the low quality of the audio but I never knew how to fix it. However, after watching the video on how to use Audacity, I’m now confident that in the future, the lessons I record will be in high quality and without all the background noise.

Looking ten to twenty down the line, audio editing will probably remind a side hobby and not something I’ll incorporate into my job. I may like to remix music every once in a while for fun but audio editing just doesn’t resonate with me the way video editing does. With that being said, I do still think it is pretty cool how we can manipulate audios and do things like how the guy in the video silenced his breathe. It was also pretty amazing how he showed us that you can change the audio to make it sound like the recording came from a radio and what not.

All in all, I found audio editing to be interesting but not something I can see myself using for a potential job in the future. After all, audacity is only the most basic of tools. I mean, the tools professionals have to use are just mindblowing…borrowed from www.nhtunes.biz

 

My Image Editing Experiences!

My image editing experience started about a year ago. It began out of boredom and curiosity. At the time, I decided to translate some Chinese comics to kill time. The problem with that was raw comics don’t always come out clean when uploaded onto the internet. More often than not I would have a low quality image of a comic on my hands. Being the perfectionist that I am, I couldn’t bare to just translate a low quality image so I decided to do some research on how to ‘clean’ images. At first, I was lost beyond help.                                                    

But I did eventually manage to teach myself how to do some very basic things like cleaning simple watermarks. Other than basic image cleaning, I’ve only ever done typesetting (which is more complicated than it looks). Naturally, I never got into any of the advanced techniques but I did learn some basic rules and standards to typesetting like the fonts and styles. Sadly, I have never taken any course (until now) that taught anything even remotely related to editing. Everything I know was self taught and so my knowledge on this field is very limited. But that’s what makes this class so thrilling. I finally get to properly learn how to play around with videos and images. Up until now, I felt as if I was grasping into the dark, unsure of what I was doing. (memgen.com)

In the Coleman reading, he says that internet trolls are often well versed in image editing due to high levels of memes used on websites like 4chan. These trolls edit images for a variety of purposes, some are funny, others gross.

Strategy Presentation – First Post

The sole purpose of this blog is for my Strategy Presentation Class Assignments.