The first one is a poem about how nature was a teacher to me, and I wrote a poem about my experiences playing golf.
When the wind blows upon the little white ball, one must go with the push rather than pull
One of the lessons I learned while playing this sport was that mother nature won’t adhere to our wishes and do whatever she pleases. It is the player’s responsibility to account for natural occurrences such as a wind, and play along with the elements rather than fight against it.
The next one is a quick photo edit over an old photo with a man listening to something.
I tried to overlay music notes I found on Google, but I had a hard time overlaying without the pictures hiding behind the background. A bit low effort, but this is all I could come up with in 10-15 minutes. And I think that’s fine. I’m coming to realize that it’s more about attempting the process with these daily creates, rather than striving for perfection.
As Hwei ventured on his quest for world domination through the harnessing of AI powers and creating life through his research, Aggressive Technologies was a corporation that he never saw eye to eye with.
Aggressive Technologies looked to take the AI market by storm, engulfing all of the industries pertaining to, e-commerce, social media, among other fields of tech. Their sole focus on expansion and obsession with creating a monopoly has made their corporation one that seeks to trample upon others to gain the upper hand.
On one hand, Hwei may seem to have the same overall goals as Aggressive Technologies, taking over the world and having the power to shape anything he touches. However, it has never a goal of his to gain monetarily from his research and creations. In fact, his ideal new world would consist of no monetary value on any item, idea, or being. All he ever wanted was to create the way he wanted to; for the world to see the potential beauties of the world from his perspective. The purpose of his new AI beings would not be for his gain, but rather for the betterment his world (at least for his perfect creations).
To be fair, some of Hwei’s equipment and parts of his laboratory were stolen from Aggressive Technologies, as he sent out his rogue thief programmed robots to infiltrate their headquarters. The masterminds behind Aggressive Technologies know about the research of Hwei and the existence of some of his true to life robots, but have not identified him as a serious threat yet. There will soon be a clash between the two parties, as Aggressive Technologies is threatened by Hwei’s unwillingness to back down to their expansion, while Hwei fights back against the irrational development of AI in his eyes, ruining the beauty of his craft.
For my choice of assignment this week, I decided to do the Talk to the Bot assignment. I actually did the Consult with your doctor as one of my optional assignments for a previous week, so I already had experience generating speech from Dr. Oblivion and creating a narrative. I decided to make my course character, Hwei, ask Dr. Oblivion to become one of his evil sentient robots with a body that would aid him in taking over the world by creating perfect AI beings that would take over humans.
Learning how to generate the lip synced video was a whole different process compared to the original Consult with your doctor assignment. It wasn’t hard, but it really did take a while and I think having a higher end PC and good internet speeds expedited the process for me. The process was streamlined enough to where I only had to click a few buttons and create the right folders. The tutorial given was very helpful for me to follow directions and create the videos.
What really intrigued me was the Python code used for the entire process. There was a “show code” button for each of the processes, and I looked through lines while I waited for my videos to generate. I was fascinated to see how each piece of code worked for the application. and it was definitely some good future personal project ideas for me in the future.
For the Dr. Oblivion clips generated, I was a little disappointed at how the lip sync wasn’t all that great. I’ve seen some other examples at the top of DS106 weekly assignment posts, and those look to be synced a little better than mine. There were parts where at the end of a period, the Doc’s lips kept moving and it felt a little jarring to me. For Hwei’s voice, I used a basic speech generator online to make mp3’s of his voice. I tried to use an AI voice replicator to take the original League of Legends game voice for hwei, but many of them required a paid subscription and was out of reach for me. I spliced it all together by using the Clipchamp online video editor, and it only took a few minutes to put the video, audio, and Hwei’s avatar picture together.
Overall, I had fun with this assignment and I learned a lot about AI generation for audio and video. Hopefully I can even make an AI bot myself with my own code! I’ll make sure to cater it towards taking over the world with AI, or else Hwei might hold my life against me
Before coming into this week, I thought that I would be facing unprecedented amounts of DS106 assignments that would take up my entire week. To my surprise, it wasn’t that bad! It was actually the least amount of work so far, and I’m glad to have a little bit of downtime for this class while I focus in on other piling assignments. The majority of this week was to work on the film analysis assignment, which took up most of my time. Before that though, I made a post on my updated goals for DS106.
I wouldn’t say my overall goals have shifted in any significant way, but I definitely had an enlightenment moment about the audio and visual storytelling effects and it genuinely piqued my interest. I wrote more about it in the post above.
I also did two daily creates for this week, which I put in my daily create roundup for the week.
Now onto the meat of this week; the video analysis. I decided to go with WALL-E again to create an analysis on the cinematography, rather than the premise and themes that I explored in my first DS106 blog post.
This is hands down my favorite ever project for DS106.
Initially I had a hard time coming up with a film to analyze. I don’t have any subscriptions to any streaming platforms, so I had to do my best to find clips on YouTube. While brainstorming, I had a lightbulb moment that reminded me of a particular scene in WALL-E that I wanted to delve further into.
I picked a scene where the majority of the attention is put on the characters. I focused in on the close-ups of the characters, and how different cinematography elements were strung together to tell a story without the use of dialogue.
I used OBS to recording my desktop screen, with the audio recording on. I wrote a script beforehand and printed it out to read, and it was recorded all in a continuous take. This allowed me to not perform any extra work of overlaying my voice on the clip, nor did I have to download the video to my computer. However, this forced me to record everything in a single take, which gave me no leeway to mess up any of my lines for 3 minutes. It took way too many takes than I want to admit to get all of my lines down, and timing my commentary with the transitions of the clips was even more difficult.
Once I did get it down though, I was so satisfied with the end result. I think this is one of my best works so far, and I had a blast walking through the creative process behind the analysis. I’d argue that the timing of the commentary is a method of storytelling in and of itself, and I think it really shines through in my WALL-E analysis.
I’ll definitely explore editing clips in a video editor in the future, but learning OBS was a great experience for the rest of my DS106 journey.
Looking back at my first post, I made an honest reflection on why I decided to enroll in the course and what my outlook for the future is. I’d say that most of this still stands true, but I’d like to add how my perspective of audio and visual elements shifted within the last 2 weeks.
I listened to a variety of audio storytelling pieces in the assignments I did as well as the DS106 radio session. I was fascinated by the amount of detail and attention that goes into the careful crafting of sounds to create a narrative. The audio stories that I created for my assignment bank projects was my first venture into creating these myself, and although I’m still a novice, I found myself really enjoying the work. For the visual side, I’m currently working on the film analysis assignment, and this has also given me a new perspective on popular films that I have watched.
The bulk of this class is still storytelling and updating the blog, but I have definitely found a greater appreciation for the attributes that make up these stories. I’m looking forward to doing more audio and visual work for the rest of the semester.
This first one was made with a tool from https://mutsuacen.com/ to draw any squiggly pattern the heart desires. There wasn’t any specific instructions for this create other than to mess around with it. I decided to create an intersecting object with geometric patterns that squiggle around. No particular meaning behind it but it looks cool!
The last one was a poem portrait where the user puts in a word of their choice along with a picture of themselves, and Google generates a portrait wall along with a gradient of colors. Not sure how the selfie affects the end result and what the AI algorithm does with it, but I did this a few times with different results each time.
Last week, I noted that I was worried about this week’s assignments, as I haven’t had much experience with Audacity or editing audio, and it seemed like a big workload. However, I enjoyed every assignment this week and learning more about audio storytelling and how sound can affect so much of any form of media, from movies to radio stories.
Setting up Audacity and SoundCloud wasn’t a big issue. I already had Audacity installed for some other school projects and I made a new SoundCloud for DS106 purposes. The hard part was getting into a mindset of expressing myself with just audio, rather than the usual visual tools that we’re so accustomed to.
The Moon Graffiti story was the first experience I had really honing in on the auditory storytelling elements. The moon landing was a great premise, and the entire story made me feel some sort of existential dread, so I wrote about it in my reflection post.
Next I created my DS106 radio bumper. This wasn’t anything special, I made a pretty generic bumper that framed DS106 in a positive light. However, the recording process actually took multiple tries because I kept tripping over my words and not getting specific enunciation I wanted. I was satisfied with the final product, but boy was it frustrating while I was recording.
The DS106 live listening session was a blast. I tuned into the Wednesday broadcast after work and I didn’t expect to get so into the stories and the audio elements that enhanced my experience. Talking in the Discord chat along with Professor Bond and other classmates gave me more perspective on how sound effects and timing of music can really elevate a story.
The Sound Effect Story was something I had to go back and edit. Initially I made a spooky story through my own will, but after looking at the assignment bank, I realized that the spooky story was another assignment entirely. So I used the spooky story as one of my 3 assignments for the week and created a car crash story for the specific Sound Effect Story assignment.
The three other audio assignments I did for the week are:
Spooky story (as I mentioned before) Dr. Oblivion leaving a voicemail Asking Dr. Oblivion about AI taking over jobs and recording a conversation with him
I had a hard time fitting my specific course character into my assignments, so I ended up relying on a lot of Dr. Oblivion content to get my stuff done for the week. I’m hoping to look up some tools that can be used to create a voice for my specific character soon.
Next are my daily creates for this week. I added text over a plane banner, made a poem about lemons without the use of the most common words associated with lemons, and took a secret hideout out of a video game and put some meaning behind it.
For my radio show ideas, I couldn’t think of anything specific since we don’t have our assigned team members yet, but I was visualizing a story that our team could make that incorporates all of the characters in one way or another, just like those in the DS106 radio broadcasts this week. I also talked about my experiences with podcasts and shows, particularly about how I’m an avid tennis podcast listener and the shift in mindset I’ll need for DS106.
That’s all for week 4! Crazy how time is flying by, we’re 1/4th of the way through the semester. Even through my copious amounts of procrastination and laziness, I really do enjoy this class and it’s one of the highlights of my week. I’m looking forward to what this next 2 weeks will bring; looks like we’re becoming filmmakers!
"Create a voice mail message for a character in a film or tv show"
This was an assignment to create a voicemail message for a character. I couldn’t really figure out how to use one of those AI voice copiers to put in my course character’s voice, so I just used Dr. O to create me one. I would like to find out how I can create my course character’s voice soon, as this will help in the storytelling assignments in the future.
Dr. Oblivion gave me some snark and filler at the beginning and end of the clip, so I had to manually remove those so that it fit the assignment. It wasn’t a hard task, but I didn’t expect him to be so annoyed at me giving him a request!
“Tell a story using nothing but sound effects. There can be no verbal communication, only sound effects. Use at least five different sounds that you find online. The story can be no longer than 90 seconds.“
I actually did this assignment using the spooky story, but I realized that the spooky story falls in line with another preexisting assignment in the assignment bank, so I repurposed my scary castle story towards that assignment and made a new story! This one is about a dude that goes into a bar and has one too many drinks, ends up driving under the influence and gets into a crash. Afterwards, the ambulance rushes to the man to save his life.
A little grim but honestly the impact sound of the crash didn’t sound too bad so hopefully my guy makes it alive. I used many fade in and fade out effects to mix the 4 different audio clips together, and it turned out pretty good!
