This is the Signing Words assignment. I chose to do this assignment because I took four years of ASL in high school and love the language and culture. Because of this I was able to finger-spell this phrase without a problem!
It has definitely been a while since I have signed, and it for sure has been a while since I have had to record myself signing. My last year of ASL was online due to COVID. Yikes.
I recorded this short video on my phone and got rid of the sound in iMovie. Do you know what I am finger-spelling?
This is video assignment 30 Second Memory and I chose to do this with my character Evelyn as we follow her into the memory of college move-in.
College move-in can be so stressful. You have to make sure you have all of your stuff, traffic can be an issue, you have to get all your college supplies and your dorm key, its hot and everyone is upset, and finally you have to say goodbye. Evelyns experience moving in was no different. Her dorm started off small, but the campus was beautiful. Follow her into her memories as she remembers what the first few hours of college move-in was like for her.
To do this assignment I found some clips that I liked of other people moving into college and importing that into iMovie. I added some filters like a cool tone to the airport and plane. And then a warmer tint in the dining hall to give it an “evening” look. I then used the “modern” theme music from iMovie and adjusted the volume accordingly.
My scene takes places when Krissy gets to the future and is exploring all the new tech products that the future has. She assumes Dr. Oblivion is similar to an Alexa, but she is mistaken and Dr. O is not afraid to tell her why. I used Sims 4 to help animate my idea and my friend was the voice actor for Krissy. The scene is listed below.
The process to make this video was long. To get Dr. Oblivion’s responses, I tried different lines from Krissy and used trial and error to find the best responses. I wanted to showcase Dr. O’s sarcastic personality but ran into the problem that his responses were just a tad limited. I eventually figured out that if I downloaded multiple audio clips, I could edit them together to get the lines I wanted. Once I had my conversation, I used Sims 4 to animate my scene. I thought this was the best medium because it allowed me to have complete control over the character design, lighting set, camera angle, and anything else. I then used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit everything together. A conflict I kept having was the screen recording of the Sims 4 was formatted as .avi, and Adobe doesn’t support .avi, however, I couldn’t go back and find a different method to record because I invested too much time into filming the Sims scenes (it may not look like it, but it took a lot of precise movements to get the camera where I wanted.) After I tried some different methods that didn’t work, I was able to use clipchamp to export the .avi into .mp4. This left me with a little bit of a blurry video, but it was the best option. My friend helped me out by voicing Krissy so she sent me an audio clip and I plugged it into the video. For Dr. Oblivion’s voice, I tried to generate the lip synced video but it was taking 30 minutes per download, and with editing together everything it would have added hours to a project that had already taken the better part of the day. Once everything else was finished, I uploaded the video to YouTube and the rest is history.
I love video essays, especially for movies and tv shows. I watch them in my free time a lot and I really enjoyed watching the Tony Zhou videos. When I was making my video essay, I was trying to emulate what I had seen in the videos before. In this video, I talk about the world building in this episode as well as the movement composure and the audio in this scene. I also tried my best to incorporate that “Therefore & But” method in this video although it was a bit of a struggle. I really wanted to talk about those three things, but I had trouble figuring where the “Therefore” and the “But” went and I had issues trying not so say “and then.” When I was making the video, I recorded my script and added it plus the scene into Adobe Premiere Pro. From there, I tried to cut up the scene so that what I was talking about matched what was being shown.
Help Wanted!
The biggest challenge of this assignment was finding a scene I could use in my video. Normally, if I want to use a video from YouTube I screen record the video. However there were essentially no full scenes on YouTube, even this one wasn’t the full scene and it was blurry. I tried to google how to do it, but most answers were talking about using pirating websites. I liked this assignment and I wouldn’t mind doing it again in the future for another class or for a final project, so if anyone has any tips on how to download high quality scenes in full please leave a comment. I need help!
This assignment is the All the Relaxation assignment. Truth be told I had an idea for what I wanted to create with my character. I just needed to find an assignment that fit what I wanted to create!
For this much needed relaxing break from work you join Evelyn for lunch. So you sit in a park with a beautiful view and start to take our your lunch to enjoy. Its been a busy day at the office and you both just need some quiet time. Evelyn brings out her lunch and Stephen Kings You Like it Darker book as you both enjoy the sounds of the park and sit in peace. Even if it is only for an hour.
I once again used Audacity and Freesound for this assignment. I knew that I wanted to incorporate my character by doing a day in the life of the sounds around her. So I created just a simple lunch with her. I started with park sounds. I wanted to convey the steps of eating lunch at work. Taking your sandwich out of its ziploc bag, so thats exactly what I did. I found a ziploc bag opening and a soft crunch of food being eaten. I then wanted Lynn to be reading a book since that is something she enjoys doing when she needs a peace of mind so I had a sound of a bag being opened and closed for her to get her book and then flipping through pages to find where she left off. She finds her page with a final flip and starts to read. I then repeat the ziploc bag, the soft crunch, and another page flip and the rest of the park sounds.
I personally feel like these park sounds and the comfort of reading in the company of others is very relaxing. Especially the page turning!
This is the Create a Place assignment. This is a Day on the Beach
In this place you are sitting on the beach listening to the seagulls and waves. There is a slight breeze in the air but you don’t mind. The air smells like salt. The sand is warm on your feet as you stand on the beach looking at the horizon. Eventually you take a calm breath and put on your earbuds and listen to you favorite orchestral track until you fall asleep.
I created this using Audacity and freesound.org. I started with the underlying sound of the beach and added the seagulls next. I wanted to take this assignment one level up rather than just describing a place so I added a relaxed inhale and exhale and found a beautiful orchestral sound to add the end of the story. I had a lot of fun making this and I feel relaxed after hearing it for a while. Im also a lot for comfortable with Audacity.
This assignment told me to remove the lyrics from my favorite song for others to guess the song. I love these kinds of games so I wanted to provide! This isn’t my all time favorite song, but I’ve been listening to this artist a lot lately and it’s definetly my favorite from her discography. Here are some hints to guess the song and I’ll put the answer at the end of my blog. Each progressing hint gives the answer away a little more.
This singer is a country artist
She was on Radio Disney
This singer is on tour right now and is coming to DC very soon. This song is on her setlist.
To make this song without lyrics, I uploaded the chorus of the song I wanted to Stemify. The app uses AI to seperate the vocals and the different instrumentals so once it worked its magic, I turned the vocals all the way down and from there I uploaded the song to Soundcloud.
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The song is Hole in the Bottle by Kelsea Ballerini
(the emojis from hint #6 are supposed to say “hole in one bottle”)
For the radio bumper assignment, I based my bumper on the iconic “You’re watching Disney Channel’ ads that would air when I was younger. I thought the idea was creative and nostalgic, but mainly because of Defunctland on YouTube. When I looked into what a radio bumper was, the assignment description explained that it is a “short recording that identifies the radio station with signature music or an expression that makes sure the listeners know what they are tuned into.” It reminded me of Defunctland’s “Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery” where the host, Kevin, talks about Network Identifiers. Kevin goes on to explain that bumpers are a fascinating liminal space that is able to tell viewers, “Here is where you are, here is what you’ve been watching, and here’s what’s next.” The video is all-around amazing, so I encourage anyone reading this to watch it. That being said, because this video taught me what bumpers were when I first watched that video, I wanted to reference it by using the Disney Channel theme for my bumper.
To make this bumper, I recorded myself saying my name and saying, “You’re listening to DS106 radio.” From there, I uploaded my recording and the audio clip of the Disney Channel theme to Adobe Audition to start editing. Because the audio was so short, editing was easy but I did run into one challenge. I wanted some music to play first and then for me to talk, but to do that, I had to set the clips at different audio levels and then have them fade into each other. The frustrating thing about Adobe Audition is that I couldn’t figure out how to do a fade transition for the audio. What kept happening was the first audio clip would fade into zero, and the next audio clip would fade from zero, but it was jarring and didn’t sound good. The solution I found told me to set the two clips to different volumes and then overlap each other. That is what I ended up doing, but I am keeping my eye out for a better way to do this.
I like how my radio bumper came out, and I’ve enjoyed listening to everyone else’s. I’m excited to maybe one day hear it on DS106 radio!
