Today I did a little combination of two Video Assignments: this one revolving around making an animatic and this one revolving around making a video list of 5 things important to you. Combining them, I chose to make a little animatic about things that are most important to my Course Character, Sol!
Actually, I was planning on making an animatic of the original assignment (conversing with Dr. Oblivion), but I was annoying having to keep drawing over and over. Instead, I used the frames I got from that and put them into this!
Here is the video:
I used FireAlpaca, an art program I’ve been using since like 2015 and a really old Wacom art tablet from when I used to actually draw a lot. Since then, I lost interest in art (I watched all my artist peers get better at art and watched how I could not always improve and it made me mad so I just stopped (and I got old and busy)), but this was nice to rebirth the artsy side of me.
I used ElevenLabs for the AI voice for Sol (it’s the voice Serena), but I don’t think the voice is exactly what I would imagine them to sound like. Having a fluid form makes me think that their voice would just be different all the time.
I used OpenShot to edit this and finally figured out how to work it, and it is actually . . . so easy to use, it’s kind of crazy. Not sure what happened last week, but we got it! Putting all the pictures in and moving them around was not hard at all, very simple task and not even the hardest part. Very crazy to me that I’m saying that the easiest and quickest part was editing it!
This was an okay assignment, though. I spent too much time on it, but I rebirthed the old art-lover inside of me, so it was sort of nostalgic too.
“Record yourself getting ready! Whether it be how you get ready for your day, ready for bed, ready for an event, makeup look, etc. See if you can edit the video to speed through parts that may take a second (i.e. washing your face, brushing your teeth…) and create a voice over of the process. For inspiration, look up any ‘Get ready with me’ video on YouTube! Have fun with it, maybe even make a (tasteful) parody version.”
So I decided, of course I’m going to do makeup!
I actually did three different looks and filmed it yesterday . . . and then accidentally deleted it when it didn’t save right . . . and lost everything so I got really mad . . . so this is actually my second time doing this video assignment!
Anyways, here is my video!
The video is messy, I cut out the majority of it because I ended up covering up what I was doing with my hand, BUT! I did it! I kept everything sped up too because it can be miserably slow . . . makeup is a tedious process, let me tell you.
Also, editing this was nightmareish. I have no idea how makeup social media influencers decide what they want in the video and especially those who make TikToks or Instagrams that are just 1 minute . . . I skipped so many stuff!! How do they do it and include everything!! Even if you cut out the entire process of a step, it feels weird . . . huge kudos to them for that though (in another life I am a social media makeup influencer but in this life I am not).
If you want a list of all of my makeup that I used in this (whether included or not), here it is:
Elf Blemish Control Face Primer w/ salicylic acid
Colourpop Pretty Fresh pressed face powder (shade fair 1)
Morphe x Nyane Fierce Fairytale Palette (Eyeshadow Colors: Gyoza)
Morphe x Abby Roberts Bittersweet Like Honey Palette (Eyeshadow Colors: Solar, Spicy, Vivienne, LA Vibez; Blush Colors: Hot Sauce, Pink Champagne)
Juvia’s Place The Nubian Glow Palette (Eyeshadow Colors: Gold shade mid bottom, has no name?!?!)
Elf Dewy Coconut Setting Mist
Isn’t that fun..
Anyways, I filmed this on my phone (iPhone 15 Pro) and edited it on iMovie because it took too long to try to send to my laptop to edit through OpenShot. I didn’t have any trouble with iMovie, though. It was a fairly easy application to use.
I’m not sure what else to say that I haven’t said here or in the video. I think it’d be interesting to see other Sol-inspired makeup (maybe I am just a lover of sun-related aesthetics and need to take a breather but this makes me so excited) so maybe I will continue to do more Sol makeup! Very obviously, this makeup would look very different on them, because I am about as pale as my hoodie in the video, but I’m actually working on drawing Sol a little bit (my other assignment that I’m doing is the animatic one . . . which is taking a while, but surprise for more Sol features soon!)
Thank you for reading and watching I hope you have a good day or night!
Today I watched the good classic 2001: A Space Odyssey to study Stanley Kubrick’s directing and cinematography. It was a long movie, and I had to separate it into two different watchings because I had to go to work in the middle of it.
This movie . . . wow, it was onto something. I really enjoyed it!! I also think it’s so interesting to see how this was one of the first AI characters in media, and I really thought about how AI has changed so much in film. It also had the trope that AI learns too much and becomes evil, so that was interesting how that idea was present even in the 60s.
For the Assignment, I did a video essay on one of the scenes in which HAL-9000, the AI in the film, was observing and listening (or reading) the two humans, Dave and Frank, discuss that maybe HAL was malfunctioning. It’s the turning point, and it’s a tense scene that has barely any movement.
Some notes about my video essay: I used OBS to record the movie and Microsoft Clipchamp to film the audio voiceover and edit. And it was hell. I couldn’t zoom in on the audio and I felt very far away and with limited control. At one point, I tried to drag the audio, and it completely disappeared . . . and I couldn’t get it back despite still hearing it . . . so please ignore the little error where my voice repeats itself! I literally could not see the audio.
Overall thoughts were, the movie was great, the filming and storytelling through tiny tiny things was so powerful. The voiceover was also like fighting a war, I filmed 3 different takes before deciding I just needed to make a script and hope for the best. Editing made me want to slam my head into a wall (also I tried OpenShot first, and couldn’t import my video at all so I gave up), despite having a little experience in editing. I definitely, definitely need more practice.
Not everyone listens to the news. Those who do know that it’s either covering really important and often depressing issues or reports that are just so bizarre you wouldn’t believe they happened if not told alongside the photos and videos. Today, my mission was to make my own ridiculous breaking news report.
Create a breaking news story. This should be fake news. You should create a dialogue and have an AI read it using text to speech. There are several free programs. One possibility is Colossyan.com. Mix in a news jingle to make your story sound legit. You can find some jingles on freesound.org. Be sure to give credit if necessary.
Be creative, funny, or serious. The choice is yours. Just make it sound realistic.
To make this new report I first started by using the AI News Article Generator I found. I wanted this assignment to be almost entirely Ai made and that meant listening to whatever it decided to write for me. As a prompt, I used “crazy man does something dumb but illegal” to avoid being too specific and getting bad results. Luckily the first one I got was immediately so bizarre and entertaining though I would probably believe happened if I saw this report. You can listen to it here:
Next, I had to find a text-to-speech reader. Now I went through a lot of different sites and had issues with a lot of them. Either the entire tool was behind a paywall, you could only insert 200 characters this was 1820 characters so definitely a slow process, or the voices sounded too fake. But finally, I stumbled upon TTSMaker with free services and a large character limit I never hit. I did two voices for the report so listeners would know another person was the police officer speaking like an actual interview and then download the files. Then I had to find a jingle which I found a very normal one on Freesound and easily downloaded as well. I imported them to Audacity and quickly spliced the audio to make the masterpiece you see before you. Next, I wanted to make a quick news background, even though the assignment didn’t call for one I had to because it felt like people needed to see such a ridiculous event. So I used Stable Diffusion Online and after a few tries I finally prompted “man dressed in a chicken suit running away from police officers in a grocery store.” Finally, I put the image into Break Your Own News which added the news header and ticker used on the actual news. I wrote the ticker this time since it was so small and not a part of the original assignment. It reads, “Are you living with Ai? Find out from real reporters here.” Hope this ridiculous piece makes someone laugh because I sure did.
This week I had to do 3 assignments from the bank. The catcher was that the assignments were only suppose to come from AudioAssignments – Assignment Bank (ds106.us). They also had to contain some sort of course theme of AI or Dr. Oblivion in two out of three assignments. The two assignments that I chose are connected to Dr. Oblivion.
I found one assignment that is called Consult with your Doctor. The instruction are:
“If you give Dr. Oblivion (https://oblivion.university/ ) a questions or directive, he will give a response of up to a minute, which may or may not be loaded with snark. For this assignment you should download MP3 of the Doctor’s response, import it into Audacity and cut it up and insert your part of the conversation, which doesn’t necessarily have to match your original input. You may download a few MP3 responses from https://oblivion.univerty/ to get some personality variation. And you don’t have to let him have the last word.”
I was so excited that I found this assignment because it relates to what I need to complete this week. I started by pulling up Dr. Oblivion and asking him a question having to do with what his office hours are. Which of course, he had a smart remark. If you want to hear my conversation with him about his office hours you can listen to it here:
To get my responses was actually kind of difficult. I had no idea where to star using my own voice because I was not taught in my 30 min intro at the DKC. I ended up using an app on my iPhone called “Voice Memos” Once I got my different responses to Dr. Oblivion, I saved it and sent it through my email. From my email I downloaded it and then of course, Audacity did not accept that format. I then went on google and asked to convert the audio to WAV. This website: MP3 to WAV Converter online – FreeConvert.com saved me multiple times during this week. I was then able to cut and paste the “conversation” with Dr. Oblivion. I think it turned out great in my opinion as this is my first time doing anything close to this.
I would give this assignment an 8 out of 10. 1 being the easiest and 10 being the hardest. The reason it was so difficult for me was because I had to find a voice recording app and then I had to convert it into WAV. After that, the cutting and pasting was not necessarily hard but very time consuming.
The other assignment that had Dr. Oblivion in it was a tongue twister. To find a tongue twister, I opened up google and I was giving Tongue Twisters Generator (randomwordgenerator.com) I clicked through a couple of them until I found one that was a little bit silly. I wanted people to laugh at the tongue twister. But the more I tried to make this assignment sound good, the worst it sounded like. The instructions you are probably wondering about are:
“Say any tongue twister as fast as you can and include a background sound to layer it.”
It sounds like such an easy task! But it because more and more difficult because first I had to hear myself talk and then go as fast as I could. I would say that I set myself up for failure! I finally got myself to say the tongue twister as fast as I could like times and by the fifth time, I gave up and I put it into audacity. Then I needed a background sound which I found on Freesound. Putting my voice along with a sound is not as good as it sounds. I had to make the music quiet because I could barley hear myself talk. If you are looking for a good laugh and disappointment, you can hear this audio here:
I would give this assignment an 8 out of 10. 1 being the easiest and 10 being the hardest. The reason it is so high in the rankings was because I had to use my own voice and there were people around me and it just sounds horrible.
So that leaves one assignment, one that is not related to a course through AI or Dr. Oblivion. Of course, I picked this next assignment dealing with instruments. I always grew up with my mom always playing different kinds of instruments so I was excited to see this assignment. The instructions are shown below:
“Using a Free Notation software (such as musescore) Create a piece of music using 3 instruments. The piece can be as long or as short as you would like, in any style but it must have 3 separate and distinct instruments.”
In my masterpiece, I used the sounds of a Kalimba, handpan and, a guitar. I had so much fun looking and hearing many different sounds you can get from these instruments. The reason I chose these is because my sister has a Kalimba, my mom has a handpan, and I always wanted to learn how to play the guitar. To hear the song, I made you can click the play button.
The sounds I got to create this was also from Freesound.
I would give this a 3 out of 10 for the challenge of this assignment because I found it fun to create but also it was hard trying to find the instrument that had a similar tone so I could match it with another instrument. The guitar sound I chose was a different sound than just strumming so that way it could somewhat go along with the other instruments I chose.
This media assignment has two parts. First, edit a song to sound like it is playing from another room. The audio should sound muffled and the bass should be prominent. Here is an example of this effect and here is a tutorial on how to do this. The second part of this assignment is to write a weirdly specific description of your song. Here is an example of a description.
I did the Played From Another Room with Chris Stapleton’s Tennessee Whiskey and included my course character Andrea and her mortal enemy Georgia. You can listen to the song below while reading the description of the song being played in context and then read my walkthrough
Andrea stands outside her enemy’s office, dreading walking in and asking for help on a project. She would do anything to get out of this but her boss’ firm directions rebutted the idea which confirmed 2 things to Andrea. That her opponent might be starting to gain a foothold in the company and that Andrea needed to crush it as soon as possible. The longer she stands there the more tense she gets, only worsened by that song that keeps getting replayed again and again. Her foe’s music can be heard from behind the door, loud enough for Andrea to hear but quiet enough that no one else seems to, just like the scheming person behind the door. The sounds of a quiet melody being sung mix with the chatter in the building and the steps of Andrea’s coworkers as they pass by, some wave and make promises to meet up later at another event, while others spare her a sympathetic glance. At least some people aren’t fooled by this quiet menace. Finally, Andrea decides to bite the bullet and walk in with the confidence and superiority she was always graced with. She opens the door (skipping the knock to put her rival on edge and keep the upper hand) and braces herself for a ride from hell. “Georgia our boss sent me.”
I chose Tennessee Whiskey because I needed a song that made sense for Georgia to be playing. After looking at Wisconsin’s top songs charts I decided that this song would be perfect for Georgia. Especially during this time in their story when she’s had a hard couple of weeks dealing with Andrea with her legion of minions who listen to her every word, and she just needs a piece of her hometown with her.
To make the audio sound like it was coming from another room I watched the videos linked in the assignment about how it should sound and how to recreate those effects myself. Now I did have to figure out some terminology and use some slight guessing on some of the instructions as the video that teaches the effects is in another application and I’m just getting used to Audacity so I didn’t want to push it. But after doing a little bit of searching through the Audacity manual I was able to adjust the song. I primarily used the filter curve EQ effect and the distortion effect to achieve this sound like in the tutorial but then I added a little bit of reverb effect to really make the piece come together. Then I used the example in the assignment to write the description. Overall it was a learning process but definitely worth it.
I had a lot of fun with the TV Product Placement Radio Ad because it combined two of my favorite things to do, watch silly sitcoms and ridiculous ads. These two feelings kinda crashed together into this assignment because of course somehow the best ads either come from the Super Bowl commercials or sitcoms. This assignment was perfect for me so that I finally had a use my infinite knowledge of sitcoms to a weird radio ad from a TV show. Listen to the genius of the Arrested Development writers and some slight editing work by me here.
TV and movies are full of product placement these days. Take a clip from a TV show or movie where they discuss a product (food, technology, movie, restaurant, etc. and turn it into a radio ad for that product.
I wanted this ad to feel less like a scene taken straight out of a show but more like an ad you could actually imagine on the radio one day where they try to be casual and just talk it up. I was first going to use a clip from 30 Rockbecause I’ve always loved the wit they use combined with just thinly veiled (it’s a glass wall) exhaustion over having to rely on such tactics to make money. But Arrested Development won me over because of just how silly and out of place their product placements are. So of course I had to use their Burger King scene that completely comes out of nowhere and adds nothing to the story but amusing and confusing feelings about Burger King. Should I like their food now that my favorite show says so? I guess I will!
The process of making this clip was a little more frustrating than I thought it would be but I’ve learned more about Audacity’s quirks and interesting tools so I guess a win is still a win. To start this assignment I found all the clips I wanted to use and downloaded them. Then I imported them into the all-powerful Audacity and cut them down until there were no awkward gaps, the scenes blended, and the volume was consistent. I exported it and was about to upload it to Soundcloud but first I gave it a good listen to check for any errors. It was all smooth sailing and I started thinking to myself, “Wow I might actually be good at this.” But then my small ego was immediately bruised by the impending sound of static on my audio. It hadn’t been there before when I was editing right? I checked in Audacity and the sound was clear as day. So I searched and searched forums, tutorials, and Audacity’s own manual and found nothing. To fix this I tried lowering the volume because of potential clipping, using the noise reduction tool in case there was a sound I missed somehow in the original clips, and changing the sample rate to help match my computer’s sound system. Nothing worked until as a last-ditch effort I exported it as an MP3 instead of an AIFF file. This option didn’t occur to me because it’s generally recommended that you export your file as either a WAV (Microsoft) or AIFF (MacBook) because they export with better-quality sound. But after making the audio export as an mp3. it was suddenly crisp and clean. So then I just uploaded it to Soundcloud and now it exists in the void. Success was achieved!
If anyone can solve my problem of the disappearing static I would be overjoyed but for now, I will live in perpetual fear of it returning.
"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!
“If you give Dr. Oblivion (https://oblivion.university/) a question or directive, he will give a response of up to a minute, which may or may not be loaded with snark. For this assignment you should download the MP3 of the Doctor’s response, import it into Audacity and cut it up and insert your part of the conversation“
Dr. Oblivion with the snark! I thought I asked a pretty straightforward question about the worries of AI taking over coding jobs. This is a topic very relevant to me, as I’m worried that during my time in the CS field, there will be a lack of jobs with the advancement of AI showing no signs of stopping. While The Doc did give me some snark, he also replied with some very insightful takes on how AI is built by us humans, and we will always use it as a tool rather than a replacement. However, I’m worried that the intent of AI creators will take a greedy turn, as many things in this world do. What if AI is used in a way where the betterment of society isn’t upheld?
I hope you have a good day or night!
