For the video essay I picked apart a scene I found interesting based of the music that was being used to create the scene I got the idea for the video about the marvel symphonic universe.
Category Archives: Tech Noir
High Five! – Week 5 Summary
This week was so relaxing! I have enjoyed the last few weeks and getting to try different assignments, but this chill week was very much needed. I feel recharged and ready for next week!
Daily Creates
I did Monday and Wednesday’s daily create. Tuesday was a snow day so I swore off all school work except to watch the Tony Zhou videos. For Monday, the prompt was to extend the rhyme of the magpies all the way to 106. This was a tough one for me because I understood the prompt as writing a poem, but it wasn’t until I finished my poem that I realized no one else did that. The poem didn’t take me too long, but it took me long enough that I refused to throw it away. I enjoyed reading some of the other responses for this. My favorite was by Sarah Honeychurch who said “obviously it’s 106 for life!” When I was crafting this poem I wanted to some jokes into the meaning behind numbers. For example, 101 is used for a lot of intro courses in college, I had it symbolize knowledge. I also tried to incorporate the quote, “all is fair in love and war” so I paired them together as 103 and 104. My poem is listed below.
One hundred is for luck
And even some winnings
Plus one is for knowledge
And lots of new beginnings
One hundred and three is for love
One hundred and four is for war
We know this is where all is fair
From the history that has come before
One hundred and five means boredom
So skip to one hundred and six
This for telling a story
And learning lots of cool tricks
The next prompt I did was to find a photo of a famous building, work of art or statue, cut it out of its environment and paste it into what’s clearly not its proper environment. Because the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, I wanted to imagine what it would look like if France kept her for themselves, so I swapped out the Eiffel Tower and replaced it with Lady Liberty. To make this post, I used Canva and its background remover to make the change look more realistic. I also used Canva’s eraser tool to erase the Eiffel Tower. It’s not perfect, you can see the where the photo is cropped in the trees, however it came out better than I expected because the background meshes together oddly well.

Commenting
This week was a challenge to find things to comment on since there was only one assignment. To remedy this problem, I commented on people’s Daily Creates. This was a good week for Daily Creates too, many responses made me smile. I commented on Liv’s Mount Rushmore Under the Sea, I said “this made me giggle! I love it!” I thought it was a creative take on the prompt, and something about it just tickled me. Next I commented on Cinder’s take on why Bananas keep appearing on the street. They said they think it’s because animals are mentally evolved and they are leaving out bananas so they can observe us; I replied “Hahaha! I love how you turned the tables!” Everyone had really good responses to this prompt but theirs was my favorite. I thought it was so clever and such a fun idea, I want to see a movie or sketch about it. Lastly, I commented on Tflora’s found poem. I told them that their poem was so vivid and they arranged their found words perfectly. Their post made me so curious about where they were finding those words though. Again, this was a great week for Daily Creates, I hope next week is just as good.
Video Essay
For my video essay, I enjoyed scripting and editing it but finding the scene to make the video for was so frustrating. I talked about this more in depth it in my Video Essay Reflection but the scene that I ended up using was the only longer scene that I could find on YouTube, and I found it really frustrating that the scene was blurry, not the full scene, and less importantly in Russian. However the other aspect of the assignments with watching the videos and black mirror, I was fascinated by! The Black Mirror episode thoroughly freaked me out but I still liked it and found it interesting. I really enjoyed the videos from Every Frame A Painting too. Tony Zhou is so well spoken, and the way he talks about movies is fascinating. He was making me want to watch movies that I have never wanted to watch before just by analyzing the camera movement. I enjoyed the videos so much that I have continued to watch his videos outside of the assigned videos.
Conclusion
I love video editing, it’s one of the things that made me want to be a Comm. & Digital Studies major, so I have been looking forward to this unit since the beginning of the semester. I’m even more excited for next week!
Attack of the Robotic Bees – Black Mirror Video Essay
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!
Weekly 5 Summary
This week was really intersting because I enjoy directing media and learning why films are made they way they do. As someone who is majoriting in digital studeis I have been in a lot of classes where we have disected movies and learned how and why people make the choices they do. The videos we watched before making our video essays helped me to get in the mindset of watching a tv show or movie from a different perspective. David Fincher is one of the best directos and a lot of his movies are filmed in ways that allow you to recognize the pattern within his styalistic choices. Seven, a murder mystery movie uses the camera angles in various ways to convey the information being recieved by the characters. The camera is higher when the audeicne has the upper hand however it will lower when the characters have more informtion. Another aspect I like learning about is color and different kind of shots abd how they are able to convey emotion without words.
For my video essay I chose the hated in the nation, episode 6 from season 3 of black mirror. I watched it twice because the first time I forgot to take note of how specific aspects of filming helped to convey the story. One aspect that I did not talk about in my video essay, but I enjoyed was the movement of the camera. There were several moments where the camera seemed to glide or follow behind characters without it feeling too edited. I think this added to the aspect of the view being present within the show. Everything was done swiftly. The scene I decied on from my video essay was the first courtroom scene. I chose this because it established who the main character was in a way that brought out a lot of emotion from the chacter ad audience without having the give the plot away. The camera focusing in her eyes, and hands pulled the audience into the world immeditley. Tony, spoke about eyes and how close up on eyes often work and the chnages in actors eyes that reveal things.
An additonal aspect of this episode that was interesting was the lighting choices, I think the major contrast between natural setting and the darkness that came with technologies intrusion on nature was defenitly showcases through scenes that where dimly lit.
Another aspect of Black Mirror that I enjoyed was that it had the ability to create story lines that cenetr around the dangers that can come from tech without having to create future-ristic worlds. I think this added to the emotion I felt watching the show because you can imagine something similar happening now. We may not have bees but we do have drones. I also thought it was interesting to see how humans do things to destroy nature and create “nature” with technology that ends up working against us.
Though this week was focused on film I still had a great time making my daily creates. I’m defenitly not a poet, but I’m having a better time just doing them for fun than thinking too deeply about them. I also did not realized that I was meant to do partial recaps of the assignments under the actual assignment, I thought that was something we included in the weekly re-caps so that’s my bad. This is another side note, with commenting, I’m commenting on peoples website pages, is that what we are supposed to be doing ?
Week 5 Summary
Weekly Summary 2/14
Happy Valentine’s Day! My week was a very busy one, and I’m definitely glad it’s over with. This week was mainly spent watching the videos and learning about video editing and how crucial it is to a show or movie’s success, although most people don’t notice the specifics of it. It was really interesting to put that together towards the end of the week in my video essay and analyze a scene about potential downsides of a surveillance bee. I also did 2 Daily Creates which I enjoy doing just as a break from everything else.
Daily Creates:


The Bees Knees
The video essay I created was an analysis of the Black Mirror scene examining the surveillance bee that had “malfunctioned” and was involved in a death. It was interesting to examine how the editors most notably used different camera angles to shift the audience’s focus, and to also set the presence of technology. I noticed more closely the usage of close ups to convey emotions of characters by focusing of their eyes as was frequently mentioned in the videos and had a lot of fun looking more into a show past its initial context/plot. Please take a look here!
My Creative Journey: Week 5
Summary
This was video week and I was very nervous because I have no experience editing videos, so this week was all about learning and trying to figure out how everything works so that my edited video would come out right especially with making sure the narration was over the correct scenes. More information on my video editing experience can be found on my post called Looking into Cyberpunk Edgerunners
New Discoveries and Experiences
- Did video editing for first time
- Used iMovie for the first time
- Used Vimeo for the first time
Daily Creates
This week I had to create 2 Daily Creates which were posted in Inside My Creative Mind
Inside My Creative Mind: Week 5
East to West Coast

For this Daily Create I was supposed to take a famous landmark and place it somewhere it shouldn’t be. For mine I decided to bring the East coast to the West coast by taking the Statue of Liberty and placing it next to the famous Hollywood sign using Canva.
People Watching

For this Daily Create I was supposed to create a backstory for why a plate of bananas appear on a Beeston street once a month. For mine I chose to write an explanation based on the idea that animals now enjoy people watching similar to how people enjoy bird watching so that’s why they’re leaving a plate of bananas out to lure in humans.
Looking into Cyberpunk Edgerunners
WARNING: Huge Spoilers ahead!
Cyberpunk Edgerunners is a wonderful playground for cinematography. There’s so many amazing scenes I could go into deep detail for, but the one that I couldn’t resist choosing was Maine’s death scene from episode 6 called Girl on Fire. The episode shows how Maine is struggling with Cyberpsychosis, but him and his crew must continue the mission as he gets worse and starts losing control after his girlfriend was killed. Once Maine accepts that its the end for him, he sacrifices himself while the main character David tries to help. Here in my video, I go in a deeper dive into the cinematics of this unforgettable scene.
Video Process
Editing a video for the first time was more complicated than I originally thought. I had to find the exact scene from Cyberpunk Edgerunners I wanted in a good enough length then I had to learn how to use iMovie to edit in the narration of my voice before uploading it to Vimeo. When I was doing my analysis of the scene I originally had a long descriptive script to voice over it, but I couldn’t keep up with the exact shots I wanted to talk about, so instead I chose to say the main points that drove each scene like the fear in certain expressions or how certain shots portrayed foreshadowing that an intense fight scene was approaching. I wanted to keep the original audio alongside my voice with it, but I thought it might be too distracting so instead I kept only my narration for the scene.
Cyberpunk Edgerunner Cinematography Overview:
- Lighting: Most of the grim scenes use dark lighting with harsh colors like red lining on faces and bodies to set the tone. In the gentle scenes where Maine feels at peace, it is sunny in an open field without the use of any dark color schemes.
- Angles: The shots chosen are taken from very specific angles depending on the emotion used like David’s fear always being full face or the focus being on his trembling hands while holding a gun. Also in most scenes they are capable of making Maine look overpowered from his cyberpyschosis by using low angles where he’s towering above.
- Expressions: Throughout the entire scene emotion is used very well from eyes widening and trembling from fear and shock, or Maine’s eyes softening as he understands this is the end for him. Shots showing sweat, tears, and even the shot of David’s pained scream at seeing Maine die tells how the characters are feeling even without the audio to hear their dialogue.
- Camera Shots: They use various shots to build up suspense like showing how MaxTac is on their way with shots of the aircraft landing or the soldiers heading in. I also think the use of switching between Maine’s hallucination perspective of him being peacefully in a field while David sees the grim reality of their situation helps the viewers understand that Maine is accepting death. Lastly, I wanna add that the final shots being in slow motion makes the viewers feel the impact of everything happening before the shot of his death.