Category Archives: video assignments

PSA – Everlast Robotic Pets

I knew I wanted to do something with AI pets, when possible, this semester. I thought with a PSA it was a great opportunity. I watched Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers as a child. There is an episode with a robotic cat that is good until Fat Cat finds a way to make it bad. This gave me inspiration for the project.

What pulls on heart strings better than children? Pets. What if you could have a pet that never died. A pet you wouldn’t have to get a pet sitter for. A dog that never needed to go out in the middle of the night. Who wouldn’t want a pet like that as long as it acted and looked real for the most important parts! I bring you the Everlast Robotic Pet line. But Something has happened! A computer virus has been created to harm these pets!

https://soundcloud.com/sarah-bradshaw-84494740/everlast-pet-psa?si=7964a8e2ce344222b5a7da792fab731c&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

For the sounds you hear I used clips I found on Free sound. You will find links for some of them below. For the voice I used https://www.narakeet.com

I watched another student’s work and really like the quality of the voice. They listed what website they used, and I book marked it for later use. I accidently closed the tab to their blog post so I regretfully cannot link it. I tried to find it but obviously have failed to do so. You know who you are so many people commented about how they were going to use your walk through of the process you did. Narakeet was a great find.

https://freesound.org/embed/sound/iframe/236236/simple/medium/

https://freesound.org/embed/sound/iframe/340062/simple/medium/

After I had my PSA all planned out, I saw this post A frank warning | raptnrent.me and wanted to add Frank with a doom and gloom message. So, I went through the steps (and didn’t need to read the instruction document this time!) and made my Frank without Franks voice. I used Wave2lip to make franks mouth match the recording I made with Narakeet. I then used Adobe Premier Rush to put the video together. I used pictures I had taken or made with Adobe generative AI to give you something to look at while the PSA played. I hope you enjoy!

To connect this to my character Lady Alice E. Smythe I will explain her feelings on the subject. She is quite annoyed that someone has figured out her plan to use Everlast Pets to spy on people. She had worked on this scheme for some time to help her collect information for her hostile takeover of Aggressive Technologies. She is now going to have to have the code reworked to get around the new antivirus software or figure out how to piggyback on what Aggressive Technologies is doing to spy on people. She will put some comments on chat boards to discredit the online chatter about using pets as spies. This company is poised to run the world in secret so she will do everything to be the one to run the company. AI can be a useful ally as long as it is under her control.

Gosh Darn this is Frustrating!

Ok so I thought this would be the easiest of the assignments because I play videogames a fair amount, however, it became the most awkward and crazy learning experience. Si did the Make it Scary, Make it Fun assignment and had to do so many weird things to get this to work and it never did. Ugh. First, I had to figure out how to get the recording program to work. It took a bit of learning, but I finally got the shortcuts down. Then I had to make sure it was recording my voice. It seemed to be based on what the program was saying. But what I neglected to check was if my voice was able to be heard over the gameplay. So, I recorded like 3 hours of Alien Isolation footage…. and my voice wasn’t coming through. Like you could barely hear it even if you were trying really hard to listen for it. The only issue with that game, is there was a lot of walking around and doing nothing, so if I re-started the process, I would have to play at least 3 hours to get the footage I needed. So, I switched to a game that had more freaky moments to cut down on play time and up the scary factor. I switched to The Forrest. I have played it a bit before, and I remember stopping because I was genuinely anxious playing it. It is a survival craft horror game with indigenous cannibals and eldritch horrors and the point is to find your son and scape the island. So where did this go wrong… glad you ask. In the recording software, it has an option to sperate the audio from the microphone and the screen. I was like hell yeah! then I can edit both separately and cut out my voice if it sounds dumb. Well little did I know that it doesn’t create two files, it layers both audio files into one Mp4 and only certain editors have the ability to read that feature… so again, I wasted about 1.5 hours recording to only have my voice show up outside the editor, but in the editor it only picks up the game music… so I’m going to embed my play sessions to s which you get to hear, my voice or the game. Experiment time!

I had to post this before time ran out, so the second vid is still processing as of this post.

Kevin’s First Top Ten!

For this assignment I chose the top ten list. I didn’t really make a top ten, but I did a “ten cool things AI is already doing” list as my character for his “blog”. This assignment was cool because I had to do a little bit of research and find the ten things my character would think is cool. Turns out he thinks he is somewhat of a humanitarian but fails to realize that these are restricted AI’s. Who knows what they would do if given full freedom to “optimize” their processes. Anyway, enjoy the video.

Lady Alice the Investor

This week I chose the option of one big assignment. I needed to make a video of my character speaking with Dr Oblivion and connect it all to Aggressive Technologies. I instantly knew I wanted to make Alice into an investor. But she is not a person to be satisfied with just being a part of a company she wants to be the boss. While Lady Alice knows she is smarter than everyone she also knows she needs to research before doing something new. This is how I approached this topic.

I started by going to visit the good Doctor. I asked him questions multiple times to hear his different answers. I downloaded the answers. I asked him leading questions to get him to mention certain things in his answer. I then wrote a script for Lady Alice Smythe. I used Audible to edit and piece together the many answers I had from Dr. Oblivion. Here is one I ended up not using.

Same question with 2 different answers.

I then went through the process of taking my mp3 and pairing it with the face. It was easier than I thought it would be after I figured out what to do. There was just a little trouble on getting started on my part. I skipped a step and didn’t realize it at first and was so lost. After a few minutes of feeling confused I found my user error and was rewarded with success! I was so over the top pleased with myself on being able to do this.

I then turned my attention to Lady Alice E. Smythe. I have a cold, so my clogged nasal voice was not an option this week. So, I turned to text to speech programs on the internet. I listened to many. I found Textmagic and liked the easiness and rang of voices I had to pick from.

With the voice done now I just needed to give her a face. I didn’t like what I could find online. To be honest I didn’t look too long. I contacted a friend I hadn’t seen in a while and asked If I could use their face. I am happy to say she said yes. I took some photos of her off of Facebook and used Adobe Photoshop to get rid of people and change the setting. I then used these photos to tell a story.

I would like to do more with the photos and get a video of my friend to play with in the future. I will have to see what she thinks of this first.

You may notice a lack of subtitles or not depending on when you view this I may have already gone back and added them.

While I didn’t have Alice actually appear to be speaking her part I like that I had different pictures to use to tell a bit of what is going on. I think I made it more interesting than just the same stiff heads going back and forth to look at. I also Like how I have introduced Aggressive Technologies to Alice’s story and what her interaction with the company will look like. Lady Alice has money and believes she is always the best person for the job.

Kevin Makes a Blog Too…

To dive deeper into my character, I decided to do the 3 video assignments this week. This first one I’m going to post about is the assignment Character Description. The main focus was to make a video describing your character. I decided to role play a bit and do the video as Kevin (yeah, it’s my voice but I played up the internet bro slang a bit) doing an intro to his new blog. I hope it came out ok. I used Microsoft Clipchamp and after messing around in it FOREVER last week, I think I ironed out the kinks.

Video Essay Oh No…

I had a rough time with this. I have found out that I am not very good with video editing software. First, I tried to use Microsoft Clipchamp and I was getting the hang of it, but I could just not seem to figure out how to get things the way I like or the way I envisioned them. I was working on this all week, and I could not seem to figure it out, so I decided to use a different program to talk over myself watching the scene and pausing at key moments to discuss. I managed to use Loom to get that to work but I could not get the video volume to come through while I was recording. Good thing I was only discussing lighting… So, I was still unable to get audio of the scene, but my voice and thoughts carried through fine so now that I’m down to the wire I just decided to try and embed the file in this post. Now that I am trying, I can’t from loom for some reason… If I do the link copy route, it doesn’t actually put the video on my post. If I go the embed code route, it still won’t. So, I decided to download the video from loom. It is an MP4 and will not embed as a video in this post for some reason. Says it is an unsupported file type. So, I am having a hell of a time trying to get this to work. what I am going to do next week is get on my wife’s Mac and use I movie for whatever I need. this stuff as just not working for me this week and I am really disappointed that I could not get my point across the way I wanted. I have found my media weakness and that is video editing. Below is the video i am trying to embed, I hope it works. If it doesn’t here is the link to the page.

Video Essay – Stealth

The main assignment this week was to learn about film making by watching and reading some information. I Highly recommend the You Tube series “Every Frame a Painting”. I learned a lot and enjoyed them very much. After we did our learning, we had to take a clip of the movie and do a voice over of our critique of the scene.

I was looking at the list of movies on Wikipedia, we were supplied, and I realized I have seen almost all of them. I learned I do watch a lot of sci-fi. The movies easy to find I have seen. I couldn’t remember the exact ending of the movie Stealth or if I had seen it on video or in theaters. It was easy to find so I went with that one. I was not even halfway through when I realized why I didn’t remember the movie. I found it very boring. I tried applying everything I learned from watching the movie making videos. I was watching for camera angles, lighting, how the scene was cut etc. Still boring. I found a few decent scenes that I jotted the time stamp down for that could be more fun or interesting to talk about.

Now came time for the downloading of a scene. I quickly realized on Thursday that it would be easiest just to find a high-resolution scene already on the internet to work with. I didn’t find any of the ones that I thought would be fun to work with. I did find one that wasn’t all action with the CGI planes.

The scene gave enough to talk about to show I watched the film making videos and told a little story.

I couldn’t just download it. I signed up to try You Tube premium free for 30 days. Turns out you can only view it in YouTube. Alright time to research and find a way.

I found this video

So, then I learned there was no way to download the video. It is Friday at noon, and I have a mild fever and caught a cold. (at least it better not turn out to be the flu) There is no going to campus today to get help. (in case you don’t remember I own a house, have kids etc.) I do own a video camera of decent quality or there is my smart phone. Let’s be pirates! I downloaded a program with dubious origins and hoped for the best. (please don’t let it be virus ridden) I then paid for the programs. I already had Adobe Premier Rush, so I was golden.

I made the voice over and it isn’t even 2 pm yet. New problem, You Tube doesn’t like the movie clip, copy right infringement. Now to use a new platform for uploading. Vimeo for the win.

I am glad I got this done before I lost my voice. My throat hurts and I am coming down with something. This take will have to do. I spent the most time trying to get a clip to do the voice over on. Once I got the clip it was easy to do a voice over on it.

A few scenes I liked better are a meeting held on the ship over a game of scrabble that takes place about 30 minutes into the movie. Has a lot of foreshadowing happening. The camera angles and placement of characters is one of the best in the whole movie. The grounding of EDI at minute 46 is also interesting. At hour 1:16 you have what I call the blame game scene. it has the “bad guys” in shadow speaking over the phone blaming each other for what went wrong. It cuts back and forth to the two men on the phone in darkness trying to one up each other. I felt it made good use of editing during the argument of who can better take down whom.

While I found the movie to be predictable and slow my husband enjoyed the movie very much. The movie had a want to be Top Gun vibe and spent a lot of money on the CGI of the state-of-the-art planes (that are not real) I noticed the font used in the credits was the same used in the Spider-man movies starring Toby McGuire. I wanted to put all this into a recording but no voice. Now that I have found the programs to use doing it again wouldn’t be too difficult.

Breaking News!

For my second assignment of choice, I decided to do Breaking News! The objective was to create a fake news story by using an AI text to speech software. I used the site that was recommended, Colossyan and some free sound from Freesound to create my audio video news story. I also used the 123RF image generator to get some hilarious pictures for the backgrounds. Below is the result of my strange brain and having free access to these tools.

The AI mispronounced a few words but that’s ok, I think you get the gist. I really liked this assignment because I got to make up an insane news story and use a few more neat tools. I will definitely b using them again on future assignments.

10 Tips On What Not To Do

I decided to give you 10 tips on how not to administer a Turing test. A Turing test is a series of questions that are given to a computer to evaluate its intelligence. It was developed by Alan Turing in the 1950’s. I don’t know what the questions are and have no experience with the test or the questions. It was a lot of fun thinking of what wouldn’t work for such a test. I enlisted my children as actors. Enjoy the chaos.

When I went to upload my video on Friday the 26th I found it was too big to be supported on my blog. I had a midnight deadline and could not figure out what to do. I was so disappointed. I spent hours on this video this week learning how to use the software and editing the clips together. While I know it isn’t perfect, I am proud of the work I did and the skills I am learning.

I emailed my professor and asked how to get my video on my blog. Answer upload to You Tube. I now have a You Tube channel. It will now be part of my blog and my adventures in DS106.

I am happy to present my 1st YouTube video. I hope you enjoyed it.