Just learning about the Golden Ratio was fascinating to me, from a sculpture who came to visit a few years back when I had a bed and breakfast at my home. He explained that it is very pleasing to the eye, that people feel comfortable, when they see a composition that is in proportion to the Golden Ratio. So I explored it further and have found out that there is mathematical science to this ratio and it also may, or may not, be real in art or nature. It’s up to you to decide what you think about that.

The Ratio is almost perfectly aligned with this cool spiral–in scientific terms called the Fibonacci Sequence. But in the main, does it really matter? I call it all Golden, and Bob Ross? He’d call it Joy and Happy Little Spirals…..

To create this movie, I’m following Video Assignment 445, called “Text + Diagram -> into a Movie”. The point to the assignment that text doesn’t tell the whole story, so make a movie that combines text and diagrams to get the “ah, ha” effect to help the viewer better understand the written text. My task was to find written text (I recorded me scrolling through the wiki on the Golden Ratio), then find the happy medium with added diagrams. I created diagrams in my title and then cut in Salvador Dali‘s famous painting that is a perfect “diagram”/explanation of the Golden Ratio in application with the dodecahedron in the background and his placement of objects in the painting. I further added a diagram of the Fibonacci sequence and then ended with the diagram of the sequence overlaid on a rose signifying that the sequence and the Golden Ratio are almost synonymous with each other, and beautiful in nature, all around us.

To create this movie, I shot the videos from my iPhone then converted them from MOV to MP4 using CloudConvert. I wrote the script and recorded it on my phone then converted that from WAV to MP3. In Open Shot, I created a Master Track and imported the file for the text then made cuts where I needed to insert the art. It seems easy but I had to time it with the narration which created difficulties for me because I’m not adept at creating transitions and sometimes the app created transitions when I didn’t want them. This took a lot of time and there are some obvious hiccups (literally) in the end product. Because of this, I decided to add background music to create a cleaner sound. I found the background music on freesound.org then had to convert the background music to MP3. I then took the file to audacity to lower the volume because I couldn’t figure out how to do that in Open Shot Video Editor. After that, I imported it to my project and I think it’s value-added because it gives the movie an overall cleaner sound and hides some of the sound imperfections from my video recordings. If I have more time, there is room for improvement but I need to first consult with someone who can help me with the nuances of editing. After all that, I exported the video to my hard drive, then sent it to Vimeo, so I could embed it here, in my blog! And there you have it–2:21 of Golden Ratio! You know what, I should have kept the movie run time to 1.618033988749….. ha ha ha ha ha ….

Howdy! This is Sterling, back with another week of content. This assignment began as one and kind of turned into another. My original intent was to do a modified form of “Exercise And Socialize” by Jeremy Hillberry, which has the following description: “Neighborhood walks used to be a good form of exercise and a good way to meet your neighbors. Nowadays, exercise is at the gym and socializing is online. Record a video of yourself taking a neighborhood walk and play a song in the backgorund of the video that your neighbors would enjoy. Get out there, exercise and socialize!” It is rated 2.5 stars.

I’m pretty camera shy as you will find out from the video, though I needed to get out of the house for a bit and figured I would record it. This lead to me doing a bit of narration, which made it morph a bit into “VLOG ONE DAY” by Eric, rated 3 stars. “For one day, attempt to vlog your day! What did you today? What was your favorit part about today? Who did you encounter? Let’s hear all about it!” Of course, this is quite abridged since it only centers on one walk. It also deviates from the ‘socialize’ part of the first assignment because, well, I’m practicing social distancing. And I don’t know my neighbors well enough to play music for them.

In brainstorming this assignment, I had some clear, cinematic ideas as you can tell by the clips of me getting ready to leave and opening doors. It took a lot of revisions because half of my in-house clips I had recorded in portrait mode rather than landscape. Eventually, though, I made it out the door and I found myself stumped. Vloggers don’t seem to have it as easy as I thought. I consider myself a pretty decent conversationalist, and I knew I had a lot to talk about regarding COVID-19 and my feelings on social distancing. However, as soon as I pressed the record button, I was lost for words. I was suddenly hyper-aware of the people around me even though they were several feet away.

I didn’t want to make it obvious I was recording, so I recorded my feet as I walked. I got to greet a neighbor as well. I had to delete and speed up a lot of clips of my shoes since I imagine they get quite boring after a while. Finally, I arrived at the plaza that has the grocery store. It was alarming to see so many store closures: they weren’t like that last time I was out. Marty’s (a restaurant) is only doing takeout. The beer shop is leaving. The nail salon has clearly closed. It isn’t shown, but the Great Clips that is always open has closed its doors. That is why my family and I are doing our best to support local restaurants when we can. I hadn’t considered the impact on cosmetology businesses: those involve close contact and tools used multiple times.

Then, I went into Kroger. There was a surprising number of people there. I found that the best solution was to make it into a montage of sorts so as to avoid filming people directly. The toilet paper carnage was interesting to witness for myself. Practicing social distancing was difficult: it was quite packed, and as I remark in my video, I couldn’t maintain six feet between myself and others. I also saw quite a few people I knew, and it would’ve been impossible to talk more then 4 feet apart. The end of the video tends more towards this “vlog” format as I attempt to gauge in conversation (but keep looking in the distance anyways). Definitely turned into word vomit at the end, but I hope you could garner something from it.

While I enjoyed my massage, I worked on editing the video with my phone. My first step was to delete all of the clips I messed up on (I’ve locked the door more times than I have unlocked it). After that, I still had about 60 clips to combine, crop, and edit. The app I used was YouCut: a free phone app that one can use to edit videos. It features all of the basic editing functions one might need to put together a decent video. I separated my clips into 5 sections: getting ready, walking to the store, inside the store, heading home from the store, and final words. Each section was between 1 and 2 minutes.

As you can see, YouCut offers quite a few editing options. My first step was to trim the cut down to omit the parts where I am turning the camera on or off. Then, I muted the audio if it was a montage clip and sped it up (walking was 1.6x). In clips like the one where I say goodbye to my big gray cat, it was all in that one recording. Therefore, I had to split the walking part from the cat part in order to speed it up as I wished. Finally, I combined all of my parts and put a brightening filter over all of the footage. Overall, it took around two hours to edit. It probably would’ve been easier if I used something like Windows Movie Maker or Adobe Premiere, but I wanted to curl up and make a day out of this.

My next step was to edit the audio. I uploaded the video to my computer and then used a MP4 to MP3 converter to allow me to edit it in Audacity. I did a quick little clean-up where I took out some wind and unnecessary background noise. I did not edit my voice much since it was difficult to eliminate some of the background sounds. After that, I layered Plastic Love by Mariya Takeuchi on top (from a YouTube to MP3 converter) since it matched my video length exactly. I made sure to de-amplify the sound a little bit whenever I spoke. Then, I returned to YouCut and muted the sound from the original video, replacing it with my new mix. This part took another couple of hours since everything took so long to download

There you have it! Overall, the exercise portion of this assignment was certainly beneficial given our current circumstances. It allowed me to think of ways I should take care of myself physically, mentally, and socially. I feel like it would be a very fun assignment otherwise if someone is more familiar and comfortable with their neighbors. The vlog part was certainly a new experience. I completely recommend it; we watch YouTubers daily, but do we ever put thought into what work goes into their process? I have a newfound appreciation for them after completing this assignment. Can I advocate that this project is worth at least 5 stars?

Oh, and my message at the end of the video isn’t very clear: I mostly wanted to say that it is hard to socialize with others, so we should use this time to socialize with ourselves. Please note that I do intend to privatize this video at the end of the semester since it advertises my location.

For my first Video Assignment Bank project I opted to the mash-up trailers assignment, which seems to be a popular choice. It’s actually a lot of fun! Although, warning it does take a bit of your time. I found this assignment was a great way to reintroduce myself to iMovie (I had only really used it once before to make our DS106 trailer). The iMovie platform is fairly user friendly. I am sure there are a lot of other cool features I could have played around with, but for this assignment I wanted to get the basics down.

My first task was to pick movies. In all my trailer uses three – The Breakfast Club (which contains the majority of visual and audio clips), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Sixteen Candles. After made it so each trailer would be easily accessible to me as I went to edit in iMovie. Every audio clip and/or video clip was trimmed from the full length trailers (every.time.). I’m sure there is probably an easier way of doing it, but I was already on a role and didn’t want to add any new information.

I watched and rewatched each trailer a multitude of times and mentally noted clips I thought could work together. It was nice to have my phone and laptop so that I could watch the individual trailers on my phone and then create and piece together the clips in iMovie on my laptop. That minimized the number of tabs I needed to flip between to complete the assignment.

There are quiet a bit of detached audio flies that are overlaid on video clips from different movies. There are also a few instances where I had to detach the audio file from the video clip in order to blend the audio into the next clip. I slowed a few visual clips down (click on the clip, there is a line with two dot icons on the top of the clip in the editing section and drag it to the left or right to manipulate the speed – it works for audio too) so that the audio files could run the length of the video.

The biggest challenge was audio. While I lowered the volume in the Ferris Bueller clips, but the background music clearly does not match the upbeat Breakfast Club music. I unfortuently, could not figure out a way to try to fix that. My guess is that I would likely need to deconstruct the audio in a different audio editing software to do so.

It’s by NO means perfect, but I did have a good time creating it!

#ds106