For the Why So Serious assignment I decided to mash up two of my favorite Rachael McAdams movies, The Notebook and Mean Girls. I thought this juxtaposition would be interesting because Rachael plays such different characters in these two movies. Her mothers are also very different as one tries to be like her daughter, while the other tries to tell her daughter what to do. Can you tell which is which?
The toughest part of this assignment was finding two scenes that would work together. Once I did some research on Youtube and found the two I liked, I downloaded the videos using savefrom.net and a Google extension called Backtick that allows downloading into MP3s. I edited in Movie Maker by trimming the audio and video clips to points where they would match (Getting Regina’s like to match Ali’s head turn was a personal win!) and saved the video to an MP4.
This Audio Assignment focuses on creating a mashup of two films. I took the films Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and mixed it up with clips from the Pokemon Movie. I inserted replies from the Pokemon to Rory Breaker’s rant where he goes on a rant about various scenarios where he will kill Nick (the Greek).
I thought this would be a pretty funny mix. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels is one of my favorite movies and definitely not without its share of swear words, so I was surprised that this Rory Breaker rant only had one swear word (which I carefully edited out). I thought that a dialogue mashup with the a cute G-rated movie would create an stark contrast between the image of cute and cuddly, cold and threatening. The most difficult thing about this assignment was finding an appropriate dialogue. Since Rory Breaker’s scene is really a monologue (because Nick the Greek is too scared to speak back), it was perfect for inserting Pokemon sound bites as rebuttal and concerned reactions.
In the process of creating this mashup, I had difficulty download straight clips from these movies. As a work around, I ended up using my sound recorder to record the sound bites straight off the speakers of my computer. Once I captured the sound bites, I simple cut and paste the different segments within different Audacity tracks. The Rory Breaker track was one continuous sound bite, which I cut up into pieces to fit in the Pokemon sound bites.
Since basketball has infiltrated our house once more this spring in the realm of the NBA playoffs, I decided to dedicate my second audio assignment of the week to the Washington Wizards who, though by a thread, are a part of the playoffs this year.
I interviewed Randy Wittman about the Wizards’ chances in the playoffs and his plans once the season is over. I gathered some intelligence from this Washington Post article to prepare for the interview.
I recorded this directly into SoundCloud and uploaded the file to embed into this blog. I compiled the songs from Youtube clips. I cued up the part of the songs I wanted to use and had them ready to go as I recorded. There is a bit of a delay as I was moving between screens, so I might perhaps have printed out the questions so I wouldn’t have to go back and forth. Here is a list of the questions and songs I chose.
Q. The Wizards are playing the Chicago Bulls tomorrow at 7pm. Are you excited for this match up?
This assignment was a great way to work on pulling audio together. These songs really have no connection to each other, but as part of a story really work quite well together!
This remix project was in accordance to DS106 audio assignment Music Mashup, which asked us to create an audio mashup aka a remix of two songs. I didn’t used Audacity as the assignment asked, but that is because I didn’t have to used Audacity.
Instead I used Mixxx which a free DJ Software. I have used previous DJ software such as Virtual DJ (which I’m certain many people I know used already, Serato and Taktor. What was such a bother about these program besides the obvious cost, was that they were never easy to use up front, seemed intimidating and there was always some underlying catch if you really wanted to practice some pro work. Serato for example, its program being free but the hardware to go with it costing more than the most computer did. That is for another forum however.
I chose to use the below audio clips :
The instrumental is from the the Trey Songz single Na Na produced by DJ Mustard. While the A capella I found is from Beyonce’s single Naughty Girl.
From the beginning when I chose to do this project I decided it would be best to use songs which were close in bpms (beats per minute). This was so that the manipulation of the songs wouldn’t differ greatly and sound over edited from the original version. Those are problems which I encountered before trying to match a slow song with an instrumental that was much much faster or slower than that acapella was.
I am new to Mixxx and decided to find a tutorial on YouTube, after I downloaded the program and began to play with it for a bit. This clip over viewed using the cross-fader, the pitch bar which not only increases or decreases the pitch but also alters the bpms correspondingly so the higher the pitch the higher the bpms. Next was the individual volume adjust for each audio track and filters with can either cut or adjust the high, mid and low frequencies of each track. Loop controls which I was familiar from other software which allows for placing marks at specific points of a song, but I didn’t need it in this case. Generally I can agree this software is good for non-professionals, but you can also practice a lot a being that is free.
I also read this article from Beyond Beatmatching, which was essentially on creating your own mashups. This article spoke on how its best not to be too complex, and to match songs of the same or similar key. For me this can be the biggest challenge, in finding songs that are close enough in key and have a similar bpm. This article also featured an interview with DJ Prince, who is a DJ and producer from Norway who has been around since the 1980′s. He goes on talk about how he had to do research back then by going to the library and reading about music theory, and discovering the root key of pop songs back then and applying them to his turntables to work. He also goes on to say how back then without affordable software he had to rely on musician friends to find the key in a song, which really shows me how far technology has come where we have free and available software that lessons our work load but obviously requires us to understand what exactly we are doing.
Screenshot of songs adjusted and playing together.
As I was using Mixxx and used two songs which were close enough in bpm I left the Instrumental track as it was. However I lowered the pitch of the A capella track since it was slightly faster than than the instrumentals and changing the pitch also changes the bpm or speed of the track. It was difficult to find the correct pitch of the A capella that would seem legitimate enough to match the instrumental. My final project is as close as I believe I could work the A capella which does not begin as sounding as good as it finishes.
This project is based on the DS106 audio bank assignment Dialogue Mashup. This assignment asked us to take two different movies and extract the dialogues from scenes and re-edit them to create a story.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGsxUKLwTUg
Here try this other video since that original one was removed:
I chose to use the clips above from two very popular movies I remember as a teenager growing up. The first scene is from The Matrix which came out in 1999, and was really popular when it introduced the ‘bullet time’ effect with slow motion and camera movement. This caused a lot of copycat scenes in other movies with the whole bullet effect. The other movie that was funny at the time was Scary Movie, which was the Wayans brothers first comedy spoof to the Scream series that was so ridiculously funny at that time. Overall I watched these two movies numerous times, till I was sick of them.
There are various approaches I thought of before deciding on how exactly I was going to do the mashup for two movies. I liked this mashup of a bunch of movies edited together to sound as though it was one dialogue from one film. Then I also liked this other movie mashup, but this one was less complicated in that it used clips from one movie which was Toy Story 3 and used the dialouge from the trailer for Fight Club. These were great edits, however they both relied heavily on the visuals to really carry the story. However I wanted the dialogue to be able to carry the story without having visuals, and it was also the reason I chose two well known movies in pop culture. So that upon hearing the two dialogues, listeners could remember the two films and then try to visualize from what they heard, the two movies blending together for the mashup.
Multi-Track edit for Morpheus and Shorty
To edit the two clips I used Audacity. I used the multi-track editing since it was two audio tracks I used and it really came down to editing for specific voice dialogues. Since the original two clips I used are from movies they had other people speaking besides the main individual characters I wanted to hear from each. To start I placed both audio clips on separate tracks and began to cut out all other dialogue from the clip and kept the main characters voice. Since the dialogue for Morpheus was much longer, I decided to use his speech as the lead character and to have Shorty follow in between Morpheus’ speech. Lastly I had to place the alternating clips to be in synch one after the other and then I also had to alter the gain where necessary to avoid the audio from one track over powering the audio from the next. Then after all that editing, I had to mixdown both tracks into one file and I exported it as a WAV file, since both clips were downloaded as mp3s to avoid further compression of two already compressed files.
My idea for the dialogue re-edit was to take the dialogue that originally had Morpheus talking to Neo in the Matrix. Then to edit it with the dialouge of Shorty from Scary Movie, so as to create a scene as though Shorty being a pot head was doing what he does best in getting high. Then Morpheus would be the voice of reason trying to explain the reality of the current Earth situation to Shorty. In reality Morpheus isn’t real and is more of a hallucination in Shorty’s head but appears real to us.
Take at least three pictures (your own or someone else’s) mash them together into something that makes them more than the sum of their parts, something that would have been impossible in real life. Include the original images so we can see how they build on one another to make your final composition.
Take at least three pictures (your own or someone else’s) mash them together into something that makes them more than the sum of their parts, something that would have been impossible in real life. Include the original images so we can see how they build on one another to make your final composition.
This was somewhat inspired by the Russian photographer1 images that were floating about (may or may not be amalgams) and a bit like this Modern Met post.2
1 Some sites called her a “Russian mother” which is kind of like calling Einstein a “former patent clerk” – they’re both true statements yet neglect most of the truth.
2 There’s room for an additional assignment or bonus points for adding elements from classical paintings.
The famous actress, Dame Ellen Terry (1847-1928), is shown here in the role of Lady Macbeth. At the first performance in 1888, Sargent was struck by Terry’s appearance and persuaded her to sit for a portrait. He invented her dramatic pose, which did not occur in the production. Oscar Wilde, who saw Terry’s arrival at Sargent’s Chelsea studio, remarked, ‘The street that on a wet and dreary morning has vouchsafed the vision of Lady Macbeth in full regalia magnificently seated in a four-wheeler can never again be as other streets: it must always be full of wonderful possibilities.’
The first thing that occurred to me was to have blood gushing all over Lady Macbeth, like from a horror film and of course I thought of this scene from the Shining. I borrowed the GIF from one of the bazillions all over Tumblr and inserted Lady Macbeth over top (after carefully masking her out of her canvas).
REDRUM QUEEN
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty!
- Lady Macbeth
Then I felt a bit guilty not GIFfing the whole thing from scratch, so I attempted to draw some blood over the poor dear.
Out, damned spot! out, I say!
I read Macbeth way back in Grade 11 high school English. I’ve always been haunted and intrigued by Lady Macbeth. She was such a pushy, overbearing wife but then in the end was consumed with guilt, seeing blood on her hands that she could never wash away. Ah, regret.
As part of my major end of term assignment I chose to do a magazine and one of the ad inserts was a cleaning product for poor old Lady Macbeth.
FiFi Five was somehow representative of something I thought clever, but I really can’t remember what any more.
The translation of the text you are going to hear in the video is the following:
Colorful… are all my clothes Colorful is all that I have So I love anything that’s colourful because my love is a painter, a painter.
Considering that ‘Green are all my clothes’ has been written a long time ago, when the people were particularly attentive to be well and properly dressed, a modern dance scene is a great contrast.
In the original video you can see a weird performance on a screen watched by Captain Kirk and his crew. The idea is to displace the content of the screen with own content. I chose early pictures of myself, which I already have worked on for a different video assignment. I remember that I thought the video may be too dramatic, but it was still ok for me.
However, looking at my pictures with the eyes of Captain Kirk and his crew made them full of despair, what finally even gripped the crew and its spaceship.
On the screenshot you can see how I’ve managed to put my pictures on the Enterprise screen. I simply put clips above the screen scenes. In addition I had to fit them into the screen, which meant to make them smaller and move them. I also used parts of the sound of my former assignment, where you can hear me speaking a sad poem I found in the internet. I thought this goes fine with the fact that to the end the crew put their hands over their ears.
A deeper meaning of my mashup version may be that our intellect works very different from our emotions, which can cause extensive tension between them. It is also true that our senses can be cracked by our emotions.
