For my first assignment this week I took a little spin off the Consumer Mashup assignment. I wanted keep with the 1980’s theme so I looked up the most popular 1980’s brands for inspiration.

I decided to focus on food and began to look into Pepsi and Coca-Cola products of the ’80’s. I specifically looked at “New Coke.” New Coke was released in 1985 as a reformulated Coke. Coca-Cola stocks had been slipping during this time and Coke wanted introduce something that they hoped would reignite people’s interest. Unfortunately, New Coke did not have the intended effect and was short lived. It was briefly rebranded “Coke II” in the 90’s, but ultimately was pulled from the shelves. It made a brief come back as a promotional tool recently for the newest season of “Stranger Things.”

Opposed to Coca-Cola, Pepsi was fairing quite will in the 1980’s and its product were rapidly expanding in the global market.

Given that Coca-Cola and Pepsi are arguable the biggest soda competitors of our current age, I decided to mash them together. I first found a stock image of the New Coke product and then found the Pepsi logo used in the 1980’s.

The next step was to upload both images into Photoshop, erase the coke brand from the Coke can, and isolated the Pepsi logo. To isolate the Coke lettering I color matched the red and silver coloring of the can and simply colored over the letters. To isolate the Pepsi logo I selected the circular logo with the “Quick Selection” tool in Photoshop and the hit the masking tool.

My original design utilized another Pepsi logo used on their 1980’s cans; however, I thought it was too plain.

In the end I opted for the circular Pepsi logo and layered the blank New Coke can with the new Pepsi logo. Here is the finished result:

It’s not perfect, but given Photoshops inability to cooperate with me while I was making it (some added technical difficulties, I don’t normally have with Photoshop), it turned out ok.

#ds106

This Doesn’t Belong Here:

For this assignment I was asked to take two iconic movie scenes or images and combine them in an unnatural way that makes you think – yeah, that doesn’t belong there. I chose the iconic scene from Titanic, and the Millennium falcon from star wars to fly in the background. I used photoshop to create this mashup and it is worth 4 stars!

Consumer Mashup:

For this assignment I decided to use my favorite company (and most often used) Starbucks! I used photoshop for this assignment and simply painted over the original lettering and added my own text in to replace it with my favorite drink. I also used a coffee cup clip art on the sides to replace the stars that were there before! 4 stars!

The first mashup assignment I did for this week was Storytelling Through Text. For this assignment, I had to record myself having some sort of storytelling text with a friend. For this assignment, I got my friend Kayla and we got together. We first had to think of the topic of our story. I took a little bit of thinking, but Kayla had just gotten stung by a bee. We decided that could be a really cool storytelling through text.

We started recording our screens and just started texting. I was fun to come up with things on the spot to make the conversation even more interesting! It was not as hard as I thought the conversation would be to come up with and I really enjoy this assignment!

4 ½ stars 

I decided to create this assignment because I felt I needed a reminder of the most exciting times of the year. 

To really resonate how amazing these holidays are, I decided I couldn’t just use a plain and still photo; this called for a gif assignment.

 I went onto my instagram and through the story application (where you can create a visual for up to 24 hours), I decided to use the gif generator to create my main background. 

Nightmare before Christmas is one of my favorite holiday movies because it captures two of the best holidays, so It was only right to base my background off of Jack Skellington. I then decided to add even more gifs to this live-photo, by adding christmas accessories to Jack such as antler ears and a christmas hat. I lastly topped it off with fireworks to represent my life for fireworks on the fourth of July. 

I posted this assignment on my instagram feed, asking if my fellow classmates could guess which are my favorite holidays. 

5 stars 

For this assignment, I had way too much fun creating! It was definitely the most amusing assignment I had this week, as I had to do a couple of retakes from laughing. 

I went onto the feature on my iPhone on iMessages, and began recording by listening to music in the background (I didn’t need the lyrics as I can sing this song backwards if I wanted to haha). 

To make this assignment even more amusing, I didn’t realize I was recording this feature through my boyfriend’s messages and sent it to him. He’ll probably get a good laugh from it too when he wakes up!

 I then saved this video to my camera roll after sending it through a message. However, I didn’t like the way the background music sounded, so I decided to import the video into iMovie and using a youtube video converter, was able to import the song onto my video to make it sound more clean. 

I imported the video to my camera roll, and lastly posted it to Twitter in hopes of amusing other with my masterpiece.

Overall, 10/10 assignment. 

For this week’s Mashup Assignments, the first one I chose was Animoji Karaoke. I chose to sing along to Men At Work’s 1981 hit song, Down Under. I chose to use a Koala face as my Animoji because its only fitting for the “Down Under” theme. I also think I somewhat resemble a koala thanks to my round face and lazy disposition. This assignment was very fun and I got to use my phone’s technology to make something entertaining.

For one of my mashup assignments I chose to do “Storytelling Through Text” which was worth 5 stars. This assignment challenged us to tell a story from any background but to do it through text and record the entire thing. I drew some inspiration from an event that actually happened to be this morning, getting stung by a wasp. Yep. Just my luck. I was walking into the house I nanny at with a toddler and I reached for the railing and a wasp was hanging out underneath it and my hand went right over top of him. It hurt, like a lot. For this assignment I used my iPhone as it already has a screen record option. I simply began the screen recording and went to text my friend Emily who was playing the role of my housemate. In most situations I would write a script with what we would be texting but for this assignment I chose to do it freestyle and let it be how we actually have conversations. Let me know what you think!!

I Believe by Cher

I created this assignment from the Mashup Assignment for 5 stars.

I used my iPhone to create an emoji of a self close-up. It was actually kind of fun. Then I looked through our music to see what was hip in the 80s. So, I chose I believe by Cher.

Sat in front of my TV on YouTube with the song with lyrics. Turn on the emoji which only has a 30 second recording time. Tried it a few times since I kept receiving texts during recordings. Sent the final video to myself and uploaded it to Photos.

I thought I could upload it on iMovie but it only played the song and not the video so I tried YouTube. That worked!

Enjoy!

Who doesn’t love Molly Ringwald?!

I completed a 4 star Mashup Assignment to mix together video clips of Molly Ringwald in 80’s films.

I took several clips from the 3 movies; Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, and Breakfast Club.

I utilized Quicktime to capture and save the video clips on my photo folder. I also used iMovie to collaborate the video clips together and shorten the clips.

I added background music, toned down so it’s not overbearing.

Enjoy!

If there is one well known legend that has been retold again and again, it is the legend of Mulan. What started as an anonymous ballad that appeared in 568 CE has undergone numerous renditions in the forms of plays, films, television shows, and literature. That’s why I thought doing the Character Evolution mashup assignment (4.5 stars) for Mulan would work out, especially with the new Mulan coming out in July this year (fingers crossed).

For this assignment, I had to mashup clips of a character from different remade movies to show the evolution of the character through the films. I have seen the 1998 Disney adaptation Mulan and the 2009 Chinese live-action Mulan: Rise of a Warrior, and I have read the script for the 1939 Chinese film Mulan Joins the Army. The latter two I had done for my Gender in Chinese History term paper Spring 2018.

Unfortunately, it was hard to find or download videos from the older films, so I had to settle on trailers from the 1998 Disney adaptation, the 2009 Chinese live-action version, and the 2020 Disney adaption version. After watching each trailer, I chose to use the audio from the 2020 Disney adaption trailer, and most of the clips used in the video are from the trailer while I interspersed clips from the other adaptations’ trailers throughout the video.

The most difficult part was syncing up the audio with the clips, but while I could’ve done better at showing the other movies, I did what I could to have some consistency with the audio. I also accidentally uploaded this on my other YouTube account, but oh well. Other than all that, I enjoyed this assignment, and I highly encourage you to watch Mulan: Rise of a Warrior (2009)! The original Disney animated version is my childhood, but this Chinese rendition my personal favorite.

Video credits:

Mulan (1998) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers

Hua Mulan Official Trailer with english subtitles

Disney’s Mulan | Final Trailer