Our governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, who has admitted to wearing racist Black Face, has signed into law a bill designed to allow authorities the power to seize your firearms withoutDue Process of the Law! Especially in these times of virus, plague, and economic depression, every man and women needs the right to defend themselves from thieves and criminals who will be more desperate and frequent then ever before. Northam’s intolerable laws allow a policeman to take your greatest tool of defense without going through a court, and ban you from buying more then a single firearm in a month, barring the common man and women from defending themselves, while Northam sits protected in his mansion with his armed bodyguards admiring his own racist Blackface photos.
Demand both the repeal of Northam’s laws and his resignation today! Second Amendment Defenders of Virginia
For my final mashup assignment I decided to do the Create Your Own SuperPAC assignment (3 stars). I found this assignment very interesting. It took so much effort to get all of this to come together. I used Skitch to crop the photos and an online Pixlr app to paste them on to the black streetlight background that I found. I thought that it would be much easier but it was truly a lot of work. I used the SuperPAC name generator to help me get started. Mine was “Recover Our Future.”
Immediately after seeing this I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Since there is so much hostility and tension in the US caused by several killings of teenage African American men I decided to use that as my theme. I thought of the three biggest names that everyone has heard of which are Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Jordan Davis. I really wanted to send a message through this assignment and I feel that I was able to capture that. Let me know what you think.
So, this took some editing in Powerpoint and a picture off of Google. There were all sorts of interesting pictures available, and I chose this one because it just looked better than all the other ones.
I decided I wanted to make this assignment about The Wire, by using it to support Prop Joe for president. I really tried to make this look like a screen capture from a commercial, hence the reason why the fine print is so small at the bottom. I rather enjoyed making this one and I think it came out pretty darn well! I still wanted it to look somewhat professional so I decided against any wild fonts, and I think this looks good. I had considered a red/white/blue color scheme, but I figured that would probably not go too well in the long run.
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This is also an assignment I will be contributing to my final project (I’m still deciding on sites to use for him), but I think I have a direction to go in.
For this week’s assignment I decided to do the “Create Your Owen SuperPAC” assignment. Using WNYC’s generator I was assigned the PAC, “Establish Capitalism.” For this assignment the only group of people that I could think of to represent my cause was Don Draper and the cast of Mad Men.
So, if it’s success your looking for, look no further.
The handy-dandy SuperSuperPAC Name Generator mentioned in the assignment was very helpful, as I didn’t have any solid ideas for how to approach this. It generated the following gems:
Hype The Nanny State Foundation
Rock Free Pizza Horde
Resurrect Outdoor Grilling Collective
Enrich The Stars and Stripes Foundation
Super Chill Not Being Tread On Horde
Ebullient Not Listening Legion
Good-looking Internet Committee
Affirm The Purple Mountain Majesty
Each of these names was fabulous in its own way, but I decided to go with Good-Looking Internet Committee. It just seemed to have so many possibilities. The SuperPAC content follows, but first I wanted to discuss the sources.
It was very difficult to find usable material. The poster was easy, but creating a video remix is challenging. I’ve done it before (my favorite being Chewbacca Explains It All), and every time it takes significantly longer than I expect to find clips that I can use, and I usually have ideas for sources that I end up having to cut out entirely because they simply don’t fit.
In the case of the political ad, I wanted to use a number of clips of celebrities (after all, anyone associated with the cause should be good-looking). I might have eventually found clips from each celebrity I brainstormed, but it would have required watching *a lot* of footage. And even then, sometimes it seems like a good fit until you start editing your mash-up, and then suddenly everything falls apart. There was an interview with Leonardo DiCaprio that I thought was perfect for this, and I ended up not using a single soundbite. (And I’ve misplaced the details on it, so I can’t link to it. The clip is from an interview he did with The Early Show about The Departed, available on YouTube if you feel like doing some digging.) I ended up using Matt Damon’s rant on Sarah Palin and an hilarious Tim Gun video from his Liz Claiborne days. And that was it.
I’m happy with the result, but man, that was a lot of work.
The Good-Looking Internet Committee
A SuperPAC For the Information Age
Platform: Who cares about “open access”, online piracy and copyright compliance, or freedom of information? We want the Internet to be good-looking! And we don’t mean attractive web design. We want the Internet to only feature good-looking people.
Candidates We Support: Those who are attractive, or have attractive spouses (let’s be real, Obama is not much of a looker, but Michelle is a fashion icon)
Candidates We Oppose: Those who only care about SOPA and whatever the ITU might be up to, and can’t be bothered to put some effort into their personal appearance. We’re looking at YOU Donald Trump.
War Chest: We invested all of our funds in Facebook stock. Oh well.
Principle Donors: The Internet. That’s right. Cuz the Internet cares about this. (To clarify, “the Internet” is Google, YouTube, Facebook, Huffington Post, Gawker, Perez Hilton, 4chan, Reddit, yada yada yada.)
Ad that you will see at least three times every time you watch anything on Hulu:
Assignment: This assignment has you use the SuperPAC name generator found here and generate a name then get some mashup of data to promote the random SuperPAC.
Process: I went to generate the name for my pseudo-SuperPAC and it happened to come up with “Bring Back Astronauts” as the name for the SuperPac. I went to go find some relevant visuals from Google; but made sure the visuals I got were widely available, and not explicitly copyrighted. My first image I found via APOD, which is a very old and famous site directly from NASA which has astronomy pictures. Then I wanted a budget visual, and the NASA budget numbers are public information so I had no problems finding a graph with that data. I chose to upload the images directly to wordpress as I usually do, because I like to have copies of free data on servers for redundancy instead of linking directly (which is more efficient to be honest)
Story: Though the name chosen was completely random according to the SuperPAC name generator, I totally agree with the name, and we do need a SuperPAC to advocate for more space exploration. Maybe Stephen Colbert’s SuperPAC will take on that challenge in real life, but until then, here is my pseudo space-exploration mashup which shows us a beautiful formation of stars brought to us by the guys at NASA. Along with this beautiful image is a graph showing how screwed NASA is, and how screwed space development is in the U.S., and definitely reflects the sad reality of an uninspired populace.
Do you have a cause/candidate you are aching to support? Why not build your own SuperPAC? Can’t think of a name and/or a mission? Well the folks at WNYC can help you out with this SuperPAC name generator. After you’ve got you’re SuperPAC name it’s time to mashup up some media to support your cause. Use a piece of fiction or reality to start sculpting your message! PSAs, Radio spots, Posters, anything and everything is fair game for this assignment.
