Week 5 – Assignment Bank

ds 106: Create A Commercial (5 stars)

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Though it’s not much of an advertisement per say, it tells Rudy just what it is they’re looking at. They will pick one to take along their journey while the rest go with a kindly stranger and his monstrous companion. Without the log left by some unnamed researcher Rudy wouldn’t even know what its name was. Now as they look around, they notice that there are some other small machines scattered throughout the room, blinking red in the darkness.

If the obnoxious watermark wasn’t a clear indicator, this was made with both screencast-o-matic and a video editing program called OpenShot. I wasn’t fully sure what I wanted to do for my video portion and figured it’d be interesting to do a recording rather than stitching together a bunch of different assets. I also used OpenShot to add a bunch of effects such as distortion, robotic voice, and pixilation to the audio and visuals. I wish I could’ve added some static and better mixed the audio, but overall I’m alright with how this turned out.

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ds 106: Weird Book Room (4 stars)

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Far in the future of our world is one completely unrecognizable. The people there are not like us, and all they know of us is that we were responsible for why the world has become the way it is now. They read what’s left of our stories of war, of the Hound, of the Cure, the day it rained light and the sun vanished behind the Ghost. How entire civilizations turned on one another, how the Earth turned on us, how the sky turned on us. They don’t know the full story. They barely know our languages, much less what we may have looked like.

This was created with Grafx2 completely. The trickiest part was far from the story or the design, as I had an idea as soon as I saw the prompt. I was inspired to make something that seemed old but not inherently crazy, like you might stumble across it in an abandoned library. But the context itself is what drives it to be “weird”. In the story of Hollowgrove humans don’t exist, and the people who exist in our place know us like we knew dinosaurs 50 years ago. Barely.

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ds 106: Play DJ & Make A Song (again!)(4.5 stars)

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Back at it again with another song! This time I focused much more on making an ambient track rather than a fully fledged song, and I’m pretty happy with the end result. I wanted something that you’d hear as the backing music to a graveyard or haunted woods at night, and put together a bunch of different elements from all sorts of songs and tracks to come up with this piece. I based this off of an old music tournament submission I made a long time ago, and edited it heavily to make it more ambient and less of a traditional song.

I used an online sequencer called Beepbox to make this track and nothing else. I browsed an embarrassing amount of spooky dark forest ambiance tracks on Youtube for my inspiration as well as a handful of songs from niche places, such as a Starbound mod called Frackin Universe and artists like Crywolf and RIOT who are amazing at building scenes with their music. Lots of reverb, lots of background noises, and a whole lot of bass and sub bass. Having these alone can fill out an empty track and give it space, and the extra noises and actual notes can keep the emphasis while not drowning out the other elements of the song. The track itself plays twice and is actually made to loop infinitely, But for the sake of making it sound nice and not going on forever I made a simple ending for it. I wanted this to make the feeling of Hollowgrove feel like a horror game. Of course there aren’t just horror aspects to it, and if it ever came to light I’d tag it with horror but wouldn’t consider it a full on horror game. The setting, the creatures and the characters are all meant to be unsettling to some extent though, and this is a great way to help instill that feeling in my audience.

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ds 106: Your story as a game! (5 stars)

For the visual aspect of this project, I decided to make a mock ups for Hollowgrove. The first end goal of this idea was to make a game, and since then I’ve known that it’s gonna be a long time before anything of the sort actually happens, so in the meantime I figured some mock ups would be nice.

I made both of these in grafx2, a free to use pixel art program. The creatures and background were made separately, then put in with the help of layers to make sure everything fit in before getting everyone on the same page. I have a specific color palette I use for all my Hollowgrove related projects to keep everything cohesive and consistent across pieces. The menu and background share a palette of a whopping five colors, while the creatures all use a different five to ten colors depending on the elements they have.

These were made to help sell two different ideas. One is the overall aesthetic and theme of Hollowgrove. It’s meant to be grimy and dark, but visually interesting enough to pull the viewer in. The colors for each element may be different, but they all share contrasting and vibrant colors. These two for example are visually unsettling, almost confusing and grotesque in appearance. But they’re both bright and detailed, individual elements of them are clear and thanks to the other colors in the image they stand out drastically and immediately grab the attention of the viewer. The second idea is that this isn’t a story that’s told through audio or video, its told specifically through a game. Again I know that as of now there’s not real game aspect, but the ideas here show what it could be as well as what it may look like. Buttons with easy to read text that have words on them that you could find in virtually any video game, icons that represent common tropes in games such as health bars and elements, and stylized menu that’s clear and shows the “player” exactly what their options are. Of course there’s plenty of tweaking that I want to do for these concepts in the future, but that’s a problem for future me.

Sound Effects Story

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Audio Assignment #3

For my sound effects story I decided to tell the story of getting up in the morning to shower and brush my teeth. All of the sound effects I used came from sound bible.

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Guess the Song

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Audio Assignment #2

For this assignment we had to choose one song that has been stuck in our head and hum it. I didn’t have any songs stuck in my head at the moment so I choose a pretty well know children’s song and hummed that instead! Can you guess what it is?

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All In This Together

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Audio Assignment #1

For this assignment I had to take a soundtrack from a movie/musical and put the songs in a different order to see if they can create a new story. I chose the songs from High School Musical 1 and strung them together above. I am not really sure it created a new story, but instead almost sounds like the songs are contradicting each other. One song seems really positive, while the next is almost negative and pushing the thought of “don’t do or try anything different”. I hope you enjoy and maybe find another story in this song order that I couldn’t!

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Just a Careless Whisper

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For my third and last audio assignment, I chose to do What A Song Might Mean To You and spoke about a popular 80s song: George Michael’s “Careless Whisper.”

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Just Hum It

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Today, I settled on doing the Humming Away audio assignment and thought I’d connect it to our 80s theme by humming along to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” because it’s the first 80s song that initially comes to mind for me. Just hum it!

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I Wanna Boujee With Somebody

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This assignment asked me to combine two songs (similar or not) so I decided to incorporate our class theme and use ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’ (I know I use this song a lot, its my favorite) with Migos’ ‘Bad and Boujee’. I used the Rave website and then an online video converter to convert it to an mp4 file to then upload to soundcloud. I really struggled how to create this but once figured out I am obsessed with doing it!!