Gruep Project

So my original idea for the group project was to make a semi-game where you are shown a poem that correlates with a picture. My first thought (read: example) was to take a Bill Shakespeare poem about a beautiful, tall, pale woman, and have a painting shown next to it, where there are several people in the picture, and where you click on the woman described to go to the next poem. I thought this wasn't a horrible idea - work could be divided into pictures and poems, or each group member could do a certain amount of pages. Yes, I was thinking it was probably the easiest idea, but it wasn't a bad one either.

When my idea met with some resistance to the group (it was too easy), I came up with the idea of playing with an old myth as a story starter, since the group was leaning towards making something like Galatea. This was met with more interest, and we evolved it into a game loosely based on the myth of Prometheus.

REview on REmix

For my review/critique/whatever of a digital remix project in my class, I decided to use Tierney Kain's piece of emo animals.
First of all, I thought her remix project was the funniest imho. Her emo animals, while not the most "techy" of the projects, was the one that I found to be the most entertaining. The short text, emphasized by the serious images, is a great piece. It's hilarious to see what is a normal picture of an animal made silly by the melodramatic tone of text that Tierney uses.
Not only was the piece funny, but it was original. While using funny text with "serious" words is not unknown, it's difficult to think of one or two sentences that can sum up a serious picture and make it hilarious. The concept is in line with creating puns, which has never been my forte.
Overall, I think that Tierney did a great job. She took common use pictures and made them her work by inventing text that succinctly makes fun of the "emo" culture and entertains us with cute pictures of animals.

Digital Remix Project - Live!

The hardest part of getting this digital remix project up and running was finding and learning the different programs to set it up. The idea itself and the actual project wasn't too difficult by itself, but first I had to change the file from MPEG4 to .wmv, then I had to find a program to edit the movies how I wanted them to be edited (I used Cyberlink PowerDirector), and then I had to find various programs to play around with the audio like I wanted (TTSApp, RealPlayer.)

I enjoyed doing this project, and if I had more time, I would have made longer clips. The clips themselves took about an hour for the first one and a couple hours for the second one, subtracting the hours that I spent finding various programs. The hardest part of the project was finding a video converter - I ended up going with 1st Video Converter. It might have been easier if I had shelled out some money, but I'm cheap, and figured the trials would be good enough. I think I went through at least 4 different converters until I found one that actually worked. It would have been a lot more convenient if the Internet Archive let me download the movie in WMV file type, but c'est la vie.

Another annoying part of this project was I couldn't embed the actual video on to my web page! I used youtube.com to upload the actual video, but when I tried to embed, I couldn't get the stupid thing to work, so I ended up having to just put the links on there. Not exactly the most efficient, but hopefully it will work out for the best.

To comment on the pieces:
First of all, I did two pieces because I had two separate ideas, but didn't want ridiculously long stretches; both pieces are a little under a minute and a half.

The first piece I just thought it would be really entertaining to use "robot voices" in a common movie that everyone would recognize. Since the voices don't contain any emotion, this piece demonstrates how just changing the tone in voices can change a movie's message (and in this case, imho, make it seem really silly!)

The second piece I thought of from the movie Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. I thought it was really entertaining how Steve Oedekerk changed an entire movie and made it hilarious. I know that my attempt isn't as funny, but I tried, using a random little story I made up on the spot after watching that section of the movie.

Oh, and in regards to copyright:
Scrooge (1935) is a British import that is under public domain.
I used TTSApp to make the voices in the edited first version.
The Chinese audio is just a fragment of a wikipedia audio file.
I made up the subtitles for the edited second version.

Ideas for Digital Remix Project

So the only thing I can think of for my digital remix project
is to take an old movie that's fallen into public domain, something like "Mr. Arkadin", and match like 5 minutes of the film with a cartoon that's fallen into public domain. The guys who did the GI Joe spoofs seem to know what to do, but I'm having problems already...

I downloaded virtualdub, a program that lets me edit videos, but I can't figure out how to download movies from the Internet Archive or the Creative Commons site. As for audio, I downloaded Audacity, which I've used before, but I can't get it to record things that I'm playing on my computer. I know it can, but I can't figure out what's wrong or what I need to change to get it to do that. I think I need to call SigmaTel, my computer's audio card company. So as soon as I can figure out how to download these movies, then I think I'll be in business.

An alternate idea that I had was to use a public domain movie, something popular, like Citizen Kane, and use the audio and make it in The Movies video game. Might be entertaining...

1st assignment for ENG 344

I have to do a couple assignments for a digital writing class that I'm taking; it's the reason I started this blog. I hope to expand this to include reviews on video games, movies, random things I find interesting, and just general commentary, but first things first, I needed to look at the Electronic Literature Collection Volume One.

"So, what do you think of the ELC? Choose a work which you find appealing, irritating, engaging, confusing, whatever. Post a few paragraphs to your class blog for this week:

What did you like?
Why?
What did you expect electronic literature to be?
What genre is the piece you choose (poetry? fiction? other?)"

There are a lot of really cool links on this site, and a lot of really weird links. I didn't click them all; there were too many of them to go through in one week. Then there was a couple that were just insanely frustrating, or confusing... On Lionel Kearns was a cross between confusing and frustrating. At first, it seems kind of cool, and interesting, even if you're not positive at what Jim Andrews is trying to do. The ending though, was a bit frustrating. I wasn't sure if the ending was the ending, so that's where it frustrated me.

A couple stood out to me, including Nio, which is kind of fun, because you can fuck around with it and end up getting different music depending on what selections you have. The only weird thing about this, and others, is the question of how this is "electronic literature." I understand that there are some weird letters in this little example, but when I think of literature, I guess I think of poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction. A couple of the pieces make sense as say, a poem, or a combination of fiction and prose, or non-fiction poetry, but theres a lot of these pieces that I think would really fall under the "digital art" category.

Urbanalities seems a little more like literature - there are parts in it where you see things that seem like poetry, but there is still a lot of things that I don't know if I would consider literature. Out of all the links, I think that I like Urbanalities the most; it's interesting to say the least. However, throughout a lot of the different links, I kept wondering what the difference is between electronic literature and digital art... I can't really point out why I like this one so much, other than it's varied enough that even if I didn't like one part, I might really enjoy another part.

first post.... kind of random: intro

just starting up with a random clip.... and the reason for this title...