Last but not least...my blog.
Blog, blog, blog...good old blog. You can say that I have had a rocky relationship with my blog. Starting it off with a post and neglecting it for eight months until now, only to go on a marathon blogging session to make up for lost time, but I wouldn't have it any other way...sorry if that makes it harder for you to mark.
The main reasoning for this is that I am a very analytical person when it comes to my thought processes and expressing what is going on within this mind of mine. I like to go through the process and look back on it in retrospect rather then jot down every thought and feeling that arises along the way. I have never been one to publicly display my neurological activity for the whole world to see. Even when I use social networking sites, I rarely post blogs or notes. I've only really done one real "blog" style post in my life, and I used the same process then as I did with this one, in which I was retelling a past experience by looking back on the events in a long, essay-like, analytical exploration spanning several months.
In terms of missing out on ideas and thoughts which may be significant later, I keep a note book which I jot down some thoughts and ideas for projects whenever something strikes me as important, but just the situation of posting it online for the whole world to see has never really caught on with me...besides, it's just a bunch of chicken scratched notes that would make absolutely no sense to anyone other than myself.
I guess it's because I've always been a really independent person. I like to do things in my own way and at my own pace, without having to explain myself at each step along the way. I also like to guard my ideas for projects so that I am able to develop them as I see fit, before getting outside opinions. Call me crazy but it has worked fine so far.
I might as well touch on some general thoughts about the course now. Overall I was happy with how this course turned out. I feel Marc is a really great professor and presented some very unique and interesting ideas that we were able to explore together within the labs. I was able to get a lot of hands on technical skill out of this course as well as new possibilities for creative exploration in the future, which I already have plans to include in extracurricular projects I have lined up this summer. In closing, thanks for all your time, insight, and patience. I hope you enjoy my Phase 4 once it is posted, as well as all my past projects and presentations. I'm sure you'll love this blog just as much as I do if not more...so enjoy and congratulations on not only getting through another school year, but this blog as well!!!
Have a good summer =)
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Phase 4
The time has come for Phase 4. This assignment was very interesting because it tied in so well with my presentation. Just as I got interested in network collaboration, I was given this opportunity to explore it a little bit.
I decided to do the first option with the image based process of email art. I felt it would be best if I contacted friends of mine instead of using classmates because of the fact that I know people who are interested in photographic design and seeing as so many classmates would be dealing with a large course load around this time, it was the least I could do to lighten their load.
I contacted a few of my friends and sent them the image I decided to use with the following instructions:
"Feel free to manipulate this image however you wish and send it back to me asap...thanks for your contribution."
I was able to find 4 people to each do 2-3 edits to get the final product. This phase was more of a waiting game seeing as this project out of my hands for the most part. It took quite some time for the image to get returned and sent out to the next person and so on, but overall I love the different styles and effects that were created using the same image. The amount of variation and creativity far surpassed what I had imagined. I am currently in the process of editing the pictures into a slide show with music, so seeing as this blog is due today, I won't be able to fill you in on the entire editing process...so you will have to wait to see the final product to get an idea for how that was done, but for the most part I plan on just presenting the images sequentially with a song playing in the background to fit the theme of the image.
In terms of my choice of images I used an image that I took in New York about 4 years ago in Strawberry Fields (a park dedicated to the memory of John Lennon) of the imagine circle, which is located across the street from where he was murdered. I felt this was a good image to use because it has a lot of options open to play with technically, along with the fact that it would tie back into my Phase 2 video. The song I am using is "Imagine" By: John Lennon as this is the overall theme. Not only does the song and image directly relate to the word "imagine", but the process of the work is based on what each contributor could imagine when they looked at the image. They were only limited by their creativity and imagination.
Overall I had a good time doing this project and seeing what everyone was able to come up with. It took a lot longer as there was more dependence on other people's time management skills, but overall it was worth it for the variety and creativity. I think it will be up there with my Phase 3 project in terms of quality. Unfortunately I have been sick over the past 2 weeks on and off and was unable to attend the critique class to show my process work, but hopefully this blog entry has filled you in on what you need to know. If there are any further questions feel free to email me. I can be reached at nickkon@yorku.ca.
I decided to do the first option with the image based process of email art. I felt it would be best if I contacted friends of mine instead of using classmates because of the fact that I know people who are interested in photographic design and seeing as so many classmates would be dealing with a large course load around this time, it was the least I could do to lighten their load.
I contacted a few of my friends and sent them the image I decided to use with the following instructions:
"Feel free to manipulate this image however you wish and send it back to me asap...thanks for your contribution."
I was able to find 4 people to each do 2-3 edits to get the final product. This phase was more of a waiting game seeing as this project out of my hands for the most part. It took quite some time for the image to get returned and sent out to the next person and so on, but overall I love the different styles and effects that were created using the same image. The amount of variation and creativity far surpassed what I had imagined. I am currently in the process of editing the pictures into a slide show with music, so seeing as this blog is due today, I won't be able to fill you in on the entire editing process...so you will have to wait to see the final product to get an idea for how that was done, but for the most part I plan on just presenting the images sequentially with a song playing in the background to fit the theme of the image.
In terms of my choice of images I used an image that I took in New York about 4 years ago in Strawberry Fields (a park dedicated to the memory of John Lennon) of the imagine circle, which is located across the street from where he was murdered. I felt this was a good image to use because it has a lot of options open to play with technically, along with the fact that it would tie back into my Phase 2 video. The song I am using is "Imagine" By: John Lennon as this is the overall theme. Not only does the song and image directly relate to the word "imagine", but the process of the work is based on what each contributor could imagine when they looked at the image. They were only limited by their creativity and imagination.
Overall I had a good time doing this project and seeing what everyone was able to come up with. It took a lot longer as there was more dependence on other people's time management skills, but overall it was worth it for the variety and creativity. I think it will be up there with my Phase 3 project in terms of quality. Unfortunately I have been sick over the past 2 weeks on and off and was unable to attend the critique class to show my process work, but hopefully this blog entry has filled you in on what you need to know. If there are any further questions feel free to email me. I can be reached at nickkon@yorku.ca.
Presentation
Presentation time. I signed up for my presentation way back before the strike, so I had a lot of time to work on it. I picked collaborative network based art because it is something I have been interested in as well as having taken advantage of myself.
I have been doing freelance acting work over the past 3 years and all of my credits have come from either online casting calls on sites such as craigslist, or through connections that I was able to get at those jobs. With the digital age we are living in and the accessibility with the internet, it is rather simple to get in touch with like-minded people to collaborate on projects with. My experience has been solely using the internet as a way to get in touch with people who are producing artwork, so that I can meet with them and contribute in person; however, I have been interested in network exchange with no face to face communication since a music group called "Neverending White Lights" came out.
I talked about their network based collaboration on their songs for their albums and was fortunate enough to meet the man behind it all named Daniel Victor...and even act in one of his latest music videos through one of those online casting calls. This gave me the opportunity to talk with him about his experiences with network collaboration as well as having had the chance to speak with some of his co-collaborators while they were on recent Canadian tours. My interest in this topic was also influenced by a course I am taking called "In Other Worlds", which deals with virtual reality, focusing on the Second Life program which consists of a completely user based creative environment to explore.
Overall through researching for this presentation I was able to learn more about what is possible using network collaboration which I may be able to use in future projects that I have in mind. I felt the presentation went well and I was able to keep the presentation to the appropriate length. The timing for my presentation couldn't have been better, as it tied in with not only other classmates presentations such as the online drum circle, but also with the Phase 4 project.
I have been doing freelance acting work over the past 3 years and all of my credits have come from either online casting calls on sites such as craigslist, or through connections that I was able to get at those jobs. With the digital age we are living in and the accessibility with the internet, it is rather simple to get in touch with like-minded people to collaborate on projects with. My experience has been solely using the internet as a way to get in touch with people who are producing artwork, so that I can meet with them and contribute in person; however, I have been interested in network exchange with no face to face communication since a music group called "Neverending White Lights" came out.
I talked about their network based collaboration on their songs for their albums and was fortunate enough to meet the man behind it all named Daniel Victor...and even act in one of his latest music videos through one of those online casting calls. This gave me the opportunity to talk with him about his experiences with network collaboration as well as having had the chance to speak with some of his co-collaborators while they were on recent Canadian tours. My interest in this topic was also influenced by a course I am taking called "In Other Worlds", which deals with virtual reality, focusing on the Second Life program which consists of a completely user based creative environment to explore.
Overall through researching for this presentation I was able to learn more about what is possible using network collaboration which I may be able to use in future projects that I have in mind. I felt the presentation went well and I was able to keep the presentation to the appropriate length. The timing for my presentation couldn't have been better, as it tied in with not only other classmates presentations such as the online drum circle, but also with the Phase 4 project.
Phase 3
Phase 3 I felt was my strongest work thus far. I took a extra year at a tech school after graduating from my high school, specifically for their Multimedia and Photography programs and the audio portion of that multimedia course really caught my fancy, so I have been playing around with sound recording for the past couple years since then.
Going into this project I was trying to come up with a way to use the concepts of performance in relation to the ideas of construction and capture in an interesting way. At first I was thinking of directly relating the two sound clips in terms of performance, so I was planning on using a captured audio clip from a live concert and then creating a performance, but I was not too sure how I could flip the two around to make it hard to tell which one was which...so I decided that an interesting way to do that would be to play with the quality.
Thinking in terms of the quality of the produced audio made me want to use quality as my main focus while still having the concept of performance as my secondary focus, so I decided to capture an extraordinary live event in high quality (in order to sound too good to be true capture) and reproduce an average everyday occurrence in low quality (in order to sound too real to be constructed).
I wanted to construct first, so I decided to perform a task that I do everyday...walk up my stairs and unload my bags. In order to construct this I first recorded a little over a minute of dead air to get the atmosphere sound to lay as my base track. I then took several sound clips of myself walking up the stairs and added them onto another track, as well as playing around with their timing to give it a realistic pace. One more layer of a plastic bag rustling and I was ready to fine tune the timing. Once I had it sounding the way I wanted it to, I played with the levels of each track to blend the noise together to make it sound like it was from one continuous sound clip. This was all recorded using a crappy microphone which came with my computer several years ago and sucks majorly. It gave it a realistic sounding quality that created the desired effect I was looking for. Overall most of the time I spent on this part of the project was done in the post production stage using Audacity.
Next was the more challenging, yet extremely fun one...the capture. There were three factors that i need to bring together for this to work effectively: good quality recording equipment, a unique sonic environment, and an extraordinary event to capture. A good friend of mine which I met in that multimedia class is a drummer, and boy can he drum. He practices in a soundproof rehearsal studio which was perfect because it leaves you with complete silence and virtually no ambient noise in between drum hits. This took care of the last two factors, now I just needed the equipment. I already own a few microphones as well as an audio mixer which is compatible with my laptop which creates a perfect portable recording studio, but I wanted a few different kinds of microphones to make his playing sound as crisp as possible. One trip to Long & McQuade and twelve dollars later, I had a full drum mic kit for the weekend to play with.
We ended up using six microphones in total: one on the bass drum, one on the snare, one on the hi-hat, one above for the cymbals, and then one on each of the two toms. Balancing the input and output levels of all six microphones was a challenge, but it was a fun learning experience for me. It ended up taking about an hour to get all the microphones set up and mixed together to my satisfaction at which point the fun could begin. He went through his different warm ups and practices and tried out a variety of techniques and tempos. The one I ended up using was his fastest warm up exercise as it sounded like there was too many beats being played to be coming from one source. The introduction and ending fit perfectly within the one minute time limit and the change in speed part way though added another interesting variable to help throw the listener off. We finished after about an hour of recording different things and another 15 minutes putting away all the microphones. With ears ringing I made the two cuts, one at the beginning and one at the end of the audio file and it was complete. Most of the time spent on this half of the project was in the pre-production setup and mixing.
Overall I think this was my strongest phase and I feel that I did my job well based on the reaction from my presentation. The outcome was definitely worth the work, and the process was interesting as well.
Going into this project I was trying to come up with a way to use the concepts of performance in relation to the ideas of construction and capture in an interesting way. At first I was thinking of directly relating the two sound clips in terms of performance, so I was planning on using a captured audio clip from a live concert and then creating a performance, but I was not too sure how I could flip the two around to make it hard to tell which one was which...so I decided that an interesting way to do that would be to play with the quality.
Thinking in terms of the quality of the produced audio made me want to use quality as my main focus while still having the concept of performance as my secondary focus, so I decided to capture an extraordinary live event in high quality (in order to sound too good to be true capture) and reproduce an average everyday occurrence in low quality (in order to sound too real to be constructed).
I wanted to construct first, so I decided to perform a task that I do everyday...walk up my stairs and unload my bags. In order to construct this I first recorded a little over a minute of dead air to get the atmosphere sound to lay as my base track. I then took several sound clips of myself walking up the stairs and added them onto another track, as well as playing around with their timing to give it a realistic pace. One more layer of a plastic bag rustling and I was ready to fine tune the timing. Once I had it sounding the way I wanted it to, I played with the levels of each track to blend the noise together to make it sound like it was from one continuous sound clip. This was all recorded using a crappy microphone which came with my computer several years ago and sucks majorly. It gave it a realistic sounding quality that created the desired effect I was looking for. Overall most of the time I spent on this part of the project was done in the post production stage using Audacity.
Next was the more challenging, yet extremely fun one...the capture. There were three factors that i need to bring together for this to work effectively: good quality recording equipment, a unique sonic environment, and an extraordinary event to capture. A good friend of mine which I met in that multimedia class is a drummer, and boy can he drum. He practices in a soundproof rehearsal studio which was perfect because it leaves you with complete silence and virtually no ambient noise in between drum hits. This took care of the last two factors, now I just needed the equipment. I already own a few microphones as well as an audio mixer which is compatible with my laptop which creates a perfect portable recording studio, but I wanted a few different kinds of microphones to make his playing sound as crisp as possible. One trip to Long & McQuade and twelve dollars later, I had a full drum mic kit for the weekend to play with.
We ended up using six microphones in total: one on the bass drum, one on the snare, one on the hi-hat, one above for the cymbals, and then one on each of the two toms. Balancing the input and output levels of all six microphones was a challenge, but it was a fun learning experience for me. It ended up taking about an hour to get all the microphones set up and mixed together to my satisfaction at which point the fun could begin. He went through his different warm ups and practices and tried out a variety of techniques and tempos. The one I ended up using was his fastest warm up exercise as it sounded like there was too many beats being played to be coming from one source. The introduction and ending fit perfectly within the one minute time limit and the change in speed part way though added another interesting variable to help throw the listener off. We finished after about an hour of recording different things and another 15 minutes putting away all the microphones. With ears ringing I made the two cuts, one at the beginning and one at the end of the audio file and it was complete. Most of the time spent on this half of the project was in the pre-production setup and mixing.
Overall I think this was my strongest phase and I feel that I did my job well based on the reaction from my presentation. The outcome was definitely worth the work, and the process was interesting as well.
Phase 2
Phase 2 was an interesting project. I have a good background in film as I made short films throughout high school even running the Film Festival in my grade 11 year, but what was challenging was the fact that I could not create any footage or soundtrack options for the project.
I came up with the idea for the general theme of the project while watching an A&E biography on Charles Manson. At one point they had the heavy subject matter of his criminal past, and then the next minute they were going back into his days as an artist/musician. Upon looking into a few of his songs I stumbled on the one I ended up using. I decided to focus on the perpetrators in the first half and the victims in the second half because of the tempo change in the latter half of the song.
When it came to selecting clips I looked into many different crimes which would be recognizable through the footage, so that the viewer could really focus on the connection between the song and the footage. I placed the clips according to how they fit with the lyrics, with a good example being the burning monk when Manson sings "just let them sit there and burn". I thought that the Rodney king footage would be good at the transition point. and I thought that John Lennon's quote being placed at the end of the video really fit well because of him being a peace activist who was a victim himself. The context of his words get twisted after witnessing the footage and listening to the song and is meant to leave the audience to really question the meaning of the video. It seemed like a good way to tie the concepts of the video together, while leaving the floor open for more thought.
The song I felt was what made the video; however, it's a shame how low the quality is due to its age and the early recording equipment used, but taking that into consideration I don't think it was too bad. Editing it was not too complicated, just required cuts and fades. The time consuming part was finding the footage and selecting the right parts to include and synchronize to the music.
Overall I was really pleased with how it turned out and felt it was a good project to explore the ideas behind found footage. It took me out of my element and challenged me in a new way, much like Phase 1 did.
I came up with the idea for the general theme of the project while watching an A&E biography on Charles Manson. At one point they had the heavy subject matter of his criminal past, and then the next minute they were going back into his days as an artist/musician. Upon looking into a few of his songs I stumbled on the one I ended up using. I decided to focus on the perpetrators in the first half and the victims in the second half because of the tempo change in the latter half of the song.
When it came to selecting clips I looked into many different crimes which would be recognizable through the footage, so that the viewer could really focus on the connection between the song and the footage. I placed the clips according to how they fit with the lyrics, with a good example being the burning monk when Manson sings "just let them sit there and burn". I thought that the Rodney king footage would be good at the transition point. and I thought that John Lennon's quote being placed at the end of the video really fit well because of him being a peace activist who was a victim himself. The context of his words get twisted after witnessing the footage and listening to the song and is meant to leave the audience to really question the meaning of the video. It seemed like a good way to tie the concepts of the video together, while leaving the floor open for more thought.
The song I felt was what made the video; however, it's a shame how low the quality is due to its age and the early recording equipment used, but taking that into consideration I don't think it was too bad. Editing it was not too complicated, just required cuts and fades. The time consuming part was finding the footage and selecting the right parts to include and synchronize to the music.
Overall I was really pleased with how it turned out and felt it was a good project to explore the ideas behind found footage. It took me out of my element and challenged me in a new way, much like Phase 1 did.
Phase 1
Finally updating this thing...going back to phase 1
Going into this project I was not sure how I was going to do as I did not take FACS 1930 and I had no HTML understanding going into it; however, I had some flash background which helped in understanding the elements of the page...but not the coding process. I feel I've learned quite a bit about HTML and that I was able to create a good basic Phase 1 project. I wish I would've given more CSS and fancy stuff, but I am satisfied with how it turned out under the circumstances I was dealing with.
Finding the quotes was the best part for me because I love to look up different quotes on topics in some of my free time, so that was enjoyable.
Coding the HTML was challenging, but rewarding once it was finished and I knew that I was able to at least create basic framesets and layouts. I plan on looking into HTML a bit more in my free time over the summer.
Going into this project I was not sure how I was going to do as I did not take FACS 1930 and I had no HTML understanding going into it; however, I had some flash background which helped in understanding the elements of the page...but not the coding process. I feel I've learned quite a bit about HTML and that I was able to create a good basic Phase 1 project. I wish I would've given more CSS and fancy stuff, but I am satisfied with how it turned out under the circumstances I was dealing with.
Finding the quotes was the best part for me because I love to look up different quotes on topics in some of my free time, so that was enjoyable.
Coding the HTML was challenging, but rewarding once it was finished and I knew that I was able to at least create basic framesets and layouts. I plan on looking into HTML a bit more in my free time over the summer.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)