Video Project Idea — Thomas, Jannine & Val

For our project, we are interested in exploring a choose your own adventure type deal where the final outcome is a result of different choices made throughout the videos. The theme for our project is most likely going to be a film noir style murder mystery. Our project will consist of a series of videos where different clickable objects will change the course of the narrative. Ideally, I’d like to incorporate some sort of clickable buttons in the video, where instead of clicking shitty HTML buttons you click on items in the video to make decisions. I would also ideally like to add different video FX depending on which route the player is going. 

Audio Project Documentation (Thomas Waugh)

For my audio project, I initially wanted to create a drum rack similar to the one that I use in Ableton. Which looks like a grid with different instruments and different beats to arrange them into. For this, my partner and I assembled a variety of sounds from throughout the AB. I then put these samples into Ableton and EQ’d them, added effects to them, and make the sound levels equal according to what drum or sound I assigned each recording to. I then realized that I do not think that the average person is familiar with drum patterns so in order to make the user interface more accessible and to make it more of an intuitive experience with easier results, I arranged all the sounds into a song and then separated the song into different layers. Each checkbox correlates to one layer of the song. All the different layers go together in a pattern because, once again, they are all from the same song. By choosing this path, I feel that I created something that someone with no previous musical experience could use to make a song of their own made from sounds of the AB in a matter of seconds. The coding for this project was relatively straightforward as it merely consisted of programming buttons to play sounds together and adding simple audio controls. Steve originally had the picture of the AB without any filters on it, but I felt that that image did not match the mood of the project so I threw the picture into Photoshop and changed the color balance, added a ton of saturation and overlaid a pattern gradient to give it a more enticing and exciting look and to make it clash less with the content that it was framing. All-in-all, I was very happy with how this project turned out and I had an absolute blast making it and I am super excited to have a drum kit of NYU Shanghai sounds to play around with in the future.

Link to Project

it didn’t let me upload the song I made with all the sounds into my documentation 🙁

Danger of a Single Story (Thomas Waugh)

In the ted talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”, Chimamanda Adichie talks about how people commonly take one single story about something and make it out to be the only truth. I thought about the message of this talk and realized I can see it everyday with the amount of cultural diversity around me. Our school is full of individuals from so many different countries and backgrounds, and it is easy for people to generalize what a person is like based on stereotypes that they have heard. I think it is important to know that there are always multiple stories that exist and that people can’t understand everything and have to acknowledge this, keeping their mind open to the many stories that exist. I spent most of my life living in America, and I know that it would be easy for other people to perceive me as the stereotypical American. But I was born in Argentina, and also have a Japanese grandmother who exposed me to Japanese culture since I was a kid. Just as I know I am not a single story, I think every person and every place possesses many stories and can’t be defined by only one. Single stories told as the only can lead to great miscommunications and misconceptions.

Response to Ecstasy of Influence (Thomas Waugh)

This article helped me to understand the difference between stealing someone else’s work and contributing and building upon it. It draws a good distinction between what is outright plagiarism and what is just part of an ever-evolving creative process. I think that this is a very important thing to note because in the modern world, and with modern art, fewer things are original and more things are becoming samplings and remixes of previous works. Nowadays, it is easier than ever to sample the work of others thanks to computers. In the past, if an artist wanted to remix someone’s image, they had to paint it themselves which would take a long time, but now I can just press command+shift+4. It’s pretty dope. For music, I can just copy the link into another website and download the song. I love the internet and how it has evolved the way artists work. However, this is also problematic for where there is art, there are people who want credit for what they have created and the internet has made this easier and more difficult simultaneously. Nowadays, people care less about citing their sources, but if they do, they can simply add a link instead of pesky MLA or other kinds of obnoxious citations. All-in-all, the internet has revolutionized the ways artists work in an amazing way, however we must be careful to give credit where credit is due. 

Response to On the Rights of Molotov Man (Thomas Waugh)

On the Rights of Molotov Man is an article about the copyright battle over an image of a Nicaraguan freedom fighter. The article shows the development and spread of the image, full of many different iterations of the image showing it in different contexts and with different motives. While some versions of the image are being used for purposes similar to the original purpose of the image, such as many of its uses in Nicaragua, others are far from the original image’s message, Pepsi for example. I feel like the reproduction and sampling of this image is totally okay as long as credit is given where credit is due. As long as the image is cited, it should be fair game to do whatever one wants with it because, after all, it is just a collection of numbers. Without sampling and instead requiring for each artist to find their own subject matter, there could be no commentary on pop culture and people would be constrained to much simpler, basic designs. So in conclusion, I would like to make the argument that the ability to recycle and sample media is crucial in order for creativity to evolve to the next level.