Media Manipulation Workshop
This week, I went to Leon’s media manipulation workshop. We reviewed the basics of importing images, videos, and live camera feeds into Processing, and learned how to rework media using tools in Processing.
Video Assignment
It was my first time working with pre-filmed videos on Processing, and I used Vimeo.com to look through non-copyrighted videos and find ones I liked. For our recitation assignment, we were supposed to rework videos to recreate a video. I decided to work with the general idea of SpongeBob SquarePants, and wanted to use footage of oceans and beaches with remixes of songs from SpongeBob in the background. To do this, I found videos on Vimeo.com of tropical places and combined them in Processing. I used stop(), noLoop(), jump(), duration(), and speed() to import the videos. To add the background music, I found an acoustic cover of the ending song of SpongeBob. I looked up how to import music on Processing references, and imported the song in the background. Manipulating videos on Processing was more complicated than I had expected. I ran into trouble when trying to cut from one part of the video to the next, but looked at the notes on video-manipulation and found the correct functions to use. Importing the song also did not work at first, which was due to the fact that the song I had downloaded was not in the ‘data’ folder I had created. Once I figured this out though, I uploaded the mp3 song file into the data folder and got it to work.
Video Assignment Result
Below is the video I created using footage from Vimeo.com and a song from YouTube.com:
Additional Notes
Because a major component of my Final Project will be image manipulation in Processing, I decided to note what functions may be most useful to my partner and I as we finish our project. They are:
- loadImage (to upload our pictures onto Processing),
- resize (to adjust the width and height of our images as necessary (so that they are all the same size and change smoothly),
- and filter (to tweak our images to better fit our game).
What I learned in this workshop will be very useful for my project, as my partner and I will need to manipulate images into pixelating on Processing. We will also have to add two separate images on the screen at the same time, one being the image itself and one being the answer choices, so this workshop was good practice and preparation for the coding on Processing we will have to do for the Final Project.