For the GIF assignment, for Computer Science 106: Digital Storytelling, I summarized Season 1, Episode 10: The Cost of The Wire. I picked five scenes that had what I felt were either crucial moments, and/or crucial lines. To create the GIF set, I imported the episode into Adobe Premiere to trim down the episodes into the scenes I wanted to use to to make GIFs. I also added in the lines as text on the video clips. After that, I imported the various video clips into Adobe Photoshop as layers, changed the speed of the frames, and saved the segments as GIFs.
ds106
The Divergent Games
This video was created for the Computer Science 106: Digital Storytelling course assignment Movie Trailer Mashup. I decided to mashup the Divergent trailer and the Hunger Games trailer because both movies take place in a dystopian future world and both have lead female characters.
To make this mashup trailer, I dowloaded both the Divergent and Hunger Games trailers from Youtube and imported them into iMovie. Next, I broke up the trailers into the scenes they featured from the movies, and tried to find similar scenes between the two trailers. I put the similar scenes together and carefully ordered them to make sure a plot line somewhat flowed through the new mashup trailer. I also wanted some of the dialogue so I made sure to increase the volume on the scenes with dialogue I thought was relevant to the mashup and mute the scenes that did not have relevant dialogue. I found a royalty free song on Incompetech to add to almost the entire trailer. In the very beginning I simply copied part of the background music from the Divergent trailer and added it to the Hunger Games scene before bringing in my royalty free track. I kept the black transitions from the original trailers and added in transitions between the scenes that did not have them. I also added in a fake release date scene and a mashup logo for my movie, The Divergent Games.
Haunted House
In the course Computer Science 106: Digital Storytelling, I creates an assignment, called Spooky Sounds. For this assignment you have to make an audio track using found sounds or your own recordings that is creepy, spooky, scary, basically Halloween inspired.
I started this assignment by collecting some sounds from FreeSound that I thought would sound right in a haunted house. This included bats, squeaky rocking chairs, footsteps, thunder, wind howling, etc. I took the sounds I found and imported them into Audacity. I slowed down the egg timer and the footsteps in order to build suspense with them. I softened the rocking chair and the bats to make them blend better with the wind howling and the wind chimes. For the wind howling, I wanted it to come in twice, but I didn’t want to repeat the same noise so I split the wind howling track into two parts and simply dragged the second part into a different section of the audio track. The door creaking was surprisingly the most difficult sound to find because I had a very specific creaking in mind, and most of the creaking doors I found were either the wrong material or the wrong pitch.
Sounds from FreeSound.org
Sounds Used:
1. timer with ding.wav by keweldog (www.freesound.org/people/keweldog/sounds/181148/)
2. bonitoWindchime.wav by plagasul (www.freesound.org/people/plagasul/sounds/602/)
3. footsteps on wood by Mydo1 (www.freesound.org/people/Mydo1/sounds/198962/)
4. bats1.aif by sofie (www.freesound.org/people/sofie/sounds/9721/)
5. wind_howl2_mono.wav by swiftoid (www.freesound.org/people/swiftoid/sounds/117610/)
6. Door – Creak 02.wav by JarredGibb (www.freesound.org/people/JarredGibb/sounds/219492/)
7. Thunder » Dry Thunder3.wav by juskiddink (www.freesound.org/people/juskiddink/sounds/101948/)
Image:
Haunted House by Open Clips (http://pixabay.com/p-151505/?no_redirect)
DS106 Radio Bumper
This is a radio bumper created for the audio assignment, “Create a DS106 Radio Bumper,” in Computer Science 106: Digital Storytelling (DS106). I first found the kind of sound I wanted for the radio bumper on SoundCloud by searching for Creative Commons EDM mixes. After I found the EDM buildup I was hoping to find, I went to Freesound and searched for sounds that resembled wires running electricity since the course was also known as Wire106 since the television show The Wire was incorporating into our weekly assignments. Lastly, I needed someone to say “DS106 Radio.” I knew I definitely did not want to record myself, so I searched for free online text to speech computer generated voices that also allowed me to download the audio. I came across YAKiToMe! and used the “Audrey” voice to say “DS1O6 Radio.”
After I downloaded the three various audio clips, I imported them into Audacity and put them together to make the radio bumper.
Sources:
1. COMMERCIAL EDM MIX JAN 6TH 2014 by djsn1 on SoundCloud (Djsn1 – Commercial-edm-mix-jan-6th)
2. Electricity.wav by da_maestro on Freesound.org www.freesound.org/people/da_maestro/sounds/42983/
3. Audrey voice from YAKiToMe! www.yakitome.com/tts?a=T&b=1082481&c=86YxLxdZ&d=T
Radio Logo:
Remixed version of the DS106 logo found here: ds106.us/
It’s a Kodak Moment in the House!
This audio work is a “commercial” I made for my a radio show project for my Computer Science 106: Digital Storytelling course at UMW. The project involved making a radio show that included themes or characters or plot points from the television show The Wire. My group’s radio show was a backwards radio show in that our content was commercials based on the actual product placement in The Wire. Kodak cameras were featured in Season 2 Episode 3: Hot Shots. Ziggy specifically references a “Kodak Moment” as Nick and his deal with Double G plays out.
To make this commercial, I took the audio from the scene where Nick and Ziggy are discussing the camera deal with Double G and the audio from an actual Kodak Commercial and combined the two in Audacity. I moved the introduction part of the music in the Kodak commercial to the end of the commercial audio to serve as background music for when Ziggy is talking about the Kodak cameras Nick and him are stealing for Double G. I cut down the audio from The Wire scene to just the specs and pricing of the cameras, as well as Ziggy’s “Kodak Moment” line.
Sources:
1. The Wire Season 2, Episode 3: Hot Shots
2. Digital Image Studios, Kodak “Moment” Commercial, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkG18KiSMGk
Dunkin’ Donuts Commercial
This audio work is a “commercial” I made for my a radio show project for my Computer Science 106: Digital Storytelling course at UMW. The project involved making a radio show that included themes or characters or plot points from the television show The Wire. My group’s radio show was a backwards radio show in that our content was commercials based on the actual product placement in The Wire. Dunkin’ Donuts products were featured in several episodes, so I decided to make a Dunkin’ Donuts radio commercial. I made the audio clip by using segments from The Wire and incorporating them into a real Dunkin’ Donuts commercial that used to air on television. I edited the audio clips using a free audio editing software called Audacity.
Sources:
1. The Wire Clip: Funny Bunk and Freeman Interrogation by hoodpolitics www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EeFa8QOq_Y
2. Dunkin’ Donuts – Fritalian Commercial by patricknelson www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2y_GwKzxck
3. 2010 Dunkin Donuts Commercial by TellyFarnsworth www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyfjXbQojzc
Currently Working On…
- DGST 101: I am currently a course called Digital Studies 101, which a required class for the the Digital Minor at UMW. In this course we will be using a new Content Management System called Known, which allows users to connect their blogs directly to their social media accounts. You can follow my work for this course here.
- DS106: Another course I am taking at UMW entitled Computer Science 106: Digital Storytelling (I will be referring to it as DS106), which is an open, online course at UMW. For this course I will be maintaining a blog in order to exhibit my course work, and provide as well as receive feedback on my work from my peers. You can follow my course blog here.
- History of the Information Age: I am also taking a senior seminar History course at UMW entitled History 471D7: History of the Information Age. For this course I will be maintaining a blog in order to discuss the course’s readings, provide and receive comments to and from my peers about the readings, and to provide updates on work I am doing in the course. You can follow my course blog here.
- History 485: Historical Research: I am also working on my senior thesis for the History major. The process of writing my senior thesis will include writing a proposal, writing a literature review, extensive research, and writing the thesis paper itself, which has to be 30-40 pages long.
