Project 2

Project 1 Critique

1.

Project Title: INVASION

Image: Don't have one on this computer.

To improve the project: I could add more photographs, higher quality ones, to boot. I had a track I originally recorded for this project that I could have put the crazy sounding one over to enhance the creepiness. I also could have added transitions, but unfortunately I didn't know how. I could brush up on how to take photos at night to avoid the blurry images, and probably should use autofocus next time. There are a number of things I could have done to make this project better, looking back.

What was successful: I think the sound certainly captures the whole unnatural aspect of the whole slide show, and I like how my final slide turned out. The picture I took of the moon worked pretty well to make a sort of "flashing lights" image reminiscent of old UFO photos. The length of the slides works to build suspense, though it probably is a bit boring.

Sound and images: The sound is the whole show, without it you would be confused as to what is going on, and it would be extremely boring. The images are mostly mundane until the final slide.

Editing: I recorded the soundtrack before I did anything else, then I went out and took the photos at 4AM, but I didn't take many because my fingers were frozen after a while.

Importance of sound: Like I said before, without the sound there might as well be no show. In this project it's the most important part.

2. I could have used a number of other things: haunting, spacey piano music; just the sound of wind; hushed voices; or, lots of noise, then everything going quiet at the explosion.

There are a lot of possibilities with ambiguous pictures like the ones I had.

For my video project I thought I would focus on a phenomenon I've noticed while searching youtube for songs recommended to me---covers. People record themselves covering songs all the time. They do it with their pianos, their guitars, ukeleles, violins, anything. People even record their BANDS in their living room. There's a wealth of these videos available for all kinds of music. I wanted to use these videos to make a montage of how people can express themselves musically to the world even if they've never played a gig.

For my first project, I decided I wanted to create a suspenseful and creepy atmosphere. I plugged the guitar into the computer, and I used it and some effects to create a track of strange noises by doing things like dragging the pick on the strings. I then took the recording into audacity and cut it and created duplicate tracks and altered the speeds.

I then went out and took some night photos and many of them didn't turn out very good because I didn't know how to work the camera, but I made do with what was useable. I decided since the noises were so bizarre and all the photos were devoid of people that I would make a slideshow that kind of led up to an alien invasion of TCNJ. I used photoshop to alter the colors of the light in the photos, and then with the last picture I used photoshop to make it look as though Loser hall was being destroyed like the White House in ID4.