Intention

Write about the big ideas behind your project? What are the goals? Why did you make it? What are your motivations?

My goal was to take a cut of a video or a song and make it into a different story. In doing this, we are using media and changing it in our own unique way to create our own work. This opens our possibilities of creating stories with stories, which infinitely expands our opportunities for stories as well. I think it's really interesting that we can use media to create new media!

Context

What informed your outcome? Situate your outcome relative to other work.

 In class, we saw videos of cuts of Obama saying "spending" in his speech, and cuts of every time someone breathed in a speech (which was quite uncomfortable actually), and I thought I could do something similar. My friend mentioned how someone took cuts of Obama and used it to make him sing Call Me Maybe, which I thought was hilarious and I wanted to do something similar. Another interesting clip she showed me was "The Cheese of Truth", which is just something funny I wanted to add on.

Process

Describe how you arrived out the outcome. Show iterations and refinements. Document design decisions and challenges encountered.

First I had to find a song to do. I wanted to find something iconic so that even when I cut it, it would be recognizable. I decided that audio would be easier to work with. I picked the song "Let It Go", which was a big Frozen hit a couple years ago.

Originally I wanted to take Let It Go and use the lyrics to sing a different song, but after compiling a list of potential words that could be used, I had trouble finding another song that utilized them. I did however, find a lot of words that sounded rather math-y, such as "fractals, limits, distance, test", but not enough to write a good amount about them.

In the end I managed to write a couple of sentences using these words...

I downloaded the MP3 of Let It Go, and in Audacity, I took small clips of the words and merged them together in my own audio file. Some issues I ran into were varying lengths of words--notice how "stand" is much longer than words such as "girl", although both are one syllable, which makes it sound slightly unnatural, but I suppose it retains the lyric aspect of Let It Go. 

Also, volume was an issue...Let It Go starts off quietly, but then the volume increases significantly after the bridge and during the chorus, so words taken from those segments were much louder. To fix this I changed the amplification of those segments in order to unify the sentences better.

I uploaded my final Mp3 cut onto SoundCloud since I couldn't upload the exported Mp3 directly into here...

Hopefully you can hear the sentences:

A girl and a queen stand in the snow storm. The wind power can't break through the door. The girl likes snow flurries; the queen don't like the cold and turn away.

Reflection

What does your inner critic say about this work? What did you learn? What would you do differently? 

Knowing that I originally wanted it to be a bit more than what I had, I'm slightly disappointed that I wasn't able to recreate a different song using Let It Go. Perhaps if I had done this differently, I could have picked a more typical love pop song or something which would be more likely to have repeated words. Also, I think the pauses in between the sentences are slightly awkward, and this could benefit with even smoother audio volume. I could have also worked with the and lengths of the words pitches to make the sentences more natural. There were also slight grammar issues due to my limtiation of words, but I think I probably could have taken cuts of syllables to make the word. Maybe I could have been a little more creative with the sentences as well, though I suppose the lyrics don't leave me much options--I do kind of wish I could've come up with something more math-y--I think that would've been really interesting!

This definitely took much more time than expected and I think whoever comes up with Youtube videos that involve much longer cuts must be really dedicated!!

Attribution

Reference any sources or materials used in the documentation or composition.

Original Song: Let It Go by Idina Menzel

Audacity (for editing)

SoundCloud (for uploading)