Assignment 3 Project & Reflection

Our project aimed to showcase the difference music can have upon the tone of media, and I think in our project we succeeded in showcasing this. We effectively gave audiences eight different styles of music to choose from, with eight videos that corresponded to each genre. In terms of modularity, our project allows viewers to pick a scene based of the thumbnails shown in Korsakow and interpret the tone of the piece based of the music that we provided. I think however that to further develop this concept, modularity could be implemented in a more effective way in the future. I believe that successful modularity give audiences as much control and choice as possible over how they consume their content, which in turn allows them to create an experience unique from anyone else’s. Each participant in our Korsakow project will have different interpretations of the music and scenes, but I think it would a more interesting to allow them to mix and match the music and footage in a way they feel is appropriate, and let them decide which tune goes with which scene.

Another way I think this could be further developed is to allow viewers to change the tone of the film as they go, seamlessly transitioning between the different moods as the film progresses. This would be better suited for something the length of a short film, and would also require the music to be more fluid, but I think it’s an idea that could be worth exploring in future projects, and would give viewers more choice through interaction, and further encourage interpretation.

The most modular part of our process ultimately ended up being the production itself. Within our own group, we were responding to the work of our teammates, and adjusting out project based on what other people were doing; the footage was filmed as a response to the music, and the music was altered in response to the footage. This was a unique way of producing content which I had never experienced before, and it was a fun and interesting exercise that forced us to think outside of the box. It also allowed us to develop our overall idea as we went along, which created an ever-changing creative process that inspired creativity. By making content in a ‘reactive’ way, we came up with ideas that we would not have come up with if we stuck with our initial plan, and I’m glad that we allowed our project to change and develop as we went along.

Working on this assignment also taught us the value of audience interpretation, which I found out while working with my group. Songs that I created with the intention of conveying a particular mood were interpreted by my teammates as something else entirely, and this encouraged us to record songs and film footage that wasn’t overly heavy-handed in the message we were trying to get across; ambiguity is not a bad thing, and keeping elements of media abstract is often what leads to the most entertaining content.

 

Assignment 3 Link:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1v4uCE3pTdKSzeB3_PSrmdzh1XhFZcPxG

 

Blog Post 4 – Assignment 3

In our final week of preparing this project, we had to make some decisions regarding how we wished our work to be presented to an audience. We were going to label the thumbnails in Korsakow with subtitles representing the genres, but ultimately decided that it shouldn’t be up to us to tell the audience what they are listening to and what they should be feeling. Instead we opted for thumbnails made up of screenshots from the videos showing Michelle’s face, which changed depending on what scene the thumbnail represented. This way, there is a way to identify each video without explicitly telling the viewer what they are about to experience, which allows for improved audience interaction and leaves room for interpretation. We also allowed for previews to each segment, so that audiences could hear the music as they hovered their cursor over the thumbnail. This creates a sense of anticipation, as the viewer can hear the music and predict what kind of ‘mood’ the video will portray before they see it.

Upon reflection, we didn’t have as much modularity in our project as I would have liked, as the video and audio are essentially fixed to each other and don’t allow for experimentation by the audience, but I think for the nature of our experiment we did it as well as we could have, plus to make ours modular in a meaningful way would probably require using different software. I do however really like how the project turned out, as it achieved what we were attempting to achieve. It showcases the differences music can make to the same scene, and furthermore, it forced us to made media as a ‘response’, which I think made it more interesting to work on with other people.

Blog Post 3 – Assignment 3

An interesting aspect of this assignment is how it forced us to create media in a “reactive” way. The majority of the audio has been completed, and the other members of the group are now filming footage in response to the tone of the music, which is the opposite of how most productions operate. This way of filmmaking is interesting, as it forced is to think as we went and use our own interpretations of the music to dictate the direction of the filming.

We have decided to compromise on our ideas for the footage; instead of just having the same footage between all the songs, and instead of showing different dance styles for each clip, we have decided to film the same ‘scene’ eight times, with different emotions being displayed in each to compliment the music. By doing this, we are keeping a consistency between the footage, as each song will be accompanied by the same actions. The only difference between the footage is how the actions are shown. We are filming someone making breakfast, which we decided is a fairly emotionless and neutral activity, making it easy to have the music manipulate. All the actions and cinematography will be the same, but the subject of the video will execute the actions displaying different emotions each time. We feel this is the best way of showing the effect music can have on the tone of a scene, but still leave some of it up to audience interpretation.

Blog Post 2 – Assignment 3

After further discussion regarding our assignment, we have decided to make the footage more integral to the experiment, and have more modularity between the visual and aural components. Instead of having a fixed video between all the genres of songs, we want to film different videos in response to the tone of the music. Michelle came up with the idea of filming different styles of dancing that correspond with the music, which will provide a better example of modularity rather than just one video across all the songs. We also thought that having different videos for each genre of music would be a good way of showing the audience what they are listening to, and will discuss these ideas further as a group.

We also discussed out idea with other groups who also offered suggestions as to how we can make our project more effective. Some suggestions included going back to our original idea of having a tonaly mutual video component, as having dance styles reflect the audio left less up to audience interpretation, and we agreed that it would be a more interesting project of there was some ambiguity towards how the viewer is supposed to feel when watching one of our scenes.

We also got to hear about other groups presentations, which helped us a lot in coming up with new ideas and finding inspiration.

I was in charge of creating the music in this project, so I continued to research and look up how artists manipulate the tones of songs to achieve a certain emotion. Many styles of music have a certain melodic or rhythmic structure which made it easier for me to warp our song of choice into a different style. We have settled on 8 different styles each going for 45 seconds, as we want the videos to be full scenes and not just quick clips, so that the audience has time to appreciate the differences in our films. And also because I don’t want to make 20 songs. I stuck with the idea of using one chorus, as it is still the best way to illustrate the differences between the genres to the audience in a memorable way.

Blog Post 1 – Assignment 3

For the previous assignment, my partner and I opted to take a musical approach, as we felt it was an effective way of showcasing modularity; the musical parts could be interchanged to create something new. For assignment 2, my group and I decided to continue developing this musical approach, but integrate the visual component in a more meaningful way. Our idea as of now is to film one sequence, and allow viewers to change the music as they wish, which we hope will ultimately affect the tone of the scene, despite having the actual footage remain the same. As for the footage, we want to stick with an activity that is emotionally and tonally mutual, which will allow the music to more effectively dictate the mood of the piece at the audience’s discretion.

For the musical direction, we sourced inspiration from various online clips of people re-interpreting songs in different genres. A good example of what we wanted to achieve musically was in Seth Everman’s Youtube video in which he performed the song ‘Africa’ by the band Toto in about a dozen different genres. The song remained the same but the feel and tone changed throughout the video, giving each part a significantly different feel despite playing the same song. This is exactly what we had in mind for the musical component, so we will be creating several different interpretations of the same song and seeing how it affects the tone of our video.

There were other examples we found of musicians playing through a song once and having it change genre as it progressed, but unless you knew the song they were playing it was hard to appreciate the differences between the sections, because the song progressively changed making it hard to compare the styles. For this reason, I think we will just create the chorus of a song, and re-do it for each genre, which will make it easier for the audience to hear the differences.