Category: Video and Sound

Working with Jordan, Osama, and Yiting from my sound and video class we created a short documentary on the history of the Astor place subway station.

A Brief History of Astor Place from Yiting Liu on Vimeo.

Creating this video used each of the skills we learned in class. We started out by storyboarding our concept, then shooting the various frames. Once we had a good deal of footage we began editing it into a cohesive film. At this point we recorded much of the sound for the project in the form of narration and shot a few extra clips that we felt were needed or as replacements for bad shots. After a couple days of staring at a computer screen and scrubbing back and fourth we finally added some background music, transitions, location bubbles and titles. Ultimately, I think this was a great exercise in the skills we learned over the first half of the semester. I am happy with the final project and look forward to producing more media like this during my time at ITP.

This week I worked on a story board with my classmates  Yiting and Jordan. We decided to do a 3-4 min documentary on the Astor Place subway station and its surrounding area. At this point we plan to use a combination of historical images as well as footage that we’ve shot of the modern day area.

This week I worked with Carrie to make a story through sound. We used the theme of insomnia and “things that keep you up at night” to tell a story about an individual experiencing sleeplessness due to thoughts and experiences from the past day, as well as environmental sounds like traffic. We recored most of the audio ourselves but we sampled some audio from one of Tom Igoe’s Pcomp tutorials as well as some freesound.org yawns (owlstorm,reitanna), clock sounds (Muk1984), and helicopters (Mike Koenig). The project was assembled in Logic where we played around with volume, left + right balance, and some effects to make a sound montage that sounds both realistic and half dreamy. Enjoy.

Plagiarism Readings

This week’s readings dealt with the somewhat awkward relationship between creative works and an economic system based on individual property rights. Among the four works we were assigned I’d say that they each pointed out that the current system of intellectual property rights is at least somewhat out of touch with the creative process it self. These laws effectively grant temporary monopolies to producers of certain characters, stories, designs, and processes based on the idea that an economic incentive must be provided in order for invention and art to be a finacialy viable endeavor. Many of the articles we read suggested that this is problematic since creative output is often based on or influenced by pre-existing creative works. In addition it is clear that this system can be easily abused and produce results that stifle creation rather than support it. I’m not sure there is an easy “solution” to this problem now that so many rely on the system being the way it is and the inherent difficulty of quantifying originality and quality in creative works. Personally I’ve been interested in the idea of eliminating intellectual property entirely. While this may seem extreme I think it would be beneficial to the creative economy in the long run. The financial system around creation without property rights would be challenging however I think that we’ve already seen the ways it is possible to make money in an industry where traditional property rights have been eroded. The music industry which saw wholesale disregard for its intellectual property as digital file sharing took off has started to grow again for the first time in over a decade. The source of this growth is mainly music streaming services and the leveraging of influence that creators often have over their fans. I think this could be a model for other forms of art and creative property where the distribution and relationship between artist and consumer is the source of revenue rather than the selling of owned ideas that we currently support.

-Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstacy of Influence: A Plagiarism

-On the Rights of the Molotov Man: Appropriation and the Art of Context

-Allergy to Originality

-Kirby Ferguson’s Embrace the Remix

Sound Walk – Her Long Black Hair

This was a really fun activity. I’ve heard binaural recordings before but never while walking around and never with such a direct relationship to my surroundings. The results were suprisingly convincing, or 3D sounding, and I often couldn’t tell whether certain sounds I was hearing were from the recording or the environment. I thought it was especially cool when comments the narrator made seemed to sync up perfectly with my visual surroundings. The recording was so accurate I thought it was continuing even after I took my headphones off. As I mentioned, when the recording synced up to the surroundings it had a powerful effect and this happened much more often then I would have anticipated. However, when the recording (or my walking speed) failed to sync up It did kinda take me out of the experience momentarily. This made clear that its possible to express a narrative without trying to dominate the full attention of the viewer/listener. In addition, having to find the points of reference myself made me feel like less of a consumer and more of an active participant which I liked. While I was only able to listen to the central park “Her Long Black Hair” sound walk for this week I think I may try to do the chinatown walk as well.