Medium Specificity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bt7m9H60gQ

         My medium specificity assignment is a silent music video of the song “Nothing’s Wrong” by Echosmith.  One of the biggest points of this video is that the human body is a piece of art that is capable of sharing thoughts and feelings in many different ways.  While watching a music video, the viewer is bombarded by vocals, instrumentation, and a visually dynamic moving image.  There is so much in a music video that distracts from the performer, including color.  Take Taylor Swift’s music video for “Blank Space” as an example.  While being an incredible piece of art, there is a lot of distraction from the main point of a music video: to see the singer actually sing. 

         In my video for “Nothing’s Wrong,” there are many things that lead the viewer to appreciate the actual singing aspect.  For example, most of the video is in black and white.  The performer barely moves throughout the video to create minimal distraction.  She is blindfolded so that the viewer has to look at her mouth.  And, of course, there is no sound.  If the viewer wants to know what the singer is saying, he or she has to pay careful attention to try and read her lips.  The random shots that are in color represent the desire to break out and do something crazy and exciting, which are what many music videos are like.

In the text written by Scott McCloud, he discusses how he regained an interest in comics as he got older because there seemed to be something there that wasn’t there before.  He said, “I felt that there was something lurking in comics…something that had never been done.  Some kind of hidden power!” (3).  There aren’t many music videos that don’t have sound.  This new way of viewing a music video forces the viewer to appreciate music in a new way.  The singer’s lips move according to a certain beat as they mouth the words to the song that clearly must be playing even though it cannot be heard.  This video addresses some disabilities such as deafness, blindness, and color blindness and that something still exists even when it cannot be experienced.  For example, if a person cannot hear, that does not mean that music doesn’t exist.  Music can exist in many different forms, even if it is only in the mind.

In conclusion, one does not need to hear music in order to feel it.  It is not even necessary to hear the words to know what is going on.  So many songs have such beautiful or important messages that are drowned out by too much noise, both visual and aural.           

            History is a huge part of our being, and creating stories based on our own history is a great way of remembering those who came before us and the contributions they made.  We wouldn’t be where we are today without our ancestors and predecessors.

             The story we chose for this assignment was an ancestral tale for the Lewis family. It is the kind of story that is told over and over and changes with each retelling. We decided not to attempt and construct an entirely historically accurate account of the events because that would probably prove impossible. Instead, we chose to make a new comedic tale of two cosmic explorers that was based on the old Lewis family tales. We kept the basic important elements but tweaked them a bit to meet our needs. The island became a planet, the dog a space monster, the boats spaceships, and the severed hand a half-finished piece of knitting. By choosing to consciously change the story, we were able to pay tribute to the Lewis Clan and their history while also creating something unique.

For our script, we took the history of the Lewis family and of how their crest came to be and turned it into a fantastic adventure set in space.  The Lewis family really did fight to claim a piece of land from an enemy clan.  The fantasy treatment that their story received while writing our script is similar to another historical family: the family of the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia.  The 1997 film Anastasia, directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, takes the story of this family and turned it into a fantastic adventure involving magic and devil worship.  Both of these historical stories based on families were given a fantasy twist.

            The characters in our script portray an accurate representation of the context.  A tribe leader would have done whatever was needed to claim land for his people, and that’s exactly what the real Lewis clan did and what Captain Lewis in our script did.  The Lewis clan sacrificed a hand for their land, whereas Captain Lewis sacrificed his wife’s knitting.  The hostility between clans is also present in our story, and hostility would have been a very prominent attribute of enemy clans during the 11^th Century.    

In the graphic story, The Veil, history is told from the perspective of a young Zoroastrian girl. Because it is coming from a little girl, the events are portrayed in a very simplified manner. She does not discuss the political complexity of the Islamic Revolution and the economic or sociological effects it had; She talks about what mattered to her. All she cared about was that she was separated from her friends, she had to wear a veil, and any of her attempts to follow her own religion were called blasphemy. When history is recounted, the priorities and biases of the teller always come through. The choice is whether or not to embrace that and show historical events in a personal way.  This story has personal significance for us because it is based off of Taylor’s family, but at the same time we were able to write something that was entertaining and enjoyable instead of just writing a history book.

Josh Allen and Taylor Lewis

    

Process Piece

          https://soundcloud.com/musicinme1992/video-gamers

             Our Process Piece takes the form of juxtaposition between two "populations" playing different versions of the same video game. The first is a newer edition of Zelda, and the players are two males; in this segment, the boys are rowdy and smack-talk each other. In the second half of the piece, a lone girl plays an old Nintendo 64 version of Zelda and is relatively quiet and wordless throughout the gameplay. The juxtaposition of these two variations on similar processes reveals differences and gaps between male versus female, groups versus solidarity, and new versus old. 

This project was similar to “The Smokehouse” video by Smith Journal that we watched for class.  For example, in the video, the audio played a far more important role than the visual.  In the beginning of the video, we hear the chainsaw before we actually see it on film.  In our audio, you can distinctly hear the difference between the two parts.  The video game sounds clue the listener in to what is happening.  The boys were much more vocal during their gaming, whereas the girl was much more calm.  In “The Smokehouse,” there are times when either the sound effects or the dialogue are the most important audio.  When the guys are playing video games in our audio, it’s their dialogue that tells us what they are doing or how the game is going.  When the girl is playing, it’s mostly the video game sounds that inform us of the nature of the process.  Our audio samples are also similar to the “Routine” videos.  Obviously, our project relies completely on audio.  The “Routine” videos would not be as exciting if they didn’t have any audio.  If you watch a video of someone playing a video game, it’s bound to not be as exciting or entertaining if there is no audio.  The game talk and sound effects add so much and tell their own story.   

            In terms of outside media, the project is faintly reminiscent of the website and movement, “Listen To A Movie” (listentoamovie.com), which is a free beta site that is marketed “for the cubicle workers of the world.” Essentially, you can be doing whatever—at work, running, riding a bus, doing homework—in a space where you can be connected to the internet but don’t have the capacity or time to actually view a movie, only put the audio of the movie on as background noise. It’s a film experience for multi-taskers.  

The Process Piece assignment is similar to Listen To A Movie based on the fact that both projects center around subjects or events that were meant to be heard and viewed, and once you take away the visual element you get a completely new kind of media and art. Without an image to accompany a sound—especially a sound process—it’s easy for a listener to make different interpretations based on their stunted knowledge of the subject at hand. Our piece is about video games being played—a process that one hundred percent depends on the ability to see what’s happening on the screen—and the unmistakable sounds of the gameplay and human interaction doesn’t need to be illustrated with pixelated cartoon characters. 

Josh Allen and Avery Taylor