YouTube Video Mashup
According to Professor Kopp's Mashup page, "This assignment is going to ask you to think expansively about an historical and/or contemporary subject that you feel strongly about and compose a mashup of video, audio, and still image texts in an attempt to make a rhetorically savvy and visually complex social/cultural critical commentary or argument."
On the right is a good example of a video mashup which I found on YouTube. However, the mashup for Writing, Research, and Technology requires still images as well as video and music.
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Prologue/Reflection
The mashup was a very fun assignment, albeit a difficult one.
My intention was to try to show the good in the evil. Kind of like how there is a white spot in the black part of a YinYang, I wanted to show that evil people are not wholly evil. My main inspiration was Loki from Marvel's Thor. In the movie, Loki found out that he was adopted, so he lashed out in anger, desperate to prove to his adopted father that he was worthy of being a Prince of Asgard. In the second movie, Thor: The Dark World, he does everything for love of his mother. In that movie, we also meet Malekith, who is trying to return the universe to darkness, since he is a "Svartalf," or Dark Elf. They thrive in darkness. However, the Asgardians fight back and wage war on the Dark Elves. During this war, Malekith's wife and children were killed, and he wanted to make sure their deaths were not in vain, so he tried to continue his attempt to return the universe to darkness. |
After I had decided the theme of my mashup, I looked for music. While looking in a free music archive, I found the perfect song: "Confutatis Maledictis." This was Mozart's Requiem and part of the lyrics translate to:
While the wicked are confounded,
doomed to flames of woe unbounded call me with thy saints surrounded. These lyrics drew me to the song because of the movie Boondock Saints, which has the quote "While the wicked stand confounded, call me with thy saints surrounded." Because I liked the quote/lyrics, I decided to not only use the song for the video, but also to create the title of my video from them: "Wicked Saints."
I thought that this was an appropriate title, because most of my video was about good people doing bad things and being termed "evil" because of it.
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Struggles
The biggest struggle I had was with my video editing software. I read on the assignments page that we were not allowed to use Windows Movie Maker, so I got another program. That one did not do the things I wanted it to, so I was at a loss.
However, when my boyfriend came to visit, he let me use his video editing software, which is "Sony Vegas Studio." This did everything I needed it to and more. He was also able to give me some feedback for the video and show me how to do a lot of the different effects and features of the program.
The hardest part of the video which the program helped was the end. I wanted it to end on a video of Snape from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows where we are seeing his memories. The clip I wanted to use was where Dumbledore says "After all this time?" and Snape replies "Always." I loved this quote because I think it shows the immense goodness in Snape. The problem I had with the clip was that I wanted it to fade to black before he says "Always," but the program I was using wouldn't do it the way I wanted it to.
However, I was able to find a way to do it in Sony Vegas Studio so that I was not only able to have it fade to black, but I was also able to increase the volume for where he says "Always."
I also had trouble with rendering the video, but I think that may have been due to the fact that the computer I was using had too many things going on at once. I am very proud of this video, because I know that I did the best work I have ever done, and I think that it conveys my ideas. |