I’m in the group who had the topic of revamping the Hills District. Starting out, I didn’t know too much about the Hill District except that it was a part of Pittsburgh which had been on the economic decline for a while now. After looking into the Hills District a little further, it turns out that this economic decline is due to the Civic Arena being built there, which ultimately cut off ties from surrounding areas. And this led to residents leaving and businesses being closed down. I personally think the Hill District has an interesting history that deserves to be told, and I think part of our group’s plan can be to find a way to tell that movie.

Some ideas I had were maybe to do a small film portion where shots of the Hill District could be taken while audio of our group talking about its history could be going on. We can discuss how it got like that to inform an audience, and explain where we want it to go. It would be a mini-documentary sort of thing. Also, as far as scaling this project out, I think it works well for the topic we have chosen. Part of revamping the Hills District would be a lot of community projects and outreach events and stuff like that, so a potential idea for scaling out would be writing “proposals” to submit to local government to get events approved. These events could actually help in turning around the Hill District.

For my audio project, I’m planning on telling a story about something I experienced while I was in high school, similar to the way the actor told the story in podcast we had to listen to last week. It’s particularly funny and I think it will be interesting to listen to. It centers around my friend who was dating this girl a few years back, and they probably had one of the most dysfunctional relationships I had ever seen. So, my audio project will kind of follow me through this certain day where I actually witnessed something truly hilarious happen between the two. I plan on interjecting certain sound effects into my brief story wherever I think they fit. In addition to that, I plan on having some background music playing in the background while I’m speaking to make the story a little bit more interesting. I’ve also already decided to include Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” as the intro to my audio project because the story I plan on telling in my audio project is incredibly crazy.

The specific audio I’ve recorded and plan to use in my soundscape project is the door knocking sound. I just recorded it by knocking on my own bedroom door. I may adjust the gain if I need it to be louder in the context of the entire project. But, the door-knock comes in because I will knocking on another friend of mine’s door when I get to his house. And it is at this friend’s house where the entire situation I’ll be describing goes down. I’ll be placing it when I mention arriving at this friend’s house.

One of the moments where I really noticed the sound design was around the 3:00 minute mark of the Limetown podcast. The sound editor mashed together a bunch of sound bites from news programs detailing what happened in Limetown. But, it was how they did it that actually had me impressed. A sound bite would rise in volume, the listener would pay attention to it, and then it would fade out just as another sound bite would come up. While it seemed like a normal sound function at first, I noticed that the sound bite that was faded out was still going even while the next sound bite was playing. In addition to that, there was still the ominous music in the background. So, the techniques seemed simple at first actually turned out to involve a good deal of layering of sounds.

Also, another technique that impressed me from this same situation was the fact that there was also some maneuvering of sounds with the Left and Right of the speakers. Sound bites tended to start on the left side of speaker and move to the right side of the speaker (or vice versa) as it began to fade. For some reason, that made listening to all those news sound bites a little bit more interesting.

When initially thinking about what I should do for my video project, I thought about something I already enjoy that I could put my own spin on, so actually doing the project would not be unbearable. I am already a huge music fan, so I thought I should probably do a project with one of my favorite music videos.

For my video project, I’m going to try and do a sort of mashup remix with Lupe Fiasco’s song “Paris, Tokyo.” The song’s premise is about traveling, more notable falling asleep in one location and waking up in another location. In fact, in the video, the artist is traveling the globe through a variety of different ways. So, what I wanted to do is collect a bunch of videos of planes and trains through Creative Commons and mash that up with the Lupe Fiasco’s video for Paris, Tokyo. I gathered up a group of general “transportation” videos from Flickr. I would leave the URL’s of all of the videos I gathered, but they are each entirely too long. I’m also using Lupe’s actual “Paris, Tokyo” video, and I will be taking snippets from that video as well to put everything together. The whole time I will have the audio of the actual song playing during this entire video.

One of the reasons I enjoyed the song so much was because it was smooth and gave you an easy-going feeling when listening to it. Hopefully, my remix will evoke similar feelings in those who choose to watch it.

I do not know too much with Adobe Premiere, so most of the effects I will be using will mostly be cutting video and rearranging them, but I hope to gain some knowledge in some simple effects. This way there will be smooth transitions between sections of video.

Lupe Fiasco – (Paris, Tokyo):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp2uqGLNm5k

For the remix I chose, it’s the rapper Rick Ross adding a verse to Adele’s “Hello.” This is technically a remix in the general sense when someone is typically thinking about when a song is remixed, but it is unusual in the terms of who is remixing what. I would say that it’s creatively reworking the original “Hello” because of the new vocals laid down by Rick Ross on top of the original song’s production. It doesn’t so much transform the source media’s meaning, but it kind of alters the way the listener chooses to view the song. Instead of paying attention to Adele’s lyrics, there’s a whole other artist to pay attention to. Using the source media, Rick Ross took what the original song embodies and puts his own personal spin on it. He even goes with a more introspective verse to go along with the vibe Adele offered up in the original song.

One of the reasons I actually chose this remix is because it really is made for a different audience than the source’s audience. Adele is making pop music with more of a mainstream audience, while Rick Ross is making rap music. But, I think that a remix like this where it cuts through genres is always an interesting thing to listen to. I find it intriguing to look into how a song works with one audience, then see how changes (a remix) made to that song can be tailored to an entirely different audience.

While there’s no change in the original instrumental nor is there a change/removal in any of Adele’s original vocals, I believe that it is still a remix worth listening to it. No elements are brought in from any distinct media objects. While this is not the most complex remix to have ever been made, I really do still enjoy it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OgwFPDDdFQ