Twine Tutorial

For my final digital media project, I plan to try and use audacity and adobe premiere in order to make fun of South Oakland and all the issues with it. This will, in some sense, pick up where I left off on the group project that also was related to issues in South Oakland. The biggest difference between the two would be that the group project was supposed to offer solutions/ suggestions to fix the problems at hand, this video is meant to me more comical and less serious. My house, which is not the worst house is Oakland, but still bad, will be used as an example and I believe I will need my roommates to help out with the video.

I plan to keep the video 2-3 minutes long. I believe that I will easily be able to film 2-3 minutes worth of material. Another way I was thinking of doing this video was to do a “how to” guide for getting a new apartment. I would have the same goal of trying to make a funny video that depicts the issues in south Oakland without making a big fuss over it.

I hope that with the use of audacity and premiere the video quality will be good, but the video will also come to life more with the additional sounds in the background.

The [unofficial] title of my game is called the Pitt Haunted House, as one can assume, the game is meat to be scary. The game tells one of several stories based on the first few answers that the game players are forced to answer. Because this game is meant to be scary, color as well as image, video and sound will play a vital role in making the game player feel as if the game is coming to life and they are part of the story. The colors I anticipate on using would be a black background with white, red or gray font. While the default background is black, I feel like any other color would have less of a creepy feel and would counter the stories rather than add to them. I plan to include many pictures throughout the story, this was the game is less dry but I do not want to add a picture for every level in the game because then the game player would become distracted in my opinion. Sounds as well as video will hopefully be incorporated in my game towards the end of it to help create a dramatic and scary ending. Sounds might be okay to use throughout the entire game, but I would like to save creepy videos for the end of whatever story the reader picks. I think all these elements will make the story come to life and hopefully be scarier than the game player would have expected. Some of the stories are based off of a true story, others are fiction but I hope that regardless people find the game interesting and try to go through the whole haunted house, per say, and see which story is the scariest.

The topic that our group chose to focus on is South Oakland, and more specifically the issues in South Oakland. Lets be honest, South Oakland as a whole is one large problem but can be broken down into sub problems which are; Slumlord housing, Dirty streets, traffic and Public safety. The traffic issue, which does not heavily affect the lives of college students, is a major headache that a lot of professionals that work in Oakland have to deal with on a daily basis. This issue does make the news, and has caught the eye of many city officials as a major issue. Transportation engineers have started to develop a Oakland Master Plan for 2025 that totally changes how traffic is managed in order to reduce congestion. Many programs like audacity and premiere could be used to create a sense of congestion and claustrophobia to try and illustrate the pain of sitting in Oakland traffic for hours. Another issue, public safety, has made the headlines of pitt newspapers and many people talk about the high number of assaults that are reported from the south o streets. When walking through south Oakland, the amount of litter and damaged belongings on the sides of the streets is appalling. All the people who live in south Oakland complain about it, but there are programs like PMADD and other community services that go around and clean up South Oakland streets. All these issues can be used by video taping the topics and try to use audio tracks to make the audience seem like they really are in south Oakland, experiencing all these issues first hand, in order to raise awareness of all the problems that need to be taken care of.

When I played the game “My fathers long, long legs.” At first, I will admit that game was going very slow. I had limited options to control how the game would play out, most of the time I was picking the only available option in order to continue the game. The story, however, started to get better and creepier as I continued. For example, one part of the story the girls “uncle” came to visit her dad who was down in the basement digging. When he left, the girl said in the story that the man never returned again. It made me wonder who the “uncle” actually was and why he asked to see the girls dad. The plot got interesting in the sense that as the dad kept digging, he grew taller and taller. My favorite part of the game was when the whole screen went dark and the cursor became a flashlight. I had to hover over the words in order to see them with my “flashlight,” and that was cool because I kind of felt like I was actually digging deeper. Also shortly after the flashlight cursor came along, the sound of digging in the background started playing. These two settings helped a lot with creating a sense of place and made the game a lot more interesting. Right before the end of the game, I clicked one of the options and I saw a long leg run down the whole window. I got stuck in a couples loops throughout the game, which was a little disappointing because it made me feel like there was only one end, but it was cool to reach the end cause I felt like I had won the game. Overall, I found the game interesting and a little creepy, the makers did a good job creating an overall sense of place.

CDM_Grove_tutorial

ENGCMP 0610: Tutorial on how to create a soundscape by mixing a created sound and adding music in the background.

Step 1: Open Audacity

Step 2: Create a new project by selecting file and then new. You can also just type (command + N)

Step 3: Import the song you wanted in the back ground by selecting file-> import-> audio.

-you will be prompted to select the audio file from wherever you have the song saved.

Step 4: Record the sound you want to make by selecting Transport->Record or by simply typing the letter R.

Step 5: Once you’ve selected record, you can start talking/ making noises and you will see audacity picking up the sound. When you are done press the button with a yellow square on it.

-Sound of a desk being knocked on.

Step 6: You can edit the sound by deleting pieces once the button with the yellow square had been hit. If you want to delete a certain section, highlight that section with the cursor and hit the backspace button.

Your final product should look like this:

If you want to change the volume of the sound, simply drag the cursor to the – or + side to change the sound effect:

For my audio project, I want to try and portray the freshman year experience through audio clips that tell a story from their first days at Pitt until their last day in the dorms. I want to try and use humor in the beginning, to try and depict their lack of experience and overall confusion to the world around them. The flow of the story that my audio track will follow will be the classic exposition, rising action climax and falling action. For the exposition, I want to include clips that have silly questions that only a freshman would ask, for example “Where is market central at?” For the rising action, I want to include tracks that have typical freshman questions such as “Can you buy me beer?” and other things the freshies say. For the climax, I would like to include a track that kind of shows them starting to adapt to the college lifestyle and shows them starting to get used to the new world they have stepped into. Final exams will also play a part in the climax. For the falling action, the freshman quotes will be geared towards leaving the dorms, looking for off campus apartments and declaring their major. The software I plan on using will be either Adobe Premiere Pro or Audacity. I am more familiar with using Adobe Premiere Pro, but I would like to learn different software such as Audacity, plus I believe compiling an audio track would be easier in audacity. I want to use different music in the background to try and contribute to the feeling of confusion that the freshman have. I also would like to add noises such as elevators, bottles clinking, buses passing by, etc. to add to the city vibe and make the video more realistic.

The sound that I choose to write about is the “Roommate vacuuming” sound. Found this sound to be interesting because I feel that it could be applied to many different situations, only not dealing with roommates. The first scene that came to mind that this could be applied is the opening scene of a crime show. The scene could be inside the house where the crime is about to take place. No one would be originally speaking in the scene, the audio editors could originally make it so that the only noise you hear is the vacuum running. Then show the killer outside the house. This way it adds to the feeling that all the people in the show hear is the vacuum, thus they are delirious and unaware of the attacker about to enter the home. Other sounds would then fade in next, such as the sound of the TV and dishes being watched. Creepy, and eerie music would then fade in and add to the intensity and to the feeling that something bad was about to happen. I would imagine minimal talking to take place, but if the wife were to shout something at the husband from anther room to illustrate that they are apart, but the vacuum running drones out the sound, illustrating that the husband cant hear her. As the sound of the creepy music’s increases, so would the sound of the vacuum right before the crime happens and then suddenly the vacuum stops.

The first sound that I appreciated and really stood out to me was at time 2:50 when on the of the voices said, “Everybody’s just gone.” The way that the word “gone” was edited to that it faded out in a suspenseful and kind of creepy way. The video said that all 327 people from Limetown were gone and that no one knew where they went. The word “gone” faded out for a whole 2 seconds to add to the suspense and eeriness of the situation. Also the person who said, “Everybody’s just gone,” was a police officer, thus the fact that even the official authorities were puzzled and a little scared, adds to the effectiveness of the audio the editor used.

The second sound that I noticed was at time 3:47 to 5:08 when there was a ringing in the background as Lia Haddick introduced herself as the story was transitioning between scenes. I noticed the audio because it did two things for me. First, its fast paced tone made me think that this investigator Lia Haddick was the perfect investigator for this case because she seemed serious and intense, like the ringing was. The story said that people seemed to forget about what happened at Limestone, but it was evident that she had not. It also had some eeriness to it which added to the effect that something creepy had happened in Limestone and it added to the suspense in my opinion.

The third sound that caught my ear was at time 8:33 to 9:22 when they read the public speech of the man who funded the construction of Limetown and how he wanted it to be a research community. The humming has an innocent tone that make the viewer think that the original intention of Limetown was good, however bad things could happen if the experiment went wrong. Also during this segment with the humming, the investigator mentioned that her uncle worked in Limetown and it shows that she is motivated to find out what happened there.

How to: Put Text over video in Adobe Premiere Pro

Step 1/5:

-Select the video clips that you want for your remix, and put them in the order you desire.

Step 2/5:

-On the top of the screen, click on the “Title” Tab.

Then click on “New Title”

Then “Default Still”

Step 3/5:

-A screen will prompt you to add your own text. It should look similar to this (see figure below):

From this window you type the text you desire, you can also edit the font, the color, the size and the position. You can also edit at what point of the video you are in so you can see how the color and positioning would look with the video.

-When you are done, just simply click the red x in the top left corner of the prompt screen.

Step 4/5:

-Once you make a title, you can find it in the left column in the premiere interface.

You can double click these if you want to go back in and edit the title you already created.

Step 5/5:

In order to put them over the video, simply drag them over video segments.

The length of the title can be adjusted by clicking on the pink block and dragging the length. Another method is to drag multiple titles over segments, even if they are the same.