80's Music Mashup

I can still recall the first music I ever bought. It was a cassette tape (you youngins can Wiki that right here) of The California Raisins (huh?). I think I may have been around six or seven at the time. My babysitter took me to a music store and I remember coming home with that tape. "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" was, I'm sure, played over and over in my house for the next several months. Good times.

I had an assignment for school this week to create music; a daunting task that gave me a new appreciation for the skill involved in song making. I decided to do a mashup because I figured I could get into that better than starting a song from scratch. So I went back to the 80's with this and (after many many scrapped ideas) went with mashing Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" with "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" by Culture Club after a tutorial suggested a website that listed song's beats per minute (BPM). I found two songs I liked that had similar BPMs. It is (noticeably, I'm sure!) my first time ever doing anything like this and I had quit a bit of difficulty.

I tried several free programs but finally settled on Sony Acid Xpress. The program was helpful in that it was supposed to keep everything at the same tempo. I don't know much about tempos so I will just figure it did that since I heard a difference in some songs I tried. I made use of the program's splitting feature and cut up "Man in the Mirror" where it felt right (during breaks in the music) and then tried to find places to put it into the other song.

The chorus was an "easy" (nothing about this was easy. LOL) first choice and is the only part of the mashup that I am really happy about. I wanted to use more of the song so I tried to find parts that went together but some of it sounds like it is competing instead of harmonizing. Overall, not my favorite assignment but I think I did OK with my first time foray into music making.

Keep singing.

Finding Beauty in the City

Try our video maker at Animoto.

I know it seem a bit off my blog topic, but beauty is timeless so this actually fits right in (go with me on this one). I made this video from some edited photographs I had done for my digital media class. If you've been reading my blog, you may remember my last post involved a picture from that very class.

For this assignment, we needed to make a 30 second video set to music with some of our pictures using Animoto.  I had a song in mind from the very beginning which was the lovely "Beneath Your Beautiful" by Labrinth and Emeli Sandé. It's a love song, I know this, but for me the song is also about finding inner beauty and I think beauty can be found in a lot of places if you just take some time to look deeper.

With my images in the video, I wanted it to almost feel like a journey from the little things like some small graffiti to the bigger places like the universe.  My "universe" picture, for example, actually started off as nothing more than some broken glass in a parking lot, something not everyone would see as beautiful. I also added text to the beginning of the video to convey my message and used the spot light feature to give one of the photos a little more time in the video. I used the simplified style so I was able to fit in a couple extra pictures and I also liked how it essentially turned the images in their own backgrounds. I tried a couple of others but I think this one looked the best and allowed my photographs to stay as the primary focus.

I hope you enjoyed.

Stay beautiful.

Pay Phones/No Answer

Cell phones. I am thankful, indeed, for that huge invention. Before cell phones, the only way you could call someone was either from a business phone (local calls only and you’d better have a good reason) or the pay phone. When I was growing up, these germ laden contraptions were at almost every store, every gas station, and restaurant I can think of. I remember it would cost 25 cents to make a call (later 35 and then the big hike to 50 cents) and you would have to talk fast so you wouldn't get the monotone message telling you to insert more money.

I remember the day I was at Wal-Mart and desperately needed to reach my mom (this was actually in the early 90’s but, eh, close enough for this topic). I wasn't sure if she was at home or at work so I tried home first and the answering machine answered so the phone assumed I reached my call recipient and didn't give me back my money (if no one answered the phone, you could hang up and your money would clink into a change return slot). I had to frantically search for more money and exchange some pennies for “silver” so I could call the other number. Frustrating for sure!

This leads me into an assignment I had for my college digital media class this week in which we first had to take photographs of “urban landscape” and then edit them. We were then asked to publish our favorite edited image to our blog and give a detailed explanation of the edits. So, two stones being the killer of two birds (aw, poor birds) I picked this picture because it is one of my favorites and also reminds me of my childhood in the 80’s.

No Answer (Edited), a photo by Blue_Eyed_Geek on Flickr.

I titled this picture “No Answer” which is apropos for this broken, pay phone handset. I took this raster-based image with my 13 megapixel LG Optimus G Pro cell phone camera. The original image (viewable here) had a resolution of 4160 x 3120 pixels which is equal to the 13 megapixels of which my camera is capable. The image was edited through Pixlr Express. I optimized the image to a final size of 800 x 678 pixels through cropping and interpolation since I knew this would be viewed on a computer screen. I am an amateur photographer and am not really familiar with manually setting the exposure on my camera. Flixr shows the exposure of the original image as 0.005 sec which was the camera’s auto setting. When I edited the image, I was pretty happy with the amount of light in this image so I didn't mess with the contrast but I did increase the saturation level very minimally just to make things a little brighter since I shot on a cloudy day. I played with the sharpness a little but found that I liked the original image better because the sharpness tool took away the soft look I had and wanted. I liked the warm tones in the original so I didn't play with temperature changes. I then went into the creative tools and applied the “Max” effect. I wanted a little pop of color in the black and white area so I used the history brush to show the blue on the handset. My final step was to apply a border overlay to balance out the frame on the little boxes created by the earlier effect. I’m really happy with the final image. So much so that I’m considering printing and framing to display in my house.