These assignments for the past two weeks were definitely a handful.  I think that I would have to say that this was probably the most time consuming week that I have worked on.  All of the assignments, save for just a few, required a lot of my time and work.  I hope that it all pays off though and that anyone who looks at my assignments enjoys them as much as I did making them.  Let’s start with all of the links, and then we’ll get in to some reflection on each of the assignments.

Understanding Remix – This assignment was probably the most underwhelming of the assignments.  I wasn’t really too sure what I was getting myself into with this week.  I’m really interested to see how my colleagues handled these two weeks of assignments as well.  I’m glad that we were told to go ahead and view these videos and get a better grasp on what remix really is because I probably would have been extremely confused for the rest of the assignments.  I really took a lot of time in explaining a lot of detail in this blog post.  I hope that you have the chance to read it, because I tried my best to break down as much as I possibly could.  This really helped in my overall understanding of what remix is and how it can be applied to work in general.

Mashup Assignment #1 – Hands down my favorite assignment of the semester.  Each week, I have my ‘new favorite’ and this one takes the cake.  I can see how the final project will wind up being my new favorite, but it’s going to be hard to top this.  I just had so much fun with the editing aspect and really went away with this assignment.  I did a lot of editing to the How To Train Your Dragon trailer in cutting out parts that I didn’t feel were pertinent to the assignment as a whole.  Amazingly, the audio that I laid down matched up perfectly with any sort of emotion that the video brought along with it.  It just worked out perfectly and I’m really thankful for that because if it didn’t, I would have been EXTREMELY frustrated and probably gotten mad.

Mashup Assignment #2 – Since I made this assignment myself, I really enjoyed it.  I think it’s going to be a lot more difficult than I’m thinking other people will think.  It did take a lot of time to just find two songs that I found were similar sounding.  After that, it was just simply having fun with the audio and cutting parts down that I wanted to put in front of and after other portions.  The actual editing took a while, but it’s something that I love so I didn’t think of it as classwork.  If I didn’t like editing, I probably would NEVER even attempt to do this assignment.  Hopefully there are others out there as passionate about editing as I am and attempt to do this assignment.  I would love to see what other people can create and come up with.

Recycled Media – I got a bit confused with this and actually started this as another Mashup Assignment.  This would put me at 11 or 12 stars but I’m just calling it it’s own assignment in my weekly summary.  I’m not really sure, based on the assignment instructions, we were supposed to go about doing this.  I looked at a few of my colleagues attempts a little while ago and feel like I was on the similar path that they were on.  Someone actually created a scenic walk which I found to be quite entertaining.  I just went the route of finding pictures that I liked the most and went to Freesound.org and found sounds that would go along with the pictures.  I don’t know if this was the actual assignment, but I didn’t really like it as much as the others for this week.  I think it’s because it was messing with photography and I’m really interested in playing around with video at this point in the semester.

Remixed Assignment – I’m glad for this assignment that I stumbled across something that I thought was really simple and easy to do.  All we had to do was find someone else’s bumper and reverse it.  It actually turned out quite interesting.  I like to see when something is reversed and how much it actually changes the meaning of the piece.  The idea of remixing is literally put into play here because we’re taking something that has already been done and creating something entirely different but using the same media.  From ‘Understanding Remix’, this is what comes in to play exactly.

Summary – So, this week was overall very interesting.  I’ve learned a lot about what remix and mashup really are and how to apply remix and mashup to stuff that’s already created.  With the popularity of YouTube, people are creating remixes and mashups every day and getting millions of views for their remixes and mashups.  I think that’s amazing and I hope to create more remixes or mashups in the future.  Any video that I create in the future, I’m going to try to apply some sort of creativity in terms of remixing and mashup that I can.  There isn’t any reason not to.  Even if it’s just taking techniques that someone else has done and applying it to my own work.  That’s remixing my own assignment even if I’m creating an original.  In essence, an original piece can just be considered remixed by virtue of applying other people’s techniques to your own.