THE END IS UPON US…

But the fun is not over just yet. Of course we couldn’t just leave the final weeks of DS106 without some memories of mashingup and remixing some crazy things. Generally, I pour out my emotions at the end of my summary posts but since DS106 is coming to an end, why not mix it up a little? These past two weeks, DS106 students veered into a completely new category, which is said in the best way possible. A lot of these assignments have been more than just following directions.They involved getting our hands dirty and really learning all sorts of new things; from remixing, to mashup, to recutting, the possibilities were endless. While things got difficult at some points, they were all worth while. Of all the weeks, this was not the funnest or worst but rather the one that offered the most to learn from. I realize that we often see way more remixes or mashups than we realize, especially in pop culture. A prominent example comes from Disney itself, which used old Grimm Tales as the inspiration for a lot of their very popular stories (such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, etc.). However, the part where Disney truly made an uh-oh and ruined it for everyone else is where they use their wealth to make sure no one else can use it after them. As I explained below, I learned a lot more about copyright as well and the most important thing would possibly be that it is always cheaper to settle out of court. So be careful when you’re making a video because while you think it’s fair use..You could be extremely wrong.

References & Examples

The most valuable thing I learned was possibly when we had to investigate remix resources, here’s my post on it but what I essentially learned from it was all about copyright. I watched two videos, A Fair(y) Use Tale and The New Prohibition, both of which talked about copyright. HOWEVER, the way in which each one went about it was most interesting. While the first video used a variety of editing/mashups to teach your the facts about copyright, the latter was by Andy Biao. If you haven;t seen it, I highly recommend it. He uses recent pop culture examples to teach us the ins and outs of copyright, and even tells his own unfortunate story of what happened. It was possibly one of the best ways to show someone the truth behind copyright, and even ‘fair use’(which is not law!). It was extremely helpful and helped me understand why my videos may have gotten taken down.  After watching these, I explained what I learned to my mom as best as possible…Although it still seems to have a lot of shades of grey to me.

Vacation and Popcorn and Firefox

GAH! I do not know how to vehemently express anymore of my dislike for this assignment, although if you’d like to read about it, here is my full-on rant. The assignment was to do an interactive video in which we send Alan on vacation. However, I’ll keep it rather brief in this summary and start by saying that it was a valuable learning experience, as everything in this class is, but I would be perfectly fine if I never had to see this again. Overall, it was extremely frustrating Mozilla Popcorn because it seemed to constantly be freezing, which can really be overwhelming. Also, it just didn’t seem to be user-friendly and the tutorials lacked real explanation of how to do anything, especially since they would freeze half way through. All in all, there was a reason I put this off until the last minute — it sucked.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! (the media!)

This was one of the funner assignments for this week! I actually took a lot of pride in my recycled media video, just because at first I couldn’t seem to string anything together but then I managed to find one thing and everything just clicked from there on out! This assignment actually fit perfectly well with these past two weeks — take other people’s work but put them together to make your own remix. Is it weird that literally just hit me? Here is my ingenious put together work of recycled media.

Post-Photo Portrait

One of the most reflective assignments this week is where we had to take Jonathan Worth’s photos of Cory Doctorow, and remix them to make them our own. The odd side catch?…Well, there was none. Except that the same right that they gave us to use their photos with no strings attached, we had to lend the same one in case anyone ever wanted to use our own creations in the future. Oddly enough, i ended up using this camouflage theme to mine, as well as use GIMP. Although GIMP and I don’t usually get along, it happened to be just fine when I made this photo. See my experience here!

Remix Luvin’

For this week, we finally got to use that remix button that often shows up whenever we’re looking at other assignments. The point of this was to click the remix generator and it gave us an assignment as well as a remix to it. My remixed assignment was Story Within the Web but with Pretty in Pink twist to it. Ahh, how easy it sounds, right? And it was, after I got the idea down pat. It allowed us to remix the assignments of others and really make them our own, which is one of the basic ideas in the past two weeks. Here is how I managed to do this assignment.

Star Finale

We did our last week of stars! For my last two assignments, I did two from the mashup category, which were Movie Trailer Mashup and Actor Transformation, which came to be an 8 star’s! For both assignments, I followed the same lines of creating; using Keepvid to download videos off of Youtube then using iMovie to do all the little fine details. It was nice to finally be finishing up with stars but it was sad to see them go! As fast as you hope a semester goes, you never truly want things to come to an end.