Pedro Sotomayor's Blog
Jun 11th, 2009 @ 11:30 pm
Reflective “Meta” Post
My blogs content is mostly made up of things that we looked at it class. With only a couple of outside links that I had found such as the swine flu data map. I found it really had to come up with something interesting to blog about each week. All I did though was talk about some of the main points that were said either in the lectures or in class. I didn’t even get any followers until the very end, i guess my blog wasn’t interesting enough.
I did get one follower which means I really didn’t have much traffic at all and I only followed another 2 people which were in my tute so we could all understand what was actually going on.
I did provide some good outside sources that linked back to other webpages, pictures or videos. These posts are also my favourite because they are the most interesting.
These are my 3 nominated blog posts:
@ 10:43 pm
Youtube Video Rationale.
For my second assignment i chose to do a short youtube video which analyses an aspect of youtube. I thought of doing this after see’ing a video Nathan showed us in class which used just paper cut outs then editing it to fit. My video is called “The Success Of Trent” it is meant to represent how in only the space of a couple weeks the “Trent from Punchy” video shot right up to about a million and a half views. Now it has more 2 million views.
I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to do it. In the end I decided with paper and cutting out characters and sets. I wanted it show how the word about the video spread and then how everyone you knew would use quotes from the video that became ever so popular. I ran into so many ridiculous problems with this assignment when i probably showed of just done it at Uni and it could of looked alot better. These problems being my Mac not recognising my video camera.
It needed to be as simple and straight forwards as possible to get what exactly was going on. I had to write down a sort of script for when i did the voice over in order for it to all fit in time. I could always go back and cut and edit it togethor but the problem with audio is that you don’t actually have a image to look at to know where on the track you are. All the little characters i drew and cut out myself. I taped them to straws so i could move them around on screen. Another problem with this was that the camera had trouble focusing them on the backdrop.
I used the actual “Trent from Punchy” video and keyed it into my video to make it look like the kids are actually watching it. Then I cut and edit the audio to use his voice for his little character. The final product could have looked at lot better if i did something as simple as using a texter to colour the characters and the backdrop. I didn’t have time to redo it all.
It did all the fit togethor and all in time exactly as i planned. The voice overs all fit in pretty well too.
@ 10:38 pm
Week 15
Assignment is due!!!!!!! It’ll be alright i guess. Now I’ve got my Mac sorted. My youtube video is turning really budget looking and poor quality. I don’t know how i can make it better but I need alot more practise at designing these sorts of things. Things like timing the voice overs right and using close up shots and what not. It’s actually really hard to get it flowing nicely and understand what is actually going on.
@ 9:45 pm
Week 14
Well I didn’t even go to class this day because my parents went overseas and I had to drive to sydney at 4am to go and pick them up from the airport. It didn’t exactly waste my time because it had to be done. However i did lose very useful class time to work on my assignment.
I’ve been looking at a number of different ways to lay out my assignment. Whether to do a stop animation or a short video. Stop animations take to much fooling around so i’ve decided on a video but i need to spend time drawing up a set and characters. I’m not the best drawer either so they won’t look the best.
May 20th, 2009 @ 9:17 pm
Week 13
I just got a brand new Mac so i can keep up with all of my assignments and do my video editing. Guess what it doesn’t have a firewire port, great! So i couldn’t upload any of my video to work on it. Now i’ll have to go to the Mac store and spend some extra money on getting some kind of USB to firewire conversion. Not fun.
May 13th, 2009 @ 8:48 pm
Week 12 Lecture
Today Michael didn’t plug his computer in properly and everything stuffed then he told us to blog about it. So i am going to blog about it. The lecture was about data visualizations it was pretty interesting but he showed us these videos that just went for way too long! But its incredible the amount of time, work and effort people have put into making some of these visualizations such as mapping out the whole Bible into that rainbow looking thing. It’s crazy. The lecture would of finished early but because Michael’s computer had to restart and the projector had to turn off and on again we wasted 15 minutes just waiting for that and i was so hungry i wanted to go home.
Last week we looked at this website called “We feel fine” Alot of work and programming has gone into developing this website. What it does is it scans the world of blogs/status updates, myspace comments and tweets for any sentence with the word “feel” in it. You can then scan through these reading each one by one and then even tracing it back to their blog or myspace page. It’s pretty interesting but if you actually go on the website it gets boring in about 5 seconds.
This is a very well done Data Vizualization of the Swine Flu virus spread.
May 6th, 2009 @ 9:58 pm
Week 11
Multiplicity. Pictures and videos that have been cut and edited together using lots of different photos of the same thing or theme. Some links on delicious were pretty good. The best one was probably of that video game replay that was done a thousand times then merged into one with 1000 cars. It has been redone except with 100 cars or even 4000 cars. Which is way over the top and just looks messy. the 1000 cars video is by far the best put togethor.
There are so many videos on youtube of people that video tape themselves making noises then cutting it all into a song. It’s a pretty good idea but it’s been overdone. the bicycle built for 2,000 was a great idea where they recorded 2,000 people making specific sounds and then they cut it and merged it all into a short song. “bicycle built for 2”
This a photo from a photographer who went into the New York Streets and took hundreds of photos in the same locations and then cut and paste people into the one picture. Such as this picture where his pasted in people who are wearing red. There are lots of different ones such as just kids, people smoking or people walking dogs. It’s pretty interesting the amount of people that are in New York for this many people doing the same thing to walk past.
@ 9:40 pm
Week 10
This week I was sick and being really lazy so I didn’t really touch an computers.
We’ve been talking about our second assignments and I think that I want to make a video for Youtube about youtube. Maybe like a stop motion type video taking photos. I’ll make up a small set and just use paper and a pen to show what I want to. Or video tape it and cut it all up in an editing program. The only thing is that to make this look good will be very hard.
It’s going to be about how a short video thats meant to be a joke becomes country wide famous within a week! Then all of your friends quote the video and it’s a competition to see who has watched it the most times.
Trent from Punchbowl. this video became so famous over youtube i don’t think i know anyone that doesn’t say “coppers, coppers punch em in the face” whenever they see a police car. it started out as just a little skit that some people put on youtube. They tried to pull it off as being a real person with a disability but eventually the truth came out that he was acting. However within a week or two it had millions of hits and some people had watched countless numbers of times. How it got so famous, i don not know.
Another one is that “beached whale” animation. This video wasn’t as successful as Trent but it is definitely up there. The number of quotes and lines that came out of it was ridiculous. There were people out there that could recite the whole thing.
Apr 29th, 2009 @ 9:58 pm
First Week Back
First week back at Uni. Today we looked at Web 2.0 websites and the result of social media. All about commenting and recommending or rating video, music, pictures or anything that you post on the internet. Web 2.0 is all about interactions. We looked at Flame-wars it was pretty funny because i’ve seen so many of them happen or even had my own video’s ripped on.
I had a video on youtube just of me and my friends riding our bikes. Nothing really that out there that you could say much about it. It only took one person to say “wear a helmet fags” because some one wasn’t wearing one in the video. To start a massive fight. All of my friends and his friends were just commenting and commenting even looking up stats on how many people have been injured from wearing helmets. Eventually youtube deleted all of the comments for being too serious or something.
Also my second assignment, I’m thinking I’ll make a youtube video demonstrating one aspect of youtube. Just make up photos or draw pictures then video tape them and cut it to fit. It’ll take a while but shouldn’t really be too hard to actually do.
Apr 10th, 2009 @ 12:15 am
Mp3.com the latest and newest Last.fm concept website. It is actually a partner of Last.Fm as it uses alot of the music in their database.
It’s meant to be the “pop” version of Last.fm because Last.fm is more for the underground scene, so Mp3.com is whats popular in the charts at the moment.
