This week we worked on our audio project. I worked with Viviana Espinosa on this piece. We wanted to create something that was a combination of sounds from different cultures. In my own collection, I have some random music including some Russian dance/techno music and some old school German hip hop. Viviana wanted to incorporate some Latin music as well, so we went online and started looking for pod casts. We found a pod cast from a Latin Funk show, that starts with an interview with one band (in both English and Spanish) and then that band starts their performance. Since neither of us had a large array of audio experience in the past, we just started playing around with Audacity and overlaying the different musical pieces we found. Unfortunately, each piece was very busy in itself, and when something was added to it, it started sounding like noise instead of music. We got a few pieces together and overlayed the interview of the Latin Funk band with the Russian dance song. We only had about 30 seconds of audio though and started thinking about the idea of just using Garage Band to create our audio piece and started playing around in there. We ended up with a nice sound, but again, we only had a short audio piece. From there, we worked on getting our two pieces to blend together. In the end, I think we ended up with a piece that was a nice ecclectic mix of music that was reminiscent of fading in and out of different radio stations.
Click here to listen to the audio piece.
I went to see my first sneak preview this week. My roommate won free tickets to see the movie "Kiss kiss, bang bang" in the Lowes at Time Square. It was a fantastic movie. I am a big fan of Coen brother films, and this one was reminiscent of the humor and also played with the idea of adapting film noir to a modern movie. The movie starred Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer, two actors who you really didn't expect to continue creating movies. The plot was a burgler (Downey) and his partner get caught stealing from a toy store and his partner gets shot. As Downey runs from the cops, he runs into a casting room, where the scene they are rehearsing involves the main character's partner getting killed. The casting directors are more than impressed with Downey's performance that they fly him out to LA and have him shadowing a detective (Kilmer) for research for the movie they are filming. Trouble ensues and so does the dark, tounge-in-cheek humor. At one point in the movie, Downey speaks to the audience and makes a comment saying something like "and Times Square audience, don't throw things at the screen." Being in Times Square, this caught me off guard, and while I'm pretty sure this is actually part of the movie that is shown to all audiences, I couldn't help but wonder if they taylored it to the location they were filming, reminscent of concerts where the drummer claims to be from the town that they are performing that night. (Idea for a project, maybe?)