Archives: Videos
Hip Hop My Way Outta Here
In the time since I have last posted, the class has done some more civil rights stuff, and we’ve moved on to music of the same era. So like, country, blues, rock n roll, all that jazz (jazz too, I guess, if you’re in New Orleans.
When thinking of an idea for my next reflection, I wanted to see how the music genres we listen to today have come about, and what they all came from. So I looked at some wikipedia pages and a couple timelines to try and link them together. It too me quite a while to get an actual coherent timeline of my own, and it was really messy (the struggle of using actual paper).
I then found an app to make it pretty, cause it was not.
When making it, I added the origins of each genre, as in what race created it. I found it interesting that mixed music inspired black music, but white music only held country and classical. I would assume this stems from the fact that music has always been a staple of the culture of black americans, in religion, hardships, and entertainment, while white americans could usually take or leave music up until a certain point in time.
Another thing I found interesting was that I couldn’t really find anything on some of the genres we have today. It’s almost like music like dubstep and electronic music came out of nowhere. And while I can find when and how genres like pop were created, theres no indication as to when pop music went from what it was created as to… like, this.
I also wanted to find a way to experience all the different kinds of music. The best way I could think of was to sing them, so that’s what I did. I skipped the slave songs, because there’s no way I could sing a slave song, they’re hard to sing alone, and it felt kind of wrong. I did my best to go in order, but it was kind of hard after awhile. I stopped once I got to disco, hip hop, and rap, because I couldn’t find any of those kinds of songs I could play on ukulele. I then piled clips of all the songs I learned together.
Oh, and for the love of god, I am sorry for how out of tune the soul part is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oRQQZ1R6LA
Lynching in America
For the next unit, my blog titles will probably be less humorous. We’ve started learning about the Civil Rights Movement, and making jokes about that just seems….wrong. So yeah, ix nay on the jokes at the moment.
For my first reflection, I decided to do it on lynching. I was interested in the topic because a couple years ago I saw the movie 12 Years a Slave and one of the scenes that really stuck with me was the hanging scene. It made me so uncomfortable, because it was supposed to.
I didn’t really know the significance of that scene at the time, just that it was really freaking uncomfortable it was to watch and how awful it was. When we learned about lynching, my mind went back to that scene in the movie, and just how awful it was to watch on screen. I can barely imagine how depressing it would be to see that in real life.
Along with the fact that people would go out and watch it. They would purposefully go out and watch the killing of other people.
So I tried to do a video on where lynching came from and how it continued to happen into the 60’s. It was kind of hard, because that’s something that’s hard to pinpoint. Luckily, there were quite a few sources I found from the time period that explored the topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT4cBdZTKrk
If you’re interested, here are some of the primary sources I pulled from to make the video.
“Why is the Negro Lynched?” by Fredrick Douglass (1895)
“The Truth About Lynching and The Negro in the South: In Which the Author Pleads That the South be Made Safe for the White Race” by Winfield H. Collins (1918)
Eleanor Roosevelt to Walter White detailing the First Lady’s lobbying efforts for federal action against lynchings letter, (19 March 1936)
A terrible blot on American civilization (1922)
Explain, Like, Most Things
Recently, my class and an assignment where we used the app explain everything to create a YouTube video on how the vote in Canada went from a prick edge to a right. We had about a week to complete this task. First, we had to create a storyboard for how our explain everything would play out. This also had to be accompanied by a thesis. Because my storyboard was pretty much illegible, I had to explain it pretty well, but was still the first person to get the go ahead.
If you can read the top, the thesis for the video is “The vote in Canada went from a privilege to a right through social pressure and change.” This basically means that through pressure and actions from oppressed communities social change erupted, and the people on top no longer saw these communites as worthless.
After explaining the thesis to my teacher, I began gathering the visuals for the project, and the pictures to use for the animation. This took one class, and the next class I wrote the script for the video. Then, there was only one class so I did the animations at home and we used it for recording.
This was the final product:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSZX4ij6JEI&feature=youtu.be
Star Wars: The Blog Awakens
Well, this is pretty late.
In mid-December, my class had a Star Wars themed “maker faire”, where we all did projects based around Star Wars. Granted, I wasn’t there, so I can’t really say how the whole thing went (when I asked, nobody really gave me a clear answer), but I can tell you about my project.
My goal was to make a project about Artificial Intelligence, you know, the stuff everyone says is going to take over the world someday. Because I had to relate my project to Star Wars, I related it to the sassiest robot of all time- C3PO (coincidentally, he’s also the most useless character in Star Wars Lego). My question ended up being: How realistic is C3PO?
The short answer is not at all, but I also went in to ask if it would ever be possible. Since that answer was more indecisive than anything else, my project is actually pretty sad, but you can watch the video anyways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWFAWHwLhYg
The challenges I faced while making this video were actually bigger than I thought they would be. It turns out it’s hard to find real-life information on something that, at this point, is basically science fiction. It’s also really stressful to have to try to put the finishing touches on your video the day it is due and suddenly have your COMPUTER RUN OUT OF SPACE. I ended up having to delete The Sims 3, Minecraft, and World Of Warcraft to finish this video, but I made it to the other side with an at least slightly presentable project.
And I guess that’s all the matters.
Arguing About America
The week after we got back from California, we had to do a debate about whatever topic it was we were assigned. I had aircraft carriers/American military spending. I was on the affirmative side, which means I agreed with the statement. In this case the statement was something along the lines of In these trying financial times, America shouldn’t be spending so much money on it’s military / aircraft carriers.
I was the third up, after Harry and Spencer. We weren’t organized, but we still went in way more confident than we came out. I’m supposed to have the video of me talking, but I actually deleted it long ago, but I looked like a thumb in that video. So, I figured this video would be the next best thing.
Long story short: we weren’t very good. The good news was that the other group wasn’t very good either. We were the first of the debates, and we still were iffy about what exactly we were doing. We didn’t realize exactly how organized we had to be for this. Answer: very. We ended up losing, despite our best efforts. It was pretty much a failure. Although, I did learn that when doing a debate, always and I mean always have a giant list of cited facts supporting your cause.
Yeah, that would have helped a lot.
Waluigi’s Lullaby
So last week was the final week for groups to get their machines together. We didn’t completely finish, but at least our machine actually works(mostly) as of right now. We wasted a lot of class time fighting on what to do next which I think took place because we didn’t have a true leader. It was hard to explain my experience working for the past few weeks with this group in words, so I have made a short video to compose my thoughts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYmRr3uqCH8
That music is very immersive.
Anyways, I do regret not having the machine up to the level we wanted it to be at by now, but I have hope that by the exhibition it will be looking good.
Tea In The Sink, Tea In The Sink
Last week, we learned about the American Civil War. When told to find a question to research, I automatically went to the Boston Tea Party, mostly because of that one Suite Life of Zack and Cody episode. To introduce my question/topic, I assisted the help of the Sims 4 and iMovie, and made this lovely trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKFyTh8Nv8o
So with that in mind, I watched the Zack and Cody episode. It sparked a question in my mind, who planned the Boston Tea Party? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Zack and Cody (TV lies).
I did some light internet digging, and found out a “Patriot leader” named Samuel Adams organized it with some buddies called the “Sons of Liberty” (which I must say, sounds like a band). There were a bunch of these Patriot groups around what is now the United States, and they were all interconnected in a way, which is pretty cool. The Sons of Liberty was a pretty big deal and had branches in Boston and New York. The Boston branch was probably way cooler though, because they met under a “Liberty Tree” and threw tea in the harbour. The New York branch hung out under a “Liberty Pole” and never through cool tea parties.
I also found out they did it on December 16th, and the cost of the tea they dumped would today be worth about $700,000. Ouch
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