Overwhelming Technology

Over the past two weeks I have been introduced to so many new technologies in class. Editing images in Photoshop, cutting and working with music in Audacity, making movies with iMovie- it’s all come at me fast and furious. I’m still feeling uneasy about how I will use what I have learned in this class when it is done- but I’m sure as with most things, time will tell. I want to just talk about some of the things I have been learning….

Images

Photoshop! Never thought I would be able to handle it. I don’t know why, but I always reserved it for professionals, and never thought I would be able to navigate it. I found though that it is relatively easy to use. I took an image I got from Google Images and dragged it into Photoshop. I resized it, made it a little smaller, and then started adding effects to it. Photoshop has tons of different effects to apply to images, and you can also layer them on top of one another. Once you have picked an effect, you can also alter them by making the effect more or less powerful by changing a few settings. I created about 10 new images and uploaded them to my website, with descriptions on how I obtained their looks. Check it out… https://files.nyu.edu/sg2747/public/images.html.

Music

We been looking at multiple ways of including music on websites, and using it in different projects. In the first week of class we learned different ways of embedding music on our pages- having it start automatically when a page loads, having it embedded on a page with a controller to turn it on and off, and creating a link to a music file- all of which I got down immediately-> https://files.nyu.edu/sg2747/public/audio.html. Then we stepped it up a bit. We have mainly been using a program called Audacity in class. As of right now I have a love/hate relationship with this program. I know it’s a great program, but I just don’t feel 100% comfortable with it yet. I have gotten how to cut music down, but adding and mixing tracks and effects has proven a little more difficult. We were assigned a “Music Concrete” project, which I am still working on. We have to record ambient sounds from the internet using WireTap Pro, then load them into Audacity, add 5 more tracks to the sound and mix them up to create a new stereo mix. It’s taking me a while to complete this one mainly because I don’t know Audacity that well yet, and am uncomfortable navigating around it. I will get it though! I really want to master this program because I know it will be of great use to me in the future for choreographic reasons. Sometimes I feel limited by music when I am trying to create dance, so I think this will give me more options, freedom, and control in my future projects.

Movies

Movies! I have been having lots of fun working with iMovie. We were assigned a project to create a movie from still images- meaning we download lots of images from Google (on a certain theme of your choosing), and create a documentary-like (in my opinion) movie. I chose to get a bunch of pictures of modern dancers in action. I gathered images of mostly American modern dance companies- Parsons, Alvin Ailey, etc., and uploaded them all into iMovie. Like Photoshop, you can apply effects to the images to change them- like “Old Black and White,” “Old Film Grain,” “Color TV,” etc. There are so many options. You can also add in transitions between the slides like “Dissolve.” This part I am having some trouble with because whenever I try to add a transition in, iMovie says my clip isn’t long enough (has to be 5:02 seconds) to have a transtiiton. I then started to try and find out if I could make my clips longer, but I haven’t found that answer, so I’ll be asking about that in class today. I added in some clips with quotes by Martha Graham, the “Mother of Modern Dance,” as well to tie the theme together. I also added music. This is another part I am going to have to ask about because the track I wanted to use was an m4p file that was like 5 minutes long. My film is only 1:43 minutes, so I need to cut that music. But I was having trouble dragging this m4p file into Audacity. So I need to work on that. I also was having trouble uploading the hi-resolution version of the movie onto my page- it was taking a really long time. Even thought I am currently facing all these problems, I really like how the movie is developing. It doesn’t surprise me that I am enjoying the visual aspects of this class right now a little more than the audio- I have always been a more visual learner. But with only a few days left in class I want to be able to get a grasp on as much of the material as I can.

-SG