INTE 5340 - Weekly Reflections of an Analog Woman in a Digital World: #remixweek - Shyna in 30 sec

This week, we are remixing the work of another student in class. I was assigned Shyna Gill. It has been good a good experience so far. I went through Shyna's work and settled on her "Me in 30 Seconds" assignment. For this remix, I decided make an animated video with her story. I decided to keep her original audio "as is", since I wanted to make sure I was still telling her story in her own voice and her own words. I used Animatron.com to create my video and added her audio to it. My idea for this was to really stay true to Shyna's original work while still making it into something new and different. Instead of writing about her, I will instead allow her to tell you about herself. Making animated videos is very new to me, and this was my first try at it.

I appreciated from reading her weekly reflections that she is honest and genuine in talking about her experiences in INTE5340. She is able to draw from real-life examples due to her extensive work and educational experience. As someone still learning the technological ropes, I appreciate that she shares how she creates her media. For her "Me in 30 Seconds" project, she is open about the challenges she faced when creating her audio clip. This is taken from her blog:

"Because of the time limit, I had to rewrite and rerecord a couple of times to get it right. This project was challenging as it forces one to be concise in their words, and also to be a proficient editor to remove any unnecessary silence, mouth clicks, etc. I encountered some issues with my sound and ended up learning how to use some of the effects that Audacity provides to attempt to resolve some distortion issues. After figuring out that some of the problems were unfixable, I ended up recording it over again but with different settings, which solved the problem."

It's good for a technology newbie like me to learn about how a person with extensive media communications experience still finds ways to both challenge herself and struggle with more unfamiliar territory such as audio. Her blog is a good reminder that we are all here to learn and push ourselves out of our comfort zone.

CC BY-NC 2.0. Oklanica on Flickr.

I can definitely relate to her "trial-and-error" struggle with making the audio, having to re-record and play with different settings. In creating my "remix", I also had to first learn how to use a new tool like Animatron to do the things I wanted it to do. Even before that, I had to figure out how to pull her audio off SoundCloud to put into Animatron.

The method I used is probably considered "barbaric" by techie standards, but it seemed to work. I used QuickTime to record the audio from SoundCloud. Then I used Audacity to clip the beginning and end of extra sounds and background noise. (I bet I have already used one too many steps here). Then I put that into Animatron and started playing with the various settings on Animatron.