This week I’d like to share my process on how I went about creating my meme remix of good ol’ Walter White and his memorable scenes throughout the Breaking Bad series. My original concept invloved a video series that showed the “transformation” of Walter from season 1 to the series finale. After realizing that anyone who had not seen the show would be furious with my spoiler-ridden project, I chose a more interactive approach. I brainstormed key quotes from the show concernig Walter and put together an interesting collection of snippets that allowed multiple paths to be derived from a primary video-snippet of Walter simply saying “I am”. I used youtube to find mostly all the snippets and edited them all with Camtasia. The short video lengths worked great with the Xbox controller because of the ability to spam the buttons thus creating that “remix feel” as you can see in my demonstration below:
Thankfully the patch was easy to use and I surprisingly found little difficulty in loading my videos into PD (probably due to the fact I edited with Camtasia). Anyway, I had a blast making it and hopefully you all enjoyed my demo in class as well as the lovely video of Walter above.
What I did for this project was to take just videos from Keyboard Cat and Surprised Kitty, and just the sound from Nyan Cat. I used the base program from the Makey Makey in order to get the keyboard input for the program.
For this assignment I decided to use a Japanese meme, assuming no one else would. Here is the original TV commercial I used.
The commercial shows a high school student who is super motivated to getting into college, but REALLY does not want to study at all. The commercial is supposed to tell you that motivation by itself does not get you into college and you should get tutoring. The way he is shouting and dancing made the commercial a popular meme on the internet among Japanese people. Here is an example of a remix of this meme done by some Japanese person:
Yeah. The dubstep song I decided to use to remix with is Skrillex’s “First Of The Year” and this is the music video for it:
Another remix video that influenced me in using this song is a remix between this and videos of Japanese politicians:
Enough of all the introducing, I will talk about what I’ve done. So when thinking of making a dubstep remix, I figured I should probably cut the song into smaller pieces so that I can playback any part of the song at anytime. But when doing this I needed to focus on making each portion flow smoothly into each other. Luckily (at least for this song), the tempo among the entire song was constant and it was actually fairly easy to cut the song into 10 portions using Audacity. So I brought them into Pure Data and tried out each of the portions. What I found out was very interesting–no matter what order I play each portion, the song seemed to flow quite naturally! Thus, I came to the conclusion that I can automate the dubstep remix by picking a random number between 0 and 9 and choosing the corresponding track portion. Here is the video demonstrating that:
You may notice in the video that while the dubstep is playing, it is sending a bang signal according to the number outputted by the envelope~ object. I used this to automate the banging of the meme video to make the video sync with the automated dubstep. The only thing I need to do when presenting is just switching the videos (which I could actually automate as well such as getting a random number for each video and a random number for how long to wait between each video switch). Here is the final thing:
Looking at the presentations of my classmates, I really thought it would have been cool using things like game controllers and webcams, but I did not own either and did not have enough time so I just used the keyboard this time. I had a lot of fun doing this remix.
For this project we had to make an interactive “remix” of popular internet memes. Some of my favorite youtube memes are from the youtube channel Schmoyoho. They have a segment of videos that are widely popular where they “songify” stories on the news or other popular youtube memes.
By turning already hilarious videos into songs, they create catchy works of art, and those videos themselves become famous memes. One of their most famous memes is the “Bed Intruder Song”; both the original news story and the version that they auto-tuned into a song are famous, but the Bed Intruder Song alone has over 118,000,00 views, surpassing the original. So you can run and tell that homeboy.
So I picked Schmoyoho’s memes as my material for this assignment. But I wanted to give it a twist: I also decided to do some subliminal messaging in my piece. I focused specifically on fast food. I sampled from the Schmoyoho memes that had a mention or reference to fast food. My first video meme was the Charles Ramsey “Dead Giveaway” song. Charles Ramsey makes several references to “McDonnalds”, and the way he says it is very comical. But Ramsey is also considered a hero from helping to rescue the 3 women locked in a basement in Ohio. So by Ramsey telling you that he was “Eatin’ my McDonnalds”, he is representing a positive connotation to a hero + fast food. My second video meme was the Dayum Drops songified “Oh my Dayum”. The youtuber Dayum Drops already has a large youtube following based on his ridiculous and over-the-top food reviews. His review of 5 Guys burgers got his review auto-tuned into the song “Oh my Dayum”. It’s another catchy Schmoyoho song, and watching Dayum Drops open that burger wrapper can really make you crave 5 Guys.
So once I had my videos picked out, I decided that I wanted to contrast the Schmoyoho videos by putting them next to the originals. Then I trimmed the clips I wanted in Corel Video Editor to different bits where either Charles Ramsey or Dayum Drops was referencing fast food. I used a text object to display a flashing message at the top stating “Eat fast food – now”. I then trimmed a sound loop and had it play in the background to tie everything together.
I used the patch to connect a controller as input so that you could scratch the videos and enjoy watching Dayum Drops unwrap that 5 Guys burger again and again and again.
[watch the video below]
I connected a ps3 controller to my computer (to use as the controller) via a USB charging cable. I had to use MotioninJoy to properly detect the ps3 controller to serve as input. Interestingly enough, with MotioninJoy I could tell the computer to use the ps3 controller as an X-Box 360 controller. This worked so that the inputs were detected to be the same as the patch we had done in class; which had been set up for an X-Box 360 controller.
In PureData I used “send” and “receive” objects to direct inputs from the ps3 controller to the patch that controlled the video memes. In the video meme patch, I had to strip the audio from the videos, and load it in separately for each video. I had to use .wav files for the audio and .avi files for the video. Avi files were the only things that worked at all for video! I spent so much time figuring that out. Even .mp4 and .mov files wouldn’t play in PureData for me.
But it all came together (magically and after much PureData struggling). My piece represents the influence of fast food in our culture through the medium of internet video memes.