Video Performance Post Mortem

The first obstacle Aidan and I had to overcome was the idea for our video performance. Going into the project, I was kind of overwhelmed with all the possibilities that we could have done visually, and I was really intrigued by the examples that essentially involved making a music video, but even then the possibilities were endless. Aidan came up with the idea of visualizing the story of COVID-19, showing how at first people didn’t take it seriously to present day stay-home orders and remote learning and working. When he brought up the idea, I immediately thought of this one Youtube video I saw documenting the dumbest takes that actual REAL PEOPLE have about wearing masks and coronavirus. Our idea took a turn towards juxtaposing many American’s ridiculous responses to COVID-19 and the reality of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.

Aidan and I split the work by audio and video, with Aidan tackling audio and me taking on video. We worked separately for the first few days and then regrouped to take a look at what the other person had done, readjusting to fit each other’s work and making suggestions.

I started off by finding a bunch of video clips of people and their wild opinions about COVID-19 and wearing masks and compiling them into one long video. Then I started on manipulating the videos themselves, starting with some Vizzie modules (brcosr, mutil8er, sketchr) to create the effect that these people we almost not of this world to emphasize how crazy and outlandish these people seem. This had an unintended side effect of resembling a heat map, which added a nice touch to the connection between the visuals and the concept of COVID. Then I overlaid a video of people burning masks and messed around with the zoomr, kaleidr and rotatr.

We went back to working and then regrouped again to rehearse and test out OBS and Zoom. During our rehearsal, we found that it was hard to hear audio coming from two different callers on the Zoom call because I was manipulating audio while playing it in the background of my video while Aidan was manipulating/playing audio on his computer. So, I gave all my major audio clips, which I was pitch shifting before, to Aidan for him to play during the performance.

Overall, I think our performance went very well. We hit all the points that we were trying to make in our video and music, but I will admit I went a bit more on the safe side when it came to the visuals for our performance. The performance aspect of this became pretty simple because I was just playing a single video and live manipulating the video’s properties, so I wish I had separated those clips individually to make the performance more interesting.