The Next Assignment - Heroes

About a month ago I said that I would be back with an update to my "Creative Arts" student music clips. It took us a month to get here because the students were working on several different kinds of medias all related to the topic of "Heroes".

We/They used Pivot (the free stick figure animation program) to create gif animations of heroes (soccer players, flying superheroes, etc). They used Microsoft's free PhotoStory  to create hero collage movies (if you already own their software, it's free).

And for the project files showcased here, they/we use Audacity (also free) - with which I chopped up the original,mp3 sound tracks into pieces which the students used to create MTV-style video clips that I later re-combined in Movie Maker.

Two of the files below come from SoundCloud and they are among the many files there that are available for download. The other comes from archive.org

Note that these are all wmv video files, not mp3 audio.

The Hero offerings are:

We Dont Need Another Hero/Tina Turner (Sarah May Lin)

Be Your Hero/Iglesias (Michelle Anderson)

Time Loves a Hero/Little Feat (Live)

An Assignment

This past year I came up with an assignment for my students wherein they had to create a topic-based video clip that was one part of a longer song. I myself later combined the student segments to finalize the full song.

As part of my instructional focus, I want my students to be sensitive to copyright issues, so I have been providing them with only one segment of a copyrighted song that (barely) remains within the fair use limits of %10 of the original. Their task, then, is to produce a video clip that matches the musical timing of the original segment with images of their choice related to the lyrics (preferably Creative Commons tagged images). I then adjust their work to fit a Creative Commons audio version of the same song.

Here are two samples from our unit based on "Future". Each features a Creative Commons (CC) soundtrack, and although all images are not specifically credited/listed, that was a part of the assumption/rubric behind the task. Note that they are WMV files of 16 and 25MB (may take some time to aquire)

When I'm 64
Space Oddity

The next in the series, which the students have just started on, based on the theme of "Hero", we will begin working on a version of Little Feat's (they give their live music away at archive.org) Time Loves a Hero. Because the original audio is CC, my tasks should be easier - don't have to work on matching the timing of a separate version to the original's. For the above two, I had to find nearly exact-timing CC versions (from beatles ukelele project and soundcloud, respectively, credited in the videos, I believe)

Check back later to see the results for Hero...