#ysdn4002

Project 3 (Open Project) Hip Hop and the City

Despite my initial ideas, I took what I wanted to learn how to do, and put it in context of Hip Hop and the City, a York University social science class that I took this semester.

As my last contribution, I made a promotional video for the class. The content is based on what I learned throughout the semester. I found it very enlightening—it made me realize that hip hop is such a downplayed genre, it's far more complex than what the media makes it out to be.

Project 2—A Logical Understanding of the Marker Incident

Despite having said that I didn't want to take too much time on project 2, I felt that I thought too hard about finding a unique way to tell a story. As the premise of the project was to recall a memory, Ed suggested to tell the story in a less-linear way (this happened, then this happened, then this happened).

This really bothered me. I definitely didn't want the video to be a conventional storytelling. At first I decided to narrate the story as a haiku, but went a different direction because I felt it was opting out of an interesting video.

I don't know how I came up with this. I think it came to me when I was staring at my ceiling, and I thought to myself, "I am overthinking this." At some point I distracted myself with thinking about the actual story and how embarrassing it was for me, and I how I was overthinking that. I thought, it was only logical that I'd fling it over the balcony, and I knew it would happen. In retrospect, it only made sense that I'd be stuck in that situation. With that being said, I figured I should do some sort of logical explanation of the incident. 

(audio clips downloaded from Freesound.org)

I figured there was another way of doing these 3D plane tutorials. There's the vanishing point that I'm trying on Photoshop that allows me to export the layers into Adobe After Effects. Unfortunately my computer can no longer handle opening After Effects.

There's also this tutorial that I found relatively useful.

A tutorial on making a 3D plane with 2D photos. 

I have already started collecting photos of cities for my visual landscape, and with two minutes, I'm hoping I won't be doing too much photoshop work...

Since ATCQ never got back to me with a solid answer (we had a few back-and-forths, but they never answered the question with a yes or no), I have decided to move forward with something else. 

I really wanted to concentrate on something I am passionate about, I feel that any kind of work with an open concept will only be great provided it is cultivated through passion. Right now, I am in a class that looks at hip hop culture in context of the city and how it affects the social, political, and economic issues of the city (gun violence, feminism, poverty, rebellion, marginalized communities such as blacks, hispanics, and youth). I believe that hip hop, since its conception, has been misunderstood as black, ghetto music. Hip hop is most often miscontextualized in two of the four elements of hip hop (graffiti and rap; the other two are DJ'ing and B-boying). Graffiti is a different story, but we most often connect hip hop culture to the music we hear. Rap music is always consumed out-of-context and are, more often than not, misinterpreted in relation to gun violence, sex, and drugs. I could write essays about everything I read this semester about this kind of stuff.

I feel like the easiest way to communicate what hip hop is, is through its evolution of lyrics. What started off as the creative expression of harmless descriptions of the ghetto over funk samples, has turned into money, girls, and selling drugs. In between, we have rappers talking about getting out of the ghetto, getting rich or die trying, the reality of living a ghetto life (non-candycoated lyrics), money-is-the-motive thinking, and then finally achieving success, popping [champagne] bottles, and sleeping around, all while sleeping with one eye open and a gun in hand.

I plan animating 25 lines/stanzas of lyrics from the most influential songs in hip hop. I have already started constructing a list of 25 influential hip hop artists along with their groundbreaking song. I'll have to figure out which part of the song is the most reflective of the timeline of hip hop. The visual in the background will be pictures of the cities these songs were birthed in/the ghetto streets. These photos will be deconstructed on Photoshop, layered, and reconstructed on Adobe After Effects for the 3D look, so I can place the type in 3D planes. Like this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM8A03GLKL0

I e-mailed them last Wednesday (and tweeted them the day after) and it was only until a few hours ago that I got a response (tweet) back. It wasn't even a reply, it was a "e-mail me again". 

So I did. Hopefully I'll have a valid answer ASAP. 

In the mean time I did a parsing for their song (Can I Kick It?, will attach file later). Some words are very descriptive, so hopefully it'll be a breeze. 

The Brooklyn video I keep referring to is definitely something I wanted to do, but I also want to incorporate a little bit of The Beatles' video. But I have no reason to. It doesn't seem to fit a concept that I can connect all of them together with. I do feel that ATCQ's music is very lively, so in no way do I want to perceive their music a static as the Brooklyn imagery. I definitely want it bouncing around (at least, at the end of the 2 minutes of my video) because there is a sort of interlude where it goes crazy with this funk music. 

I probably should've constructed the video before I went looking for music to apply to my video. I'm not sure what kind of emotion I'm trying to convey through this project, but I wanted it to be fun and innocent (although it was an embarrassing moment) because it happened when I was young, and it made me feel, 'wow, of all things to happen, this happened'.