I “own” a piece of software for a while that I’ve never got to grips with. Today was the day. I had a great time playing with Adobe Premiere. Great fun. I’ll post up a bit more about my thinking behind the actual content of the production later next week, but I’m sure you’ll get the general theme given the wholesale lifting of a trailer from a certain well referenced movie about androids…..
With apologies to all the sources I stitched together:
Minecraft world: http://www.planetminecraft.com/project/cyberpunk-map-bladecraft/
Minecraft resource pack: http://www.planetminecraft.com/texture_pack/mrshortees-bladecraft-x64-cyberpunk-resource-pack/
Soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhJ7Mf2Oxs
Images used during the cinema scene via Pintrest: https://uk.pinterest.com/colin9068/future/
That rain!
This started off feeling quite playful however with the fragments of distorted dialogue and others sounds, it quickly became quite menacing. Just as Chenee says above, your video is a brilliant enactment of Sterne’s call to think about cybercultures in ways beyond the visual, for instance through the auditory dimension. I re-watched your video with the volume turned down and the effect wasn’t nearly the same, which would seem to prove Sterne’s point whilst highlighting your success in paying attention to the way that the sound worked with the images. This does though make me wonder whether we are framing this exercise correctly when we refer to a visual artefact: your video is so visual, but’s its also much more than that.
I’m intrigued by the concluding image in the slideshow of someone with their head on the desk surrounded by books. At first I wondered whether you were making a point about the evolving nature of digital culture? But on reflection I’m now thinking this is more of a personal reflection on the challenging reading we’ve been undertaking around cybercultures. Is this your ‘falling asleep whilst tackling Haraway’s Manifesto for Cyborgs moment?!
Thanks again for this really nice visual/aural artefact, Colin. With your permission I’d like to share it with a colleague who recently completed his PhD about a Minecraft club – I think he’d love to see this. Would that be OK?
The final slide fits many interpretations, all of them valid. I didn’t quite pull it off as I had hoped in my mind, I ran out of time (both with the soundtrack, and with my own scheduling) I’m happy with the end result and would be delighted to have it shared with others.
The last image starts off as part of the cinema screen, but the background slides off in to blackness. Part of me thinks that this type of distopyian future can only exist as a warning in a dream. I don’t think humans would choose to create a world like Bladerunner, so it would have to be a bad dream.
It’s also a comment that works well with the soundtrack at that point “more human than human”. A student in this world/future would not have limitations of learning caused by the need to sleep, or limits of concentration. A common thread of sci-fi is that knowledge will be consumed, downloaded. Making book-based learning a thing of the past. Much like the Matrix. But not like the poor student who has crashed on her books.
I also wanted to bring the stream of pictures back to some sort of educational connection. The second last slide is a building, possibly a university building from the future (I don’t think I made the transition obvious enough to really claim this worked at all).
That final image is also a loose attempt at ending on a bit of a joke, a lighter note, and you nailed it. I was certainly tired at the end of making it, but not as tired as the day I was reading through the Cyborg Manifesto.
I’d like to read the PhD about a Minecraft club, if the author was willing to enter in to a very one-sided trade. A video that took a day to produce compared to a PhD that probably took three or four years…!
Not the thing to do ever, never mind when making ethnographic study of online community 🙁 🙁
Hi Matthew
Your artefact was great I thought. It really evoked cyberculture in many ways for me and I appreciated the layering effect of cultures – Minecraft and Bladerunner, the obligatory dystopian weather on the way to a screening of all those futuristic images. I thought it was really well conceived and created and I felt I got a bit more for my bitcoin with the Pinterest board resources too! Did you video capture your Minecraft figure and then incorporate the images and overlay with sound? What do you think a “more human than human” would be/look like or do you think that is the film’s technobabble?
Cathy
Sorry Colin – addressed this wrongly 🙁
I’m sure you will explain this later but I’m a bit unsure how Adobe Premier fits in. Is it the video software that stitched it all together?
Yes, Adobe Premiere is a video editing suite. I used it to produce the video from the sources mentioned, as well as my own footage of my character in Minecraft.
Colin, what an original fun way to interpret what we’ve been doing on the course!
The thing that probably struck me about your post is the ease in which you move around the Minecraft environment. I never managed to do that well in Minecraft. Are you using it as a metaphor for how we navigate digital spaces in terms of technical ability and where we feel comfortable online? How we interact with others? I noticed some places were more populated than others.
I also like how you managed to enhance your artefact with the soundtrack from the film referencing Sterne. Thanks for your unique perspective.