Project 4 - Nobody Knows Me

After much input from various people and an extensive editing process, my project 4 can be found by clicking here. It's very important to click "watch the video in high quality" just below the project display screen.

I was going to just embed this video to my blog but I can not embed the high quality version of it for some reason.

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I knew from the first time that I read the syllabus for this project that I would end up doing this fourth project based on something political. This election season has been filled to the brim with all kinds of scandalous, radical and ridiculous assertions from all over the political spectrum. For some reason the American people had become enthralled with voicing their own opinions on the subject--in a way that I don't think has ever happened.

Leading up the Presidential election, I didn't think that there were a lot of strong opinions towards the Presidential candidates. Everyone had a couple of things that their candidate stood for, to give as examples if he or she were ever in an argument. But, there wasn't an onslaught of emotional reactions.

Finally, the hours after the election, I was watching as my Facebook newsfeed was flooded with varying degrees of emotional reactions from my friends. Most of them seemed elated about Barack Obama winning, but there were some rather ignorant ones that caught my eye. It was these statuses that really sparked the lightbulb in my head for this fourth project.

For this project, I wanted to showcase the range of emotions that my friends on Facebook were experiencing minutes after the election was called. I think it is so interesting that I am able to understand how people are feeling via a social networking site. So many people use this website as a medium for expressing themselves, and I couldn't think of a better way to portray my friends' feelings.

I struggled a bit coming up with a song that would fit as an anthem for this project. The project actually began with the idea of focusing only on the statuses that were disappointed with the results of the election. As I started taking the screen shots I realized there were a lot of very powerful, positive messages that I felt should be displayed as well. I came to realize that a lot of people seem to think they know Barack Obama and John McCain personally. Asserting that Obama is a Mulsim (which he is not) and that our country is going to fall apart (it already has) as well as McCain is going to die soon, so why choose him, were all statuses that portrayed the unrealistic impression that my friends actually know these candidates personally.

The song I settled on was a song by Madonna called, "Nobody Knows Me." Click here for the unofficial lyrics. This song was on one of the only Madonna albums that I liked, "American Life." This album was basically centered around the ideals and culture of America. The song really seems to vocalize what I feel Barack Obama or John McCain would be thinking if he actually met any of my friends and their assertions of either candidate. The reality is, none of my friends actually know either of them, yet they believe that they truly do.

I used a few different methods to create this project. First, I took screen shots using my Mac, of each Facebook status that I thought was significant or powerful in one way or another. I took about 40 screen shots, and after reading through and editing, settled on the ones that fit the overall idea of what my friends were feeling at the time. I then used Photoshop to blur out each person's name and photo. I did this to create anonymity amongst my friends and so that they weren't offended by my using their information for a public video. I then imported every edited screen shot in to Final Cut Express and created a cross-fade effect for each. After I created the image rotations, I imported the song, "Nobody Knows Me." The final image I used asserts that America is "doomed." I thought this was ironic considering America is in the worst shape that it has ever been. I decided to do a zoom in on the word "doomed" to show some of the irony that I was trying to portray throughout the piece. Also, it adds a bit of drama to the otherwise steady movie. I exported the video in YouTube's preferred codec, H.264, but as with other videos I have tried to do for this class, was unsuccessful in the finished file. It seemed to skip just like the others. I finally tinkered with the export codec and found settings that were perfect for the YouTube upload. I suggest watching the video in high quality (an option on the actual page) to get the best viewing exprience for this video.