School-fall2017-new Media

Selected work produced as part of the New Media 1 class at MSU-Billings, in the Fall 2017.

PhotoShop Basics

This project mixed video, still images, and various graphical elements. The video came from the 1929 film, "The Man with the Movie Camera," (used for another project listed below) and we were encouraged to present the imagery in a new narrative. I created a travel poster for a fictitious company in the Soviet Union, an idea I expanded in the "Utopia Travel" project below.

Click on the image to enlarge it.




Storyboarding and Planning Project

While this project did not result in a finished work, it fed into several other projects, "Utopia Travel" and "Mind the Gap." It did allow me to explore some possibilities for an installation that used analog recording devices to play selected recording mixes and encourage viewers to add their own to the layers of sound. The content of the prerecorded sounds would be political and religious extremist broadcasters of the 1950s.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

This is a short sample of the sound that would compose the initial prompt to the viewer/participant.

Below is a video of a proof of concept. It shows a tape loop running around two reel-to-reel machine. The left channel is playing back on the left machine and the right machine is recording on the right channel using a microphone.






Stop-Motion Animation

This assignment was open in content and we were encouraged to try our hand at stop-motion animation. I shot the scene with an iPhone 5S and imported the still images into Premiere for post-production.






The White Mouse Project

Project Prompt (adapted from Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs):

Purchase one white mouse from a pet shop where they are often sold as live food for snakes and lizards.

1. This is your white mouse. You are responsible for it.
2. Do with your white mouse what ever you feel is necessary.
3. Your white mouse is your muse and your subject.
4. Your white mouse is your audience and your critic.
5. Your white mouse is your friend and your enemy.
6. Your white mouse is your slave and your oppressor.
7. Your white mouse has needs and desires. Choose to respect or disrespect it.
9 and 10. Create with your white mouse.

NOTE: This is a critical thinking project. You can take it literally, metaphorically, conceptually, etc. Find connections between the 2 references, interpret in your own way. There is not a wrong way to achieve this assignment except for not doing it!

As I was traveling out of state during the course of this project, acquiring a live mouse would be an issue so I interpreted the prompt to mean I only had to acquire a white mouse where live mice were sold, not that my mouse must be live. From that I created the "Mari Mouse" project. This was built largely on the road and in Astoria, Oregon. I shot the images with an iPhone 5S, imported them to a MacBook, and built the pages using OpenOffice Writer. The resulting document was exported as a PDF.

Mari Mouse (PDF, 43 mb)




The "Leaves" Project

For this assignment I used a Canon Rebel T3 digital camera to shoot a collection of shots at a local cemetery. I wanted to portray mortality and it was near the end of the fall with the trees almost done losing their leaves. Instead of shooting video, I shot all stills and used a slow shutter speed, 1/5 second, to capture the motion I saw on this windy day. The images were imported first to Lightroom and then to Premiere.




Utopia Travel Project

The prompt in this assignment was to watch the 1929 film, "The Man with the Movie Camera," and extract scenes to use them in a new narrative. First I made a poster using PhotoShop, shown above, and followed that up with a video using Premiere.

The narrator is a computer generated voice. I fed my script into a web site that translates English into Russian-accented English. I fed the result into a web site that translates text into the spoken word.

I placed the time of this film in 1935.

Images were sourced from a variety of places, primarily the National Archives. Music was sourced from old Russian recordings found online.

Read my artist statement by clicking here. Artist Statement
Project: Utopia Travel

Artists have, for centuries, appropriated elements of work by other artists and incorporated them into their own work to create new narratives. I have followed this tradition in my "Utopia Travel" project.

The prompt for the work was to repurpose scenes from the 1929 film "The Man With the Movie Camera" into a different narrative. With my interest in politics of the early 20th-century, particularly the American left and the drift into communism by many who saw that party as the only anti-fascist movement in the time of American isolationism, I chose to look at how the Soviets may have attempted to appeal to those Americans who questioned the country's direction in the face of the Great Depression. To this end I looked at the issue from the Soviet viewpoint and utilized America's own media, in this case, photographs largely commissioned by the government, to sell a message about the failure of capitalism.

Recognizing that propaganda is practiced by all, the pro-Soviet scenes, taken from the "The Man With the Movie Camera," paint a positive viewpoint of life in that country and ignores the vagaries experienced by their people at that time. Missing are the shortages of food outside the cities and their low level of level technology that exacerbates their suffering.

Done in the style of an infomercial, the piece mocks that form of marketing while employing the specious-type of claims that advertising is so well known for. The message also features some decidedly anti-American elements that may create a sense of ire in those not taking in the entire message.

Vince Long, 2017






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