Meme

The term meme is shortened from mimeme, Greek for "imitated thing". Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976 and the word has transformed into meaning an expressed idea regarding cultural phenomena. 

My personal favorite meme is the Successful Black Man which takes stereotypes of black men and turns them into unexpected results. Here's my favorite memes out there. 

Mixtape

After experiencing severe struggle trying to work the app, I finally figured it out thanks to the help of Liz, who taught me how to import from my history. Regardless, I stand by my rant earlier this week in that Mixtape lacks a certain sleekness in its design. 

In terms of the actual project I chose to do mine about time itself and how it constantly keeps moving. Time never stops. It can feel slower and it can feel faster but it never stops. And in turn it moves us.

http://mixb.it/_1TbXrF56

Top 5 Remixes

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x132a29_funny-cat-jumps-on-sail-song-awolnation-hit-music-video-parody_music

This is a cat acting perfectly to the beat of Awolnation's hit Sail. Or it should be called Fail. 

http://www.youtube.com/embed/NQ9zKd1kZ6A?autoplay=1

Eminem's obsession with his mom's spaghetti

http://www.youtube.com/embed/hPdB2jFBhq4?autoplay=1

Classic but still great

http://www.youtube.com/embed/tnCBQAyY814?autoplay=1

Songs in real life remains as a top choice to watch when I'm bored

http://www.youtube.com/embed/g87Xyt2agWQ?autoplay=1

Rapping Brian Williams is still the greatest thing to ever be made

Current Remix Progress

Everything going smoothly on my end as I finally decided on the song Finale by Young Money. The song incorporates ten or eleven rappers as they collaborate together for about five minutes. I'm going to lip sync the track over ten or eleven disney characters which is fairly generic in concept but I plan on crossing over different movies giving my project a little edge from others. The toughest part will be matching the words with mouths but once I can nail that it should be smooth sailing.

Mixtape fails in comparison to Vine and Instagram

First off, yes I procrastinated on this. I opened the app on Friday intent on getting this over with and being done with the project. And this post is not an excuse for why I did not do the assignment by any means. With that out of the way, the app mixtape is just a disappointment in video edit technology. 

The source material available by others for you to incorporate in your own videos is so shallow that you'll be lucky to actually find the kind of video you're looking for. This is mostly due to the fact that the search engine runs off of literal keywords. For example, searching for the song "Say Something" is practically impossible because you get videos ranging from "Jimmy is going to say Hi to me today" to "Something is in my shoe ugh". The app does not separate videos into categories either which further clunks everything together as well. None of the users on Mixtape use more than one hashtag, a staple part of Instagram which allows users to browse through keywords at an accellerated pace. 

Then there are the actual technical difficulties that I faced. It might just be me but for the life of me I could not figure out how to save clips from other videos. There was no help section to assist me and I still doubt that it is even possible to incorporate other people's work into mine. I recorded about 15 seconds of material and looked to finish it off with a decently funny video clip I found on the site. But the closest I could get to saving the video clip was copying the URL which did absolutely nothing for me. 

All in all, I was actually excited when I heard we would be doing an app project since I never heard of Mixtape before and it had a neat concept. But the execution was so disappointing and it looked and felt more like a poor man's Vine instead of its own separate entity. 

Project One: Final Results

Project One: Self Portrait

When first trying to do this project I think I was trying to be too creative and too involved with a deep thought provoking presentation. At one point i was even considering taking a video of me setting the photos on fire to symbolize the new person I have become, like a phoenix, and then bring in the ashes as the physical proof.

But no. That's not who I am. I'm not a pheonix. I'm simpler than that. But not to the point of boredom. I have my unique characteristics. So i went for a different approach to this project. I am personally more complex than a simple photo grid or photos cut into different shapes. I feel that I'm more complicated as a person than a 2D presentation so I set about finding a 3D form to present my photos.

So then I thought of my personal interests to decide what exactly I wanted to do and at first I was going to try and incorporate soccer, since it is a large part of my life, but I chose not to because it isn't the whole part of who I am. So I thought some more and realized that I value wisdom and knowledge more than any other quality. After this, I decided to turn my photos into the embodiment of wisdom and i turned them into fortune cookies.

It took me roughly five hours to properly fold them but I am more than satisfied with the outcome. Enjoy.