I chose to do the remix version of the Hamilton song “my shot”. This song is basically the life of Alexander Hamilton himself. Moreover, being that “my shot” was and overview of his life, I wanted to make my remix “My Skin” about an overview that not only goes into my life but goes into how it is as a minority in my life. I wanted to give off a message to an audience of everyone. In that message I wanted people to know that we should soon come together and raise awareness for not only our race, but all races. Being black in America has some positives but it’s overwhelmed with negatives as well. For several years the black community has received numerous amounts of injustice cases and hate crimes that are hidden within the souls of mankind. Being black in America comes with many hardships and with those hardships already taking place, it just makes no sense to keep adding fuel to the fire from the system of what we call America. Moreover, this does nothing but causes more racial tension throughout our country and adds reasons for the desire of division once again.

In conclusion, the sooner we all gain justice for or people as a whole the better step we’d take as a nation to become stronger. In my project i didn’t want to just mention the hardships of the color of my skin, but also the power that the color of my skin could have in making a change for us all come together. At first I was just going to make small changes to the original song, but I knew I could expand on it by using this song to voice my opinion on what I think needs to be changed in our country. GOD BLESS AMERICA

By: Avery Showell

After articulating the feedback I have received there have been many changes to my draft. Just like Art, everything does not always look how you want it or how you want other people to perceive it the first time that you make up a piece. That is why you have drafts and people to look at those drafts and give opinions. These opinions end up making drastic changes, small changes, or no changes at all. But the purpose of them are for them to spark thought, and new ideas. Ideas that can bring masterpieces and steer you to reflect on the process you took and how you can use new techniques and viewpoints in the future.

It allows your peers in the class examining your work and raising questions about aspects of the work that you may need greater clarification in. They may also offer an unbiased view, highlighting when certain things catch an audience or make sense, given the particular situation and or class. 

At first, my view on my remix was simple and dry. What it was missing was an audience catcher or something someone would actually wanted to keep clicking through. The choice to turn my 10 Dual commandments into a slideshow and or power point came from wanting to impress myself with my work and see how I could work on visual and electronic communication. I now feel like my finished project will be outgoing to those interested. After the changes I have made, I now feel more confident in making slides and power points on different topics for different subjects. The process of learning from the different parts of submission on this remix and adaptation project influenced me to find new ways to get things done. Especially seeking the new avenue of plays and on stage performances.

by Grace Griggs

My proposed project was to write a D&D one-shot adventure inspired by Hamilton stealing cannons from the British, which is briefly mentioned in “Right Hand Man” pretty much like this.

My finished project is very similar to what I proposed, a 18 page pdf containing the written adventure, a map of Fort George, custom enemy stat-blocks and Character sheets for Burr, Hamilton, Lafayette, Laurens and Mulligan.

One of my favorite parts of this project was getting to monkey around with the actual history in order to tell the story I wanted to tell. In reality, only Hamilton and Hercules Mulligan participated, but I wanted to include the whole gang so I did. The cannons at Fort George were completely abandoned, but I wanted to make it more interesting, so I added some British soldiers on guard there. It’s a very cool feeling to make a story how you want it to be.

I found the peer review process very helpful. My biggest worry going in was that the person reviewing me wouldn’t get what I was trying to do, since it’s a little bit out of left field. To try to avoid this I made my draft as close to the finished product as possible. I was glad to see my peer review partner got what I was going for both on purpose and intended audience.

The main change suggested by my peer reviewer was that I add some text explaining D&D because she felt that someone unfamiliar with the game would be unable to play it and fully understand it based on my work alone. This is very valid, but unfortunately I was not able to come up with a good solution. Explaining the game system to the level required would easily double my word count and would possibly be overstepping the boundaries of copyrighted material. The issue is that a module like this is only intended to be read by the person running the game, the GM, and a GM has to have much more knowledge of the game than I can provide for something like this. 

The main changes between my first and final drafts are the addition of custom enemy stat-blocks and substantial editing of the character sheets, along with changing the wording in a few places. In my first draft, rather than providing enemy stats, I simply cited stats from published sources. Adding custom stats allows this adventure to stand on its own more and allowed the combat encounters to fit the Revolutionary time period better. In addition characters were upped from level one to two and a sheet was added for Aaron Burr. These changes combined make the adventure much more playable. Running the combat encounters I describe in my draft without modification would leave almost no chance for the players to actually succeed. They have a pretty good shot now.

Overall I found the review and revision process helpful and am happy with my finished product.

 

 

 

Reflective Blog Entry

 

 

The project I used was from the song 10 duel commandments. I portrayed my life to the song because I felt my life was a great topic and how I go through each day and my beliefs I live by. In my rough draft we used peer review and the person told me that my project was very “plain” and that the person was going through adversity in a time in his life. I took each comment I received and used it has constructive criticism to have an effective project. The way I made the project not boring I added pictures and used a color way that seems to go with the mood of the commandments. The power point seemed to be a great program to use to just, because it has a pause between each commandments as you switch slides and this to me showed me how it resembles the song in a small way. I also used picture to show its resembles before each commandment the song says a number so before each commandment I have a picture of a number to show the resemblances of the song and after I have each commandment and a picture that shows a similarity of each commandment.  This project was very useful because it showed me how songs I hear on the radio I can remix and possibly make into a new song.  Also this project made me think that these are really the things I live by and I never noticed until I did this project and  how these are the most important things I live by each day of my life. I also learned that some of things I live by alexander also live by. By me seeing this it showed me that people all over the world live the same way so it showed I wasn’t alone

I dreaded this project if I am being honest. I tried my best to wait until the last minute to start working on it. This is not because I did not care about this assignment but because I am not artistic at all. At first, I started brainstorming a theme to base my project on. I decided to tackle the ever-worsening problem of student debt. I am very passionate about this topic, especially because I suffer from it as well. I also liked this topic because it will resonate with my classmates.

My next step was to find the appropriate media to use for this topic. With limited artistic abilities, I decided to focus on lyrics. I chose to change the lyrics for “My Shot”. I chose this song because of the defiance feel to it. In this song, Hamilton lays out his ambition and goals. He believes in himself and will do his best to forge his destiny. I was able to relate to this song because I am also ambitious in my education. Like Hamilton, my path has been filled with challenges. However, they will not stop me from achieving my goals and aspirations. I wanted to express a college student’s experience while maintaining the lyrical and rhyming flow of the song. The lyrics talk about how students have worked hard to earn their spots in competitive colleges only to be scared off with outrageous tuition fees. It is not uncommon for students to accumulate six figures of debt. The feedback I received from my peer was very helpful. He really liked the premise behind the project but thought my lyrics needed to flow better. To fix that, I spent several hours stringing different words together to create a nice flow to the song. Towards the end of my project, I was actually enjoying the process and was not fearful of my artistic abilities anymore.

 

For the Remix Adaptation project, we had to chose a song from the Hamilton Mix tapes and remix them. When thinking about the phrase ‘ remixing a song’ you would think that we had to write a whole song with our own lyrics, but we had a more broader spectrum of ways we could remix it. For example we could draw a poster or make a slide show that depicts the song but in ways that correlate to you. For my project I chose the song ‘ Ten Duel Commandments’ which talked about ten duel rules to follow when in duels. With me being a football player, I decided to list 10 important rules that one should follow when playing Football. I put it in a slideshow and for each rule, I would put a jersey number that corresponded to it. Kelton Dawson peer reviewed my work and gave me the advice to add more pictures to give my audience a better understanding of each rule that I was depicting. He also informed me to make sure my audience had a clear picture of the message I was trying to portray, the last thing I would have wanted was a confused audience. Overall I felt like my project was pretty good. The hardest part for me was trying to be creative. I’ve always liked being blunt and straight to the point when it came to projects like this, but for the sake of my grade I had to try and find some creativity within myself. Another obstacle I was facing was the thought that my remix wasn’t enough. After all I was trying to make the most out of a list of 10 things. But some of my online classmates were doing the same song and seeing their examples gave me the right idea of what was enough versus what wasn’t.

By: Rahmel Bailey

When I first began this project my main goal was – go big. I wanted to create something that would push me to learn about new techniques in video editing and have fun while being able to show my creativity. In this project, I was able to do just that. However, the process wasn’t simple. I intended to complete the project very early and after choosing my song I had initial thoughts on an overall message that would guide the video. I came up with a song and video duo that would focus on the battle between life and legacy. However, I wasn’t sure how I would put everything together, and when I would have time to spend learning software. Last week I attempted to make a push while studying for a big exam. I completed the entire outline from start to finish and my next job was to record. My brother came to visit me over the weekend, which was great because he helped me put the pieces together. I spent the rest of my time editing but, there were some defects in the video because I am still learning the software.
I chose legacy vs. time as my theme because I aim to do work that positively impacts others and leaves a mark on the world. I have many interests that involve me tackling that challenge in different ways. I sometimes wonder if I have enough time to do them all. I have always been interested in music, movies, politics, engineering, African-American history, business, sports, and the list goes on. Therefore, I chose legacy vs. time.
The feedback from the Peer Review was very helpful and I took it into consideration. My partner Clarisa gave effective feedback that made me feel more confident about my idea for the project but it also questioned the scale of the project given my skills and time. Because of that feedback, I decided not to include some of the green screen ideas I had before such as a video background that was constantly changing and speeding up. For this project, I didn’t have enough time to add the features that I originally planned. It would have taken me days to figure out how to get that effect to work.
In all, I like how the project came out even if it has a rough look from the videography and editing. I think the rough look gives it a style that goes fits the music. In the future, I will take more time to learn the video editing software to create a more refined video.

By: Clarisa Colton

Going into this project, I was not totally sure what my final product would be like. When I first began work on the project, I mainly worked on learning the melody of the song. Since I haven’t touched my cello all summer, it definitely took me a minute to get back into the groove of things. I remembered why I love playing so much, and I’m so glad this project gave me the opportunity revisit this part of me. My first draft was mainly just a taste of what I wanted my final product to be. I recorded the first part of the song (Hurricane) – the part before the rap. This was partially due to time constraints and partially due to me not yet having a plan for the rap part. I received really good feedback for my work at that point, and really liked the idea of my peer editor to add more instruments to perhaps add some more emotion into the song, however I didn’t end up doing this mostly because I’m really not skilled with any other instruments, aside from basic piano skills, and didn’t have the time or resources to work that out.

Since my cello is at home and I have been living on campus this summer, I had to go home in order to record and work on the project. I was able to complete everything by only going home twice – but I developed ideas for what I wanted to do while still here. What I ended up doing for the rap portion of the song was playing basically the same background/bass line but doing a bit of improvisation during the section where Miranda usually does the rap portion. I thought this was effective and in line with the rest of my work because it captured the song Hurricane in a way that speaks in a slightly different way than the original. My main purpose in this project was to present a piece of music that showed communication can be achieved without the use of words and language. I feel that playing improv on an instrument is akin to freestyle rapping, but without words. It is a creative type of expression that can communicate just as effectively as speech, albeit in a completely different way. The rest of the process was basically me learning the rest of the song, then looking up what basic chords were used during each part of the song and kind of just going with what I thought sounded good. A lot of my life has centered around my social anxiety, and talking has been very hard for me for a long time, and cello has always been one of the ways I was able to communicate without words, so that is really want I wanted to get out of this.

If you want to check out my final project, I uploaded it to Soundcloud! https://soundcloud.com/clarisa-colton-772470817/hurricane-cello-cover/s-LK0rJ

By: Max Jarck

I produced a video of  iMessage conversations between Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and then between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. The original intent was to recreate ‘Cabinet Battle #1’ but as a sort of introduction I adapted the end of ‘What’d I Miss’ into an iMessage conversation as well. For some messages, I used the lyrics as they were with no changes but in most instances for the conversation to make no sense I had to make small edits. The conversations were between two people so in both songs I was eliminating characters and therefore tweaks had to be made. These tweaks remind me of changes made in Ashanti and Ja Rule’s cover of ‘Helpless’. In that too, they eliminate characters. In addition to these small changes I added lines based on historical facts discovered in readings for our previous project and from genius lyric facts. I got to throw a few extra “burns” into the conversation. I recorded the conversations by using the screen recording function on my iPhone and then using that and an older iPad to send messages from a script I had written.

The bulk of the work was editing this rough conversation down to a watchable length. I edited 18 minutes down to 8 mins. At 18 minutes it was hard to sit through but at 8 it’s the right length to tell the story. I cut long gaps in between messages, typos, and other unnecessary content. I purchased several instrumental versions of Hamilton songs. I matched the backing of ‘What’d I Miss’ with the Washington and Jefferson segment which is a segment from that song. The ‘Cabinet Battle #1’ backing plays behind Hamilton and Jefferson arguing and then ‘Room Where it Happens’ finishes the video. I ended the video with ‘Room Where it Happens’ because it tells how the deal that put Hamilton’s financial plan(what they just debated) into place happened behind closed doors. The songs represent a progression and ‘Room Where it Happens’ seemed more like a logical next step.

Technical difficulties hurt any chance for peer review but I already knew some of the big things that had to be done. This is when I cut the video down from 18 minutes to just 8 minutes. This adaptation shows how two cabinet members may debate something today. I opted to keep it serious because at the times these debate were very serious. It illustrates how communication has changed and offers a unique way to digest these two songs.