Palaces Out Of Paragraphs

English 1102: Hamilton and Writing

Reflective Blog

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Reflective Blog
by Ye Jun Kim

left: Jenny Lind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Lind)

right: Maria Reynolds (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/alexander-hamiltons-adultery-and-apology-18021947/)

My adaptation was made by mixing two different original works with similar stories. I gathered insipration from the song “Say No to This” and came up with my remix. Listening to the song, there was a movie I kept thinking of, called “The Greatest Showman”. Although the real story of P.T. Barnum and Jenny Lind was not an actual affair, in the movie, the two were portrayed of having a short affair, like Hamilton and Reynold’s affair.
The woman in the drawing is Maria Reynolds and the man is Alexander Hamilton. However, the setting of the scene is in the movie, “The Greatest Showman”, after Jenny Lind performs at a big stage and kisses P.T. Barnum right before the curtain call. This is also right after Jenny Lind sings “Never Enough”, which is written on the background of the drawing.
I originally was planning on making this on pencil and paper, since I had no experience with computer graphics. However, as I kept thinking about making the remix, I wanted to try something different, even though it might not be as well drawn as if I drew on paper. So, after I submitted my proposal, I changed my mind to draw on the cimputer, which didn’t turn out that bad after all.
One thing I wish I could have done better is to better incorporate both original works into the remix. I also kind of regret not shoosing a more popular film to do the remix because after I drew the whole thing, I felt like people wouldn’t get the point of the remix.
Overall, there weren’t any big changes that was suggested, but tiny details were suggested to tweak to enhance the artwork. To reflect on the suggestion, I added more shading on the two characters and changed the hand written words to typed words. Adding shadow to the characters further defines the characters itself and allows the artwork to look more complete. I also changed the words to print because my handwritting didn’t seem to resemble the perhaps ‘old’ times.

Reflective Blog Post

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By: Kristen EnglishImage result for hamilton memes

The feedback I received for my project through the peer review was very helpful and insightful. It gave me a different perspective on some things and helped me to see what was relevant and what was not. I made changes according to some of the suggestions but decided to keep some elements as well. Overall I felt as if the peer review was extremely beneficial and I am glad that I was given the opportunity to participate in it.

One suggestion I was given was to rewrite the blog entries from my project and make them sound more formal as Hamilton would have. I decided not to take this suggestion into the revision process and I was not intending to tell the story as Hamilton would have in the past. My goal was to tell the story of the song My Shot from a modern perspective. I felt like using modern dialect would help to tell the story more than using dialect that Hamilton might have in the Revolutionary Era.

Another suggestion I was given was to rewrite the character in the blog posts political views to align with Hamilton’s views in real life. I also decided not to take this piece of advice, as my goal was not to make the character in the blogs exactly a mirrored representation of Hamilton. The goal was to get the spirit and to tell the story of the song My Shot and I feel like the background and views that the character I created has helps to tell the story from a modern perspective. I did however take into consideration my partners suggestion of getting rid of characters who do not add anything to the story. I agree that some characters were added who did not contribute to the overall project.

In conclusion I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to have another peer review my work and to tell me what could be fixed and what could be made better. I believe through this project I have gained a deeper understanding of the meaning behind the song My Shot and really admire Miranda for creating such an inspiring and deep piece.

Remix Adaptation Reflection

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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.

The project I decided to do, in case you didn’t know, was all about “Alexander Hamilton”, portrayed by this wonderful human being

Remixing The Remix…

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By: Ahad Khatri

 

The project I decided to do, in case you didn’t know, was all about “Alexander Hamilton”, portrayed by this wonderful human being…

 

With the constructive criticism my partner offered me, I decided to change the dynamics of the song that I created as a response to “Alexander Hamilton”, a song that incorporated lyrics regarding my health and mental struggles compared to Alexander Hamilton’s political and social struggle.

While my partner understood the premises and the purpose of my song, as well as its intended audience, which she felt could be extended to Tech students as well as general fans of the song, she mentioned improvements I could have made in the flow, recording and the narration of the song, all of which I took drastic measures to improve. The rough draft I submitted was recorded early in the morning while the fan was on, without instrumentals, but I intended on bringing in the music to my adaptation to give the listener an interesting experience.

My partner appreciated the effort I made to create the song in such a short time; I enjoyed reading her peer review and felt like the changes that she recommended were both realistic and helpful at the same time.

I then sat down, opened my computer, took a deep breath, and put my final draft and my rough draft side-by-side. For rhyme scheme purposes, for example, I changed “hospitalized”, because the word felt awkward in terms of flow, to “admitted”. I made sure that each line of my song had enough syllables to fully capture the beat of “Alexander Hamilton”; as I was making minor changes to my song, I could feel my sense of creativity ebb and increase at different points. For example, I tried to mimic the lyric “I’m the damn fool that shot him!” from the original song; I had to think about what or who constituted the biggest part of my life, as I had already mentioned my parents. I decided to place God in my lyric, “God’s the one who saved him”, to emphasize the emotion I was feeling during my surgery and the miracle that saved me.

Finally, I felt that the hardest part about creating the song was both finding a quiet place where I could record my voice, as well as relating the high and low points of my life to Georgia Tech, or where I currently am. Like “Alexander Hamilton” somewhat narrates the life of Alexander Hamilton chronologically, I decided to take the past events of my life and view them as stepping stones to my present. The most important lyric that reflected the turning point of my hardship and “strife”, as I mention in my song, was, “In G.T. he could start a new life”, which related to “In New York you can be a new man” from “Alexander Hamilton”. It was an amazing experience writing the remix in third-person and incorporating an anonymous narrator into the performance of the song because I was able to express myself more freely and clearly recount the different moments of my life. Here is hoping you will enjoy my remix!

https://soundcloud.com/ahad-yousuf-khatri/ahadyousufkhatri-remixandadaptation/s-3trQB

Reflective Blog Entry

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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.

Remix Reflection

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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

A Reviewed, Revised, Rewritten, Revamped Remix

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By: Adair Garrett

The revision process of this project helped my project grow to become stronger and more informative.  Upon first reading through the comments, I was surprised by my peer reviewer’s understanding of my piece.  Multiple times he commented on how “dark” my piece was, which was interesting to me because most of the facts I included came straight from news that had been published within the past two months.  After receiving comments from my peer reviewer, I immediately began editing my letters. He noted that I had a few grammatical errors, which I took care to correct quickly, but I waited two days before going through and addressing the rest of his comments.   As suggested in class, reading through the comments at first left a certain impression – and triggered my impulse to defend my work – but time encouraged me to be more open to implementing some of the suggestions.

I didn’t agree with his idea to change the letters to specify an intended audience.  My peer reviewer asked whether I intended to write both for immigrants and for the families of immigrants living outside the US.  I did not change anything in my work as a response to this question because my intention was to write this for anyone whose lives have been touched by the detainment or deportation of immigrants.  He also noted that the use of Hamilton lyrics throughout the letters may impact the span of the audience.  Here, I agreed; I knew that incorporating lyrics within the letters would drive the story to be told a different way, but I also wanted to pull as much from Hamilton as I could to make it more of a “remix”.  

My peer reviewer left many comments that I did apply.  His questions drove me to reflect on my own project and how I could make the project better.  My peer reviewer suggested that I add a letter written from Ann Mitchell to Hamilton, stating that it would add to my project if “two sides of an overall story” were included.  Upon this suggestion, I read over again my draft and decided he was right, even though it required me to do more research about Ann Mitchell and about news stories I could pull from. I added a letter from Ann Mitchell but did not include lyrics from the musical in her letter because she did not have a role in the musical that I could draw from, and there was no character that mirrored her position in Hamilton’s life.  I decided to leave her letter empty of references to the lyrics within the musical and focused on making sure her letter relayed the difficulty in communication faced by parents of detained immigrant children. I also wanted to include historical information of Ann Mitchell’s life since her role was left unmentioned by the musical.

I continued to make changes after adding the letter from Ann Mitchell.  I tried to edit the letters so they could be a stronger means to make my argument about the similarities between the themes of the musical and the news stories of today.  I decided to add references throughout the document so audience members could refer to the article that lead me to make a claim (this was a continued response to my peer reviewer’s comment that my take on the news was so dark).  I also wanted to take the form of the document and put it into a more interactive and aesthetic form. After asking for suggestions from many people, I received the advice to use the templates for medieval-themed video game manuals.  When I formatted my project onto the letters, however, I lost the citations. I decided that I would keep the formatted documents as they were (without the references) and turn in both the PDF of the old, handwritten letters as well as a PDF of the original document including the references.  This way, I kept the aesthetic of a handwritten letter while citing the appropriate information in the original document.

Here is an example of my final product:

Or you can check out my entire project:

RemixandAdaptationProject

Remix and Adaptation Project Reflection

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By: Keval Bollavaram

While I really enjoyed creating my adaptation to Hamilton, I believe I took on too much when submitting my original proposal. I originally planned to compare Hamilton to two other musicals with my analysis focusing mostly on cross comparisons between musicals. After doing more research, I learned that the amount of available scripts for musicals that are a good comparison for Hamilton are very limited. In the end, I opted to focus my analysis on aspects of Hamilton with some cross comparisons to A New World: The Life of Thomas Paine. The specific aspects analyzed were speaking parts in Hamilton versus number of mentions of major characters.

For the coding part of my project I tried to simplify phrases that I was searching for to keywords within the musical. This process actually gave me more interesting data to interpret than data I gathered from more complex phrasing. Furthermore, I originally intended to analyze more locations and possibly create a separate code specifically for this task but after testing some of the songs, I had a difficult time finding correlative data. So, I decided to leave out my location data and include only one location in my analysis in order to demonstrate insignificance.

The peer review workshop was with a doubt the most guiding part of the project. Not only did I get great feedback, but the workshop forced me to think from the perspective of my audience. The feedback that I received focused mainly on how my work was organized so that the reader could clearly interpret what I was trying to portray. From the feedback, I decided to take a deeper look at the meaning behind my analysis. I realized that some of phrasing and word choice was a bit bombastic and lacked true analytical substance. This led me to go back through my data sets and pay attention to the details in my work. I ended up going further into my analysis and drawing possible conclusions based on the statistics that I gathered; this is something I did not have in my rough draft.

Below is an interesting graphic I found on Hamilton ticket sales compared to other Broadway shows during Hamilton’s rise to prominence.

Adaptation Reflection

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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.

A look at the editing process.

 

Remix Reflective Blog

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By: Karl Risley

 

In my proposal, I said I would pull lyrics from countless songs from Hamilton the play, envisioning more of a remix that was composed of Lin Manuel’s lyrics. I ended up creating most of the lines on my own. I did end up using lyrics from “Hamilton” and  “Wait For It”, and “the World Was Wide Enough”. My extensive knowledge of the duel correspondences, from the Historical Annotation project, allowed me to immediately dive into writing the lyrics without researching.

Emily Moseley was my peer review partner. She was only able to get a glimpse of the guitar playing and read the lyrics. She told me that I need to make sure I understood the tempo of the song, and suggested that I add the word “the” into the line “aim for sky”, which was a great suggestion that I implemented. I also added a very brief introduction before the song that provides background to the song. Her edits were helpful because they were focused on improving how a listener would perceive and understand the song. Because she was a listener, she knew exactly what the song needed to take it to the next level. She caught things, I the producer/writer, couldn’t catch.

 

This process was very different for me because it required me to rely on things that were out of my control. Mainly, the idea of having a women sing the vocals was great, but proved difficult to actually pull off. I asked a friend of mine that I knew could sing a little. She was out of town until July 8th, and due to her busy schedule, could only meet me once. I think proposing a video was ambitious. I even planned on her wearing a shirt that I knew she had that said, “Dangerous Woman.” She forgot it. There was no way a video could have been made while we were recording. While one of us was doing well, the other would mess up. She was reading the lyrics from her phone, while I was focused on playing guitar. The video would not have seen either of our faces. It also took forever to record, but was honestly a very fun process. We never were able to get through the whole song in one cut, so I had to edit good pieces of each take together, which also tested my editing skills that I did not have, nor was I really planning on using extensively. As soon as I knew I wanted to make this song, I began to learn the guitar for it. With my guitar skill level, it was very difficult, I could barely play the sequence for thirty seconds because my hand would cramp and get tired from the power chords. I was very impressed with how much that improved. When the recording day came,I didn’t started feeling the fatigue until an hour in.