Category: Summary Posts

This week in ds106, we dove into what is easily the most challenging and rewarding unit: video. This unit pushed us to become critical viewers of cinema before we even opened our editing software. We learned to “read” movies, analyzing techniques and storytelling, and then applied those lessons to our own complex video stories. This post is a summary of my work and reflections.

Part II & III: Reading Movies and Analysis

My analysis of cinematic techniques can be found in my previous posts:

• Analysis of Cinematic Theory
• Deconstruction of a Scene from The Matrix Revolutions

Part IV: Video Assignments

This week, I completed the three required video assignments, each in its own post, telling its own story.

1. A Character’s Story: Vengeance in the Shadows This was the required assignment to tell a character’s story. (3 Stars) I chose to focus on The Batman and his singular drive for “Vengeance,” using the shadows and sounds of Gotham to define him.
   • A Character’s Story: Vengeance in the Shadows
2. Return to the Silent Era: Captain America’s Elevator Showdown For my first video assignment (4 stars), I took the iconic Captain America: The Winter Soldier elevator fight and re-imagined it as a silent film. By changing the audio and visual style, the entire meaning of the scene shifted from tense to comedic.
   • Return to the Silent Era: Captain America’s Elevator Showdown
3. Spoil a Movie: The Circle of Life… and Death For my second video assignment (2 stars), I took on the “Spoil a Movie” challenge. I condensed the entire plot of The Lion King into 22 seconds, focusing on the juxtaposition of Simba’s birth and Mufasa’s death to spoil the story.
   • Spoil a Movie: The Circle of Life… and Death

Part V: Summary Reflection

• What did you learn? I learned that sound is more than 50% of the video experience. The “Return to the Silent Era” assignment proved this beyond a shadow of a doubt. You can take a scene of brutal violence, add a jaunty piano track, and it becomes slapstick comedy. Audio isn’t just background; it’s the entire emotional context.
• What was harder than you thought it would be? Editing to a beat. For the Batman video, getting the clip to appear exactly on the word “Vengeance” took way more time than I expected. The same goes for the Lion King video—finding the exact frame where Scar says “king” and Mufasa starts to fall was a challenge.
• What was easier? Finding clips, surprisingly. Once I knew what story I wanted to tell, it was easy to identify the exact 1-2 second clips I needed. The “Spoil a Movie” assignment felt daunting, but when I realized it just came down to two key moments (Simba up, Mufasa down), it came together very quickly.
• What drove you crazy? Why? File formats and conversion! Just as the prompt warned, getting downloaded video files to properly import into my software was frustrating. Sometimes the audio would be missing, or the video would be choppy. It required a lot of patience and re-downloading to get clean-working files.
• What did you enjoy? Why? I genuinely enjoyed the “Return to the Silent Era” assignment the most. It felt the most “ds106″–it’s a perfect example of taking existing media and creating new meaning through remixing. Seeing that tense, serious scene become genuinely funny just by changing the music!

For the second part of this assignment, I applied the theories of film analysis to a specific scene using the “Look, Listen, Analyze” method. I chose the final “Big Fight Scene” between Neo and Agent Smith from The Matrix Revolutions, as it is visually and audio dense.

Here is the scene.

Analysis 1: Visuals Only (Volume Muted)

Watching the scene without sound, I took notes on the visual elements.

• Pacing & Editing: The number of cuts is staggering. The scene’s pacing is erratic, rapidly alternating between extreme slow-motion (speed ramping) and hyper-fast cutting during the exchanges of punches.
• Camera Angles: The camera almost never views the characters at eye level. It is dominated by extreme low-angle shots, looking up at Neo and Smith, or extreme high-angle, wide-angle shots showing them as tiny figures in a vast, destroyed city.
• Lighting: The lighting is dark, monochromatic, and artificial. The entire scene is bathed in the familiar green tint of the Matrix, with the only significant light sources being flashes of lightning and the “code” effects from their impacts.
• Movement: The movement is entirely superhuman. The wire-work allows characters to hang in the air, fly, and absorb impacts that would be fatal, visually reinforcing their god-like status.

Analysis 2: Audio Only (Screen Off)

Listening to the scene without visuals, I focused on the audio track.

• Music: The music is the most dominant element. It is a massive, operatic, and swelling orchestral and choral score. The music, more than anything, communicates that this is not just a fight, but an epic, almost religious, confrontation.
• Sound Effects: The sound effects are hyper-exaggerated and non-realistic. Punches are not “thwacks” but deep, percussive “booms.” Movement is a “whoosh,” and every lightning strike is a sharp “crack” that punctuates the action.
• Dialogue: Dialogue is minimal. The few lines spoken (“This is my world!”) are declarative and thematic, not conversational.
• Ambience: The sound of driving rain is a constant, steady layer that provides a chaotic backdrop for the music and effects.

Analysis 3: Synthesis (Full Viewing)

Watching the scene with both picture and sound, I saw how the elements synthesize.

• The visual cuts are perfectly timed to the audio. Every fast cut lands on a musical beat or a sound-effect “boom,” creating a jarring, percussive rhythm.
• The moments of visual slow-motion are always paired with a major crescendo in the orchestral music and choir, signaling to the audience that this is a moment of high significance.
• The dark, rainy visuals are reinforced by the constant sound of rain and thunder, creating a unified, oppressive, and chaotic atmosphere.

Reflection

Minimizing one of my senses was incredibly revealing. Watching without sound, the fight almost looked repetitive and rhythm-less. Listening without video, I realized the emotional story is told almost entirely by the musical score. The scene’s “epic” quality comes from the audio, not the visuals.

For most of my life, I have been a passive watcher of movies. This assignment, however, challenged me to “read” film; to deconstruct its visual and auditory language to understand how it creates meaning. To begin this process, I read Roger Ebert’s “How to Read a Movie” and analyzed three short videos on specific cinematic techniques. This post will detail my response to Ebert’s methods and summarize my key takeaways from the videos.

Roger Ebert’s Methods

Ebert’s article provides a powerful toolkit for understanding the subconscious language of film. His methods are effective because they tap into deeply ingrained cultural and psychological associations.

On Camera Angles: Ebert’s assertion that low-angle shots make a subject look powerful and high-angle shots make them look weak is, in my view, the most effective and universal technique. It works because it forces the viewer to physically and metaphorically “look up” or “look down” at a character, mimicking the body language of submission or dominance.

On Movement and Placement: His idea that left-to-right movement feels “correct” and right-to-left movement feels “wrong” or arduous is a fascinating concept. This likely works for Western audiences conditioned to read text from left to right. This makes left-to-right movement feel like progress, while the opposite feels like a struggle against the grain.

Summary of Cinematic Techniques

To further my understanding, I watched three videos on specific directorial techniques.

Hitchcock Loves Bikinis: This clip was a revelation. It perfectly illustrates the “Kuleshov effect,” which Hitchcock calls “pure cinematics.” He demonstrates that by juxtaposing the exact same shot of a man’s smiling face with two different images (a woman with a baby vs. a girl in a bikini), the audience entirely changes its interpretation of the man. The key takeaway is that editing, not just acting, creates the performance and meaning.

Kubrick // One-Point Perspective: This video is a compilation of Stanley Kubrick’s relentless use of one-point perspective, which creates perfectly symmetrical images that seem to recede into a central vanishing point. I learned that this technique is incredibly versatile: it can create a feeling of intense focus, formal order, or a deep-seated psychological unease and obsession, as the viewer is relentlessly pulled into the center of the frame.

Tarantino // From Below: This video showcases Quentin Tarantino’s signature “trunk shot” and other extremely low-angle shots. The key takeaway is how this specific angle functions as a storytelling device. It places the audience in a subordinate or voyeuristic position, making the characters who tower over the camera seem exceptionally powerful, dominant, and in control of the situation.

Together, Ebert’s article and these videos provide a foundational understanding of how directors use a non-verbal language of angles, edits, and composition to tell a story.

This post is my summary of the first audio storytelling genre for ds106. The assignment required creating several audio projects, including a mandatory “Spooky Season” story and enough other assignments to total at least 9 stars. After creating each piece, I posted them to my blog and have collected them all here, along with a final reflection on the process.

Part I: My Audio Assignments

1. Spooky Season (4 Stars)

• [Spooky Season]
• This was the required assignment to create a 20+ second spooky story. I created a scene of someone walking in the rain and entering a haunted house.

2. Make Noise From a Normal Sample (3 Stars)

[Cat Meow into Industrial Noise]

• For this assignment, I took a simple sound of a cat meowing and completely transformed it using distortion, reverse, and echo effects in Audacity.

3. All the Relaxation (2 and a half Stars)

• [Relaxation]
• The goal here was to create a loopable, relaxing soundscape. I layered sounds of wind, rain, and a spontaneous bird call to build a peaceful natural scene.

Part II: My Reflection

This was my first time diving deep into audio editing, and it was a really interesting experience.

• What did you learn? I learned the fundamentals of working with a digital audio workstation (Audacity). The most important skill I picked up was audio layering; learning that you build a “soundscape” by putting different tracks on top of each other. I also learned how to use the Time Shift tool to control when sounds happen, which was key for the Spooky Season story.
• What drove you crazy? Why? The SoundCloud copyright bot. That was easily the most frustrating part. I used sounds from freesound, but my Spooky Season story still got flagged and taken down immediately. It drove me crazy because I was following the rules, but the automated system didn’t care. It was a good lesson in why you need a backup plan, and I was relieved I could just upload the MP3 directly to my blog.
• What was harder than you thought it would be? Making something sound good was harder than I expected. It’s easy to drag and drop 10 sounds on top of each other, but it just sounds like a mess. The “All the Relaxation” assignment was a good example. I had to adjust the volume levels and use fades to make the wind, rain, and bird calls sound natural together, rather than just being a wall of noise.
• What was easier? Honestly, getting started with Audacity was easier than I thought. It looks intimidating, but for these assignments, I only needed to know a few tools: the Selection tool, the Time Shift tool, and the “Effect” menu. The “Make Noise From a Normal Sample” assignment was really fun and surprisingly easy; just layering effects like Distortion and Reverse created a cool result really fast.
• What did you enjoy? Why? I really enjoyed the “Make Noise” assignment. It felt like pure experimentation. There was no “right” answer, and it was a lot of fun to take a normal cat meow and completely destroy it with effects until it sounded like something from an industrial or sci-fi movie. It was a great way to learn what all the different effects do without any pressure.

This week I learned why and how audio adds so much with so little on a screen. Ira Glass’s short talks on storytelling gave me simple rules to follow in order to achieve this affect. On top of that, Spooked showed how these rules feel in a finished piece.

Ira Glass

Ira Glass Reflection

Ira Glass showed how to build a chain of actions and keep a clear question pulling the listener forward; cut anything that doesn’t raise or advance that question; talk like a person, not “radio voice”; accept the gap between your taste and your early work and close it by making lots of finished pieces.

Spooked

Episode: Did my Reflection Reveal Something Sinister?

Spooked Reflection

In this episode, I heard clear anecdote-plus-question and a close-mic narration. All of this helps to build tension without cheap jumps, or any image at all (If you utilize it as a podcast, and not watch the video.)

Q&A

What did you learn?
That momentum in audio comes from action + a driving question, not always fancy editing. If a moment doesn’t push the question, it’s likely unimportant. Conversational delivery builds trust, and the only way past the taste/skill gap is to finish more pieces.

What was harder than you thought it would be? Why?
Hearing (and naming) the layers was something I perceived as difficult. When music beds rise or disappear, when silence is used on purpose, and how ambience changes feel all aid this notion. It takes focused, no-distraction listening to notice those choices. I feel like this is something I’d struggle implementing correctly.

What was easier than you expected? Why?
Spotting the question once I listened actively. After Glass’s framework, I could hear exactly where the episode planted the mystery and how each beat pulled it forward.

What drove you crazy? Why?
The urge to multitask while listening. If I glanced at my phone, I missed a small production choice, and the scene lost impact. Focus matters with audio. This is likely audio’s greatest weakness, as it relies on both the audio having a grand hook, and the listener to actually be hooked.

What did you enjoy? Why?
The way silence + close voice can land a reveal harder than any loud sting. That restraint in Spooked is what makes the story feel real rather than theatrical.

This week was all about making clear design choices to make actual storytelling pieces; Just posters and a cover that work at a glance.

Part I – Links to my 3 Design Assignments

• Motivational Poster – “Quiet Coast”
• Event Poster – “Beach Cookout Today”
• Magazine Cover – “Catch of the Week”

What did you learn?

That simple, deliberate choices beat “busy.”

• For the motivational poster, a low horizon, breathing room, and one clean line of type can set the whole mood.
• For the event poster, friendly centered type + a warm field = instant readability (people should know what/when/why in one glance).
• For the magazine cover, realism hinges on matching scale, light, and a soft shadow rather than piling on effects.
  Here, I learned to pick the message first, then make type, color, and space serve it.

What was harder than you thought it would be? Why?

The composite on the magazine cover. Figuring out how to cut myself out of a picture without anything unneeded took lots of small tweaks. Trying to figure out a good contrast for the picture was rough too; one pixel too bright and it looked pasted on.

What was easier than you expected? Why?

The motivational poster. Once the line “Let the tide carry the noise away” was set, the layout practically designed itself—low horizon, centered title, and done. GIMP had a built in blur effect that did most of the heavy lifting.

What drove you crazy? Why?

What drove me crazy was trying to figure out the best way to pose the motivational poster. At first, I was going to do a simply blur and add a white text box so that the words didnt blend into the back-ground. However, I was unable to figure out how to do this. So instead, I blurred the edges, which made the text at the bottom really stick out.

What did you enjoy? Why?

I really liked to change the color and mood work on the beach images. Tiny shifts (warmth, edge blur, saturation) changed the feel immediately, and seeing that happen in real time was satisfying. I always find messing with the presets fun!

Conclusion

Through the three design projects, I learned a lot of practical use case for my skills. For example, deciding what you want people to notice, give it space, and let the rest get out of the way. Hopefully I can continue to use these skills further in my life!