Convergent/Divergent: Two Videos and One Song

I wrote a new song this week called Tell Everyone You Know.

Then I asked Terry Elliott to Zeega it up, as he has done in the past. He did.

Before I saw Terry’s final version, even as he was working on it, I thought to myself, what if I used Mozilla Popcorn Maker to do my own video version. How would my digital work compare to Terry’s? What would he focus on for the visual? I found myself thinking of phones and dancing ..

So what choices did we make?

Where the pieces converged:

  • Obviously, the music. I uploaded the song into Soundcloud so that he could use it in Zeega. Both Zeega and Popcorn have search functions within Soundcloud.

  • There’s a line about holding hands, and I think we both heard that as a visual cue. My hand-holding scene goes a bit longer than his, and he instilled some humor while I went for the emotional scene.

  • We both used mostly animated gifs. Actually, that’s all I used for mine. While Popcorn allows for videos to be edited and used, it seemed like the gif was the way to go. Terry sprinkled some static images in his.

  • Both videos conveyed the theme of the worlds, of coming together to change the the world for the better.

Where the videos diverged:

  • Interestingly, Terry went very political in his, right from the first shot. He tweeted me about it, saying that the song coming out near to MLK Day had him in a political frame of mind. I was moving into another direction, choosing a lighter theme — with the dancing, and the phones. The tone of each piece is different due to those choices.
  • Zeega and Popcorn are similar as video construction tools and yet, not …. particularly from the experience of the viewer. In Popcorn, you (the viewer) follow my editing trail, so I was very careful in where gifs started and ended, trying to sync ideas directly to the music and words. With Zeega, the reader has more agency. You (the viewer) click when you want the image to move on. Terry is thoughtful in the sequencing of images, and there is even a rhythm you can achieve with Zeega, if the viewer plays along.

Now here is where it could interesting, if you want to play along. Both Zeega and Popcorn allow the viewer to remix a project. If you have a Zeega account, you can hit the “reply” button on Terry’s project and it will bring you to a platform to remix his media in a multimedia reply. When you remix a reply, it gets tacked on to the end of the original project, which is interesting and disruptive in itself, right?

remix terry zeega

So:

In Popcorn, with a Mozilla Webmaker account, you can also remix any project. Just find the “remix” button at the top of the screen, click it and begin. So, if you go to my project, you can use your own vision for the song.

kevin popcorn remix

kevin popcorn remix2

Think of it as an invitation. If you do remix, be sure to leave us a note. I’d be honored …

 

Peace (in the muse),
Kevin

2 Comments
  1. I am working on a remix of your piece in Popcorn and Weavly. I think what these ‘toys’ mean to me is that they encourage play. In fact recently I have been able to do similar play using the social bookmarking tool Diigo. And part of play is getting others to join in the infinite game of play for its own sake. The beauty of tools like these are that they encourage play. I think it would be really cool to have a separate rubric for judging apps and web tools that would measure how fun they are AND how much they enable play and more fun. Zeega and PopcornMaker? I give them 95’s because they have a beat and you can dance with them. Funz.

    Today’s captcha cartoon: “mad livid”, whoa, that is highly agitated.

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