Well, here it is: the last of your 3 major writing projects. For this assignment, you will be asked to write a soundtrack for your life. Each song you choose will contain the following elements: 1 embedded video, the name of the band & song, 250 words that contain an O-O account of the video, a BRIEF narrative strand relating the video to your life, an O-O account of an object that relates to an object in your life AND the video, & 3 relevant hyperlinks for each song (1 of which must be the band's site & another of which must be a place to acquire the song legally).
The soundtrack itself will consist of 8 songs (no more no less) & each video must be engaged directly. By this, I mean that you need to take an aspect of the video, whether it be visual or auditory (music or lyrics), & address how that element speaks to or for your life. To this extent, you will be utilizing the video as an entryway into your life by writing through the object (i.e. O-O approach). But, once you enter that doorway, you are NOT to provide a straight narrative of some event that took place, but instead say something about who you are through another object, thing, idea, etc. As mentioned in class, you will most likely need a BRIEF narrative strand to connect or transition between different objects or thoughts, but this should in no way be the focal point. I would HIGHLY recommend looking toward the essays we have read for class as examples of how to do this (e.g. Sanders' paragraphs on his hammer). Furthermore, the order of your videos MUST be chronological in nature, according to the part of your life it relates to. Finally, your essay will best be served if you have a common theme running throughout.
The final draft of this project is DUE, Friday 18, December 2008 @ midnight.
As a matter of example, here is a sample I wrote myself. Please use the formatting for your project that I have here (i.e. margins, embedding, band/song preface). Notice how the first two sentences address the video directly, then the third sentence transitions into an account of how the "Atari-aesthetic" relates to my life (even so, I defer the use of the first-person "I"). Sentences four and five provide further description of the nature of an "Atari-aesthetic," while sentence six once again relates it to my childhood. Of particular importance is how sentence six utilizes 1) the gaming units as the subject of the sentence, 2) contains SPECIFIC jargon with regard to games, and 3) employs an overloaded prepositional phrase through the use of cataloging. The final sentence returns to the Octopus Project video and provides the vignette with a certain amount of closure, but does NOT attempt to develop an epiphany, meaning, or overt lesson for the reader other than relating the "Atari-aesthetic" back to the video itself.
As a matter of example, here is a sample I wrote myself. Please use the formatting for your project that I have here (i.e. margins, embedding, band/song preface). Notice how the first two sentences address the video directly, then the third sentence transitions into an account of how the "Atari-aesthetic" relates to my life (even so, I defer the use of the first-person "I"). Sentences four and five provide further description of the nature of an "Atari-aesthetic," while sentence six once again relates it to my childhood. Of particular importance is how sentence six utilizes 1) the gaming units as the subject of the sentence, 2) contains SPECIFIC jargon with regard to games, and 3) employs an overloaded prepositional phrase through the use of cataloging. The final sentence returns to the Octopus Project video and provides the vignette with a certain amount of closure, but does NOT attempt to develop an epiphany, meaning, or overt lesson for the reader other than relating the "Atari-aesthetic" back to the video itself.
Octopus Project, “Music is Happiness”: Between cuts of the band playing on what appears to a Saturday Night Fever dance floor, this Octopus Project video splices in clips of a gerbil scurrying through several different retro-video game worlds: Legend of Zelda, Berserker, & Asteroids just to name a few. The gerbil-scenes present the viewer with an Atari-aesthetic that anyone who grew up in the 80s can no doubt recognize. As a child, many of my weekend mornings were spent in front of the television set playing highly-pixilated arcade games on my family’s Atari 5200 gaming unit, &, a few years later, on an original Nintendo Entertainment System. At the time, these ancient games were technological wonders; in retrospect, our amazement appears laughable. The squared-off images were more abstract figuration than mimetic, & the movement of individual entities mimicked the herky-jerky nature of a poorly conceived stop-action film. A far cry from the life-like images & fluid movement today’s systems offer, Atari & early Nintendo games nonetheless enabled my brothers, friends, & I to enter into fantastical worlds in which we could play the roles of a happy-go-lucky star fighter with a penchant for shooting at robots with laser beams, a jungle adventurer attempting to save a distressed maiden (all the while leaping boulders & dodging arrows), or a chivalrous knight in search of golden coins & fire-breathing dragons; & this is to say nothing of classic arcade games such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, or Frogger. By the look of the video, it would seem that the Octopus Project may have shared similar childhood experiences (Not to mention that the music itself sounds as if it could be used in one of these games).
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