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Daniel Anderson, Author

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ePoem - Good Pages

The Assignment

Live Version:



Edited Version:



Revised Version:



Discussion

In this assignment, we were asked to assemble a series of ePoems.  The first one was a live ePoem, and it was recorded all in one take by using Camtasia to capture the screen as I moved, played, paused, and resized a series of video and audio windows on the desktop.  For this project, the most important thing for me was creating something that was both visually and sonically something enjoyable to experience.  I had a specific vision for what I wanted to ePoem to mean, but this was secondary in my opinion to creating something that was very pretty and highly polished.  Thus, I chose to play, in a quadrant format, some of the prettiest visuals and most interesting audio I could find.  This included a series of scientific and mathematical videos, one by Derek Muller, another by Vi Hart, and one by Brady Haren.  I grew up watching these videos, and they always captivated me with interesting ideas and beautiful images.  In the second half of the ePoem, I used a series of slow motion videos that I particularly enjoyed in this same quadrant format.

In the subsequent revisions to this poem, I spent the majority of my effort simply polishing the visuals and honing in on creating something very enjoyable to the senses.  Meaning, while certainly important, was still secondary in my mind to creating something beautiful.  Thus, in the second video in this series, instead of recording the performance live, I assembled the whole project in the Camtasia editing environment.  This allowed me to fine-tune the timings and audio levels of every clip in the poem.  To this end, I spent a fair amount of tie trying to coordinate the visuals in the poem to sync up with both the music and the text of the poem.  The third and final video took this even further, polishing more and sticking to a clean, rigid quadrant structure.

Technically, this was a difficult piece to create, simply due to its dynamic nature and the number of moving parts that needed to be coordinated.  I wrote a short program that printed out each word of the poem one at a time.  This created an interesting visual effect that, again, I believed was pretty.  From there, I had two sets of three videos that played around the quadrant containing the text, and brought up a series of transparent clips of chemical reactions that I overlayed on top of everything else.  I also heavily employed animations in this assignment, and had most clips moving and fading in and out over time.
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