American Pie

American Pie – A Lyrical Analysis

For my final project, I conducted a lyrical analysis of Don McLean’s hit song from 1972 “American Pie.”  I chose this song because it is widely known for it’s many, many references to other musicians and political issues of the time, while McLean himself has remained mostly mum on what the meaning is.  This has left fans of the song with many theories as to the meaning of the lyrics, which I try to address in the video.

I chose to once again do a video because, well, it’s one of the few things I’m particularly good at.  In researching for the video, however, I put together a Microsoft Word file, in which the lyrics are parsed line-by-line using the comment feature.  Because the song lyrics move relatively quickly, I couldn’t include all of the information I wished to in the video – to make up for this, I’ve also included the word file as a PDF attachment on the website for your reading pleasure.

Blog Post 19

I’ve finally come to a definitive final project for this class.

And of course, it’s completely different from my original (sorta) ideas.

My plan now revolves around the Don McLean song “American Pie” – I’ll present the lyrics to the song, which reference a numerous number of different historical and musical events, people, etc.  Hovering/clicking specific lyrics will lead to a number of different kinds of media – a story about what the lyrics are (supposedly) referring to, links to music, YouTube videos, photographs, and so on.  The idea is to create a comprehensive history of the song “American Pie” and all of the nuances involved in the lyrics – a real history lesson of the song and the time it was created.

I realize it’s probably a little late to make such a massive change, but I feel like this is a little more a) concrete and b) doable than my original plans.  I’m very excited for this project and think it’s going to turn out very well, assuming I can handle the technical side of it.

Blog Post 18

As the semester winds down, I’m finding my ability to focus on this project to be a little more difficult.  In part, I imagine that this is because it’s due last – and therefore can be worked on the latest.  That said, I will finish it on time.

The project itself is slowly (perhaps too slowly) coming together.  I’ve started sketching out a bit of a story to link all of the ideas mentioned in previous blog posts together – ultimately, I imagine some of those ideas will have to be dropped, because it’s becoming difficult to synthesize everything into a natural, workable story.  I intend to still use the idea of the ransom note, though I’ll likely have to drop the redacted document idea.  I’m also thinking of embracing the game-type aspect of it a little more than originally planned.  Think something along the lines of Clue meets Resident Evil for a general idea – a large mansion, a murder mystery, multiple suspects, and maybe some monsters/zombies/other things to impede or halt progress.  Quite a bit of this is going to have to be accomplished via text (not unlike the Harry Potter story we read in class earlier in the semester), but I would like to have some sort of visual component (at the very least, for example, the layout of the mansion, etc.)

That’s where I stand right now.  With a major paper due for another class on Wednesday, I wouldn’t expect much to be changed between now and Wednesday night’s class – but I should be able to work on this project en masse over the weekend.

Edit:  There’s also a website called strix (strix.org.uk) that allows users to “mash up” words and images – I’ve already made a few of photographs I’ve taken with band lyrics, for example.  I may use that somehow – perhaps as chapter slides, where clicking on a specific word moves you into the next chapter (ex:  “You enter the hallway and see a photograph hanging on the wall, with what appears to be song lyrics scrawled across it.”  The photograph with the words would appear, and only by clicking on a specific word [mimicking you in person pushing a button on the photo] can you move on. )  I’m still working this part out, but I think I’d like to have a song visual/musical component to this project in the end.

Blog Post 17

I’m still in the process of figuring out the overarching theme of my final project.  Again, I still have the ideas (outlined in the previous post), but my link is missing – I don’t think I have it in me to pull an entire story out of thin air again (like for Project 1), but I definitely need something to link together all of the pieces.

As tends to be the case, I’m pretty good with planning out the tools, but not so great putting in into an interesting narrative.  It doesn’t help that the people I typically use to brainstorm with or bounce ideas off of have been inaccessable for the past two weeks.  Hopefully I can meet up with them this week, if nothing else comes in the next day or two.

In the meantime, I’ve started putting together the Sporcle quiz that I intend to use.  It’s a little time-consuming, but I knew that would be the case coming in.  I intend to finish it tomorrow, and then fine-tune it once I’ve got everything else solidified so it’s all uniform.

Blog 16

For Project 3, I’m leaning towards creating a story involving the following components:

1. A ransom note (magazine-cutout style, the links will lead to other interactive pieces – this will probably be the main portion of the project)

2. A document, with redacted style print – readers will click through to try to figure out what the redacted information actually is.  This is not well thought out just yet and may be dropped when I realize I’m being too ambitious again.

3. A Sporcle quiz – as mentioned a few other times here and in class, I’d like to utilize Sporcle in some manner.  Again, not entirely sure where it’s going to fit just yet, but it’s something I’d like to try.

Blog 15

Blog 15: what did you like about the short projects?  what was hard?  what do you want to try next? brainstorming for final project

With respect to the two short projects, I enjoyed the freedom that they offered – I feel very happy with both of my projects, despite the fact that they’re fairly different projects.  That freedom, however, proved to be the most difficult aspect of the projects as well – I have a difficult time focusing on a singular idea or project when I have little guidance as far as what is expected. (A close second for most difficult? Editing that damned video.)

As far as what I want to try next – I’m still not 100% sure what I’m going to do with it.  Again, I’ve got some ideas for form (for an example of the Sporcle quiz I was mentioning in a previous post, click here.  (The link leads to a Sprocle quiz, where one must guess the lyrics to a Beatles song without any clues – the idea being that you start by guessing random but common words, and as those fill in, you start to recognize the song and can fill in the rest.  As I mentioned earlier, I’m debating doing something similar as a part of a larger project, using famous excerpts from literature).

As for how that’s going to fit into the final project – or exactly what the final project will be, for that matter – well, I’m still working on it.  Hopefully class tonight will help to figure that part out.

Blog 14 – Final Abstract for Project 2

http://www.wix.com/burnettj/scrabble

For Project 2, I opted to shoot a video using the board game Scrabble and it’s tiles to tell the story of Scrabble (history, facts & figures, etc.).  The video is embedded on the website above, along with some information about the video and so on.

It’s very simple and straightforward; just click on the video and enjoy.

Blog 12: Final Project

After reviewing Lexia to Perplexia and the reaction (and reaction to the reaction), I feel as though I like the idea behind the piece, but I’m not really sure how much I care for the piece itself on a practical level.  I realize that maybe part of it (and electronic literature in general) is using the impracticality as part of the art, but it just bugged me to try to read.  Perhaps part of that is my computer – the work seems slow to load and the dialogue boxes that pop up do so over each other, making it kind of a frustrating read.

With respect to the final project – honestly, I have no idea.  I’m tapped out of ideas as far as stories or anything creative goes, so I’m going to have to really think about this one.

The one idea I have had was to use the guessing game website Sporcle (sporcle.com) as a component.  Sporcle is a site that dubs itself “mentally stimulating diversion” and is probably the top reason why I get things done so late as a graduate student – it’s truly addicting.  It allows users to create guessing games (Name the Stanley Cup Champions in order; Name the countries of Europe, etc.).  Some have taken song lyrics (Name the hidden lyrics) and had users guess what song it is with no clues – the idea being that you guess common words (I, and, the, etc) to eventually lead to guessing the hidden lyrics (say, a Beatles song).

I feel like this would make for an interesting component for my final project, as I could create a quiz that say, for argument’s sake, is something like “Guess the famous monologue from literature” – allowing the user to interact with the piece by guessing words and (hopefully) figuring out and typing out the full piece.  I’m not sure this would work for the entire final project, but as a portion of one, I’m excited at the possibility of using it.

Blog 11: Feedback

The feedback that I received from my group with respect to project 2 was largely positive, with little by way of recommendations other than to continue on the road I’m on.

It’s still pretty early in the filming and editing process, so I think it may have been difficult for the other members of my group to visualize what I’m seeing for the project in my head – which may be why there wasn’t much feedback given.  I’m okay with that, however, as I’ve got a pretty clear idea as to what I want to do with this project and simply need to put the time in to finishing the video work and editing it together.  The idea of the sped-up Scrabble game and the stop-motion photography for constructing words seemed to go over well, which I was hoping for.

I anticipate finishing the filming for the project by Friday, which should give me 10 days to get the project finished and uploaded (likely onto YouTube, with a Scrabble-themed website to house an embedded version of the video).

Blog 10: Project Map 2, Again

I’ve used some time during the spring break to finally figure out what exactly I’m going to do with project #2, and begin filming for it.

I’ve decided on using  time-lapse, stop-motion, and on-screen graphics to tell a brief, lighthearted history of the board game Scrabble.  The stop-motion and time-lapse portions will be done with Scrabble tiles, giving information about the highest scoring tournament Scrabble games in history, highest scoring words, who/when the game was invented, and other things of that nature.  I don’t exactly have a map per se as this will be similar to the video we watched in an earlier class – it’ll be a video to watch and it will have a strong writing component, but it won’t be particularly interactive – at least not the video itself, though I may try to create a website to host it on that may contain some interactivity if time permits.

I’ve done quite a bit of planning for this, and some initial shooting (with more to come next week), but it’s difficult to show this on here.  In class on Monday, I’ll bring my notebook with the planned information and a few clips of video to show exactly what I’m thinking about for this project.