This is the Music Video Unit where we collaborated with film students to come up with an original music piece and a video to go along with it.

I was in Group 6, with Ryan Rosh, Helena Steffens, and Gabrielle Makower. Chiara Neyman was featured in our video because we loved her voice, and none of us wanted to sing. Ryan was the other Web/Audio student while Helena and Gabrielle were the Film students in our group. I wrote the lyrics and recorded some of the music while Ryan Rosh did all of the music (along with some other students like Gilles Laurent). Helena and Gabrielle filmed us while we worked and created a beautiful video that reflected the fun we had making the video and music. You can view it under the tab Music Video. The song that we came up with is called "Shine and Shimmer". I thought of the song since the unit was during the winter months, so Christmas lights were a huge inspiration to both the song and the music video.

I have to admit, I didn't like the Music Video Unit very much. First, being put in a group with people I didn't really know was uncomfortable, and I didn't feel like I was contributing much, but I also didn't know how to bring it up.

The upsides of the unit were the lyrics that I wrote and the art pieces that we had to create. I'm proud of them.

I had a lot of fun making the poster and the CD design in general. We had to come up with a fake band and what genre they were, and then design a poster, what their CD would look like and what the CD casing would look like. I had some art block with creating the concept, but then as I was trying to create my original idea at home on Photoshop, my cat kept bothering me because I wasn't paying attention to him. He finally laid down in my line of vision and glared at me. That's when the idea popped into my head. What if cats ruled the world? What if humans were at the disposal of giant cats? I also had help from reading the Sandman by Neil Gaiman, but that's beside the point.

I was kind of listening to Be Prepared from the Lion King, and came up with the idea of a Republic. Thus The Cat's Republic was born. I created everything in Illustrator and learned to really love the program since it made duplicating and creating certain effects easier than what I would have had to have done in Photoshop.

For my music poster, I came up with a alternative punk rock band called The Cat’s Republic. The idea of The Cat’s Republic came from my cat who, at the time, was laying on my arm wanting attention, and I thought, what if this cat ruled the world? He’d probably recruit humans to pet and feed him. Thus, the idea of a cat republic came to mind and the genre along with it, since I envisioned a lot of outsiders and loners joining together in the republic.

Everything was created using Adobe Illustrator, and I learned how to duplicate and mirror objects that I wanted in order to help both at the same time as well as frustration since a lot of the poster was based in symmetry with the repetition of cats in the background as well as the foreground main cat. I chose colors that I thought would help give off a sense of authority and leadership, with a black cat at the front with a bright red hat inspired by captain’s hats. The cats in the background are slightly gray in order to give depth to the poster, and the background color is slightly green to help bring out more of the red and to help show off the background cats a bit more. The font I used for the band name complimented the cats since it’s very curly and slinky as well as the font for the location, place, and time, which looks more uniform.

And here you can see our music Video that Helena and Gabrielle made using their software from Film, and you can listen to our music created with the help of ProTools.

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Making Of
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