MCC Work

- MIRACOSTA COLLEGE WORK BELOW -

Kid Rock - All Summer Long

Warren Zevon - Werewolves of London

Lynyrd Skynyrd - Sweet Home Alabama

'Sample' Project

Kid Rock - All Summer Long

I chose to do my project on a song(s) I really enjoy. Growing up I heard all of these songs on the radio, they all sounded very similar and I could never figure out which song was which let alone who sang what. It wasn't until I got older and learned about sampling in the music industry. I really enjoy sampling in the music industry it takes great parts from great pieces and makes something else. There isn't much of a historical significance to Kid Rock's song it simply blends two songs. Below are excerpts from articles I found online detailing the similarities and differences between the three songs.

Kid Rock’s "All Summer Long" samples "Sweet Home Alabama" by Lynyrd Skynyrd and "Werewolves of London" by Warren Zevon. Eight people are credited for writing "All Summer Long": the songwriters of "Werewolves of London" (Leroy Marinell, Waddy Wachtel, and Warren Zevon), the songwriters of "Sweet Home Alabama" (Ed King, Gary Rossington, and Ronnie Van Zant), Matthew Shafer (Uncle Kracker), and Robert Ritchie (Kid Rock). Kid Rock came up with the idea to do a mashup of "Werewolves of London" and Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" and add a new melody, resulting in the new composition "All Summer Long".

Although ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, ‘Werewolves of London’ and ‘All Summer Long’ do indeed have the same chords, they don’t mean the same thing in each case. The D in ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ is the tonic chord I. The C is a subtonic or flattened seventh chord II, and the G is the subdominant IV. It starts in the tonic, drops down a tone, drops a perfect fourth to the subdominant, and then returns to the tonic at the beginning of the next cycle. ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ conveys a sense of being continually on the move. The D in ‘Werewolves of London’ is the dominant V, the C is the subdominant IV, and the G is the tonic I. It starts in the dominant, then drops down a tone to the subdominant, and finishes each cycle there.

‘All Summer Long’ is built on samples of the piano riff from ‘Werewolves’ and the guitar riff of ‘Alabama’, and shifts its sense of tonality. They all share the same chord progression. D, C9, G. They’re quite different songs but the chord structure means the backing can be played identically.

"Anit-Vax" Propaganda Ad Project

I chose to make an ‘Anti-Vax’ propaganda poster. Vaccines have been debated since their development but since the pandemic the debate has been pushed to the forefront of everyone’s mind. The video on George Creel and the CPI mentions that propaganda is supposed to elicit emotions like fear and hate, so I purposely chose a topic that would elicit those emotions. Along with Creel and the CPI as guides for the project I also used the ‘Tell a lie but make it a truth’ and ‘Make something beneficial a detriment’ prompts to guide my project. I think it is a bit ridiculous that despite practically getting rid of a variety of once-deadly diseases (polio & smallpox) vaccines are still debated with topics that have little to nothing to do with the actual science of the medicine. Vaccines have become very politicized making it easier to play on the audience’s emotion. I wanted to design something reminiscent of WW1 and WW2 posters, I wanted to make something that had a short, strong and direct message. I included words like ‘freedom’ and ‘deadly’ to elicit some emotional responses as well. These words were intentional as they are the most used debating points for the anti-vax side, I thought if I include something that is already being used by that side then it will bolster support from them while showcasing the points to the rest.

Despite not being a spoof ad my goal was to satire a select few of the anti-vax community’s points against vaccinations. The anti-vax side posits that the requirement to get vaccinated is infringing on their American freedom. If an American’s freedom is in jeopardy then they’ll fight tooth and nail for it and if stated that vaccines will take that away from them then they’ll fight against it in the face of science and common sense. I also feel that my target audience of the anti-vax community have an easy time following a crowd if it aligns with their beliefs.

"Anit-Vax" Propaganda Ad Project

"We Are The National Science Foundation"

My spoof ad is based on an ad I saw on Adbusters, I chose to create a spoof ad for the National Science Foundation & I'm satirizing the dichotomy between science and sex in our society, I wanted the ad to be informative and indicative of what the NSF does while also playing on the taboo nature of sexualizing anything in our society, but also utilizing the common notion that sexualized products sell. The National Science Foundation is part of the United States government but it is an independent agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. The NSF is a primary driver of the U.S. economy, they enhance the nation's security and advance knowledge to sustain global leadership. They focus on areas from astronomy to geology to zoology which is why I selected them; my main goal was to bring awareness to them and their efforts. My initial idea was to satire their lack of engagement but since they’re government-funded with an annual budget of $8.5 billion they don’t really need to bring awareness for revenue’s sake but I still wanted to satirize society’s lack of interest in their efforts. My thoughts are that people don’t think that science is sexy or attractive enough so my spoof ad utilizes sexuality to grab the viewer’s attention, once they read all of the blurbs on the ad they’ll realize the text has nothing to do with the image but they know a little more about science news. These headlines are all from recent articles I took from the NSF’s actual website, when I was browsing their site for interesting articles they all suffered from the same thing and that was a lack of interesting headline/main images that went along with the articles. The whole point of my spoof ad is to play on the fact that the NSF would never use anything like sex to sell anything or use it to bring awareness to any of their efforts but I think utilizing taboo subjects to allow the exposure of science should be encouraged; if it could help further scientific research do it. I managed to get all of my images from pixabay.com, a royalty-free website. Overall I really like the organization I’m creating this spoof ad for, I wanted to use real headlines to bring awareness to their actual efforts but I wanted to use something better than just their dry scientific images to get the attention of more people. I would really want to see if an article on their site used this image or an image similar to it how it would perform relative to their other articles. I understand they don’t really have an incentive to get any money from people so sharing information isn’t that important to them but I’d say for the sake of science and bettering this country it would benefit everyone to know more about what’s going on with science and to learn about how much good this organization really does.

"I have mountains of work on my desk"

Metonymy - I had a difficult time trying to figure out what I was going to do, like most I frequently use the four options but when it comes down to trying to think about what it looks like can be very challenging. I made a couple different versions of this project before I figured out which one I liked the best. My initial project saw layers in a room whos heads were replaced by sharks, I figured that if you see a shark in a suit and tie that you would associate that with being a lawyer, I though this would work but I didn't feel like it made enough sense or really exemplified Metonymy, so I decided to try over again. On this second I tried to look for some examples of metonymy and one phrase that I tried to work with was 'want some of my Danish' when offering someone a piece of a Danish pastry. I tried to keep it very simple and tried to make the meaning of the word appear through the visuals but I didn't really feel like it was working, I think it was too simple.

Finally I went back to search for some more examples and I found one that made sense to me and was actually kind of topical since I was doing homework, the phrase which also inspired the title of my work, "I have a mountain of work on my desk". For this attempt the first thing I searched for, was a desk with a good orientation that might fit some mountains on it. Before I downloaded any images I made sure they were all going to be royalty free. I found the image of the desk on Pexels.com HERE. I found the image of the mountain on Pixabay.com HERE. The first draft of this project just had a single mountain on the desk but I didn't think it conveyed the message enough. I decided to add more mountains but when I tried to read the image, I could still only say "there's a mountain on a desk" I still needed a visual for "work". I decided to simply add the word "work" composing the mountains, now when I try to read what is being visualized I could at least say, "mountains (images of mountains) of work (homework or office work visualized w/ the word ) on a desk (background image of the desk)". My main goal was to try to visualize the phrase I started with, I tried to include a visual component for each piece of the phrase. My main challenge was trying to make a "mountain" of "work" I tried a couple different things when trying to make a mountain of work, one thing I tried was making the mountain a silhouette with white words, but I couldn't really tell the silhouettes were mountains the shape wasn't unique enough. I also tried to reduce the leading of the text but I felt that it made the mountain too busy and looked more like a texture rather than actual text. I wanted the word to be readable but still create a pattern.

"Sharks & A Danish"

Project Drafts

"I have mountains of work on my desk"

The Abduction of Hollywoodland

Initially what gave me the idea for my assignment was reviewing the assignment and reading 'Historic' in the details. When I think historic I think old so it leads me to simply Google vintage images, after scrolling a little I saw a vintage image of Hollywood, and being enrolled in a film class this semester I thought it matched up great. After knowing what I would use as a background I started brainstorming some ideas of objects I can use, I thought of some great Sci-fi films and came to H.G. Well's War of the Wold. I saw the foreground elements and I thought it would be great to incorporate UFOs abducting the classic cars. I simply searched for images of UFOs and found some royalty-free images with a transparent background which made it easier to just select what I wanted.

After finding an image size that met the assignment requirements, I visited where the image came from Here. From the website, I downloaded the largest image I could and made sure it was at least a jpg or png. I also downloaded the UFO image from Pixabay Here.

When I see the original image I think there is a small sense of awe because of how old it is, but what I wanted to achieve was making a serious and historical image into something humorous. I thought to utilize the natural focus of the elements in the original image to help further the humorous point of view, I added UFOs abducting the vintage cars but I thought why not go a step further and have one abducting the large building in the background. Another element in the original image that I think furthers the humorous POV is that there is a man running up the road and a woman poking her head out of the car window - both probably excited to see the Hollywoodland sign instead due to the placement of the UFOs it looks like they are running away from and staring at them respectively.