The right screen shows what someone who prefers conservative media might choose. Following Dean’s speach, some networks repeatedly played the scream, literally taking the sound out of context. There’s even a GOP sponsored ad comparing Dean to Hitler. Comic relief is provided by a handful of twenty-something white male conservatives spoofing the scream at a GOP convention.
We are free to choose what we consume, but what makes a media consumer chose a particular news outlet over others? They can certainly DVR news shows that are aligned with their outlook, or watch media clips from like-minded blogs. As viewers make their choices, conservatives tend to consume conservative media, and liberals consume liberal media, and we are what we eat. But by fine-tuning our news consumption, it’s all too easy to overly reinforce our accepted worldviews, unconsciously silencing alien ideas and dissenting opinions that could otherwise broaden our understanding and increase capacity for higher level thinking.
First I collected the news media clips. Choosing the “Dean scream” as an example, I searched Google Video, You Tube, and media commentary blogs including Crooks and Liars and Daily Kos. The videos I found were formatted in QuickTime (.mov), Windows Media (.wmv), Realplayer (.rm), and Flash Video (.flv) formats. The QuickTime and most Windows Media files were easy to download, the others were not.
The streaming Widows Media, and streaming Real Player files could not be “downloaded” using conventional methods. I found an open source Real Player alternative called mPlayer, and after playing the streams I was able to extract them as files from the mPlayer cashe.
Flash Video files are downloaded by and played through a flash player plug-in rather than the web browser directly, so it is impossible to download them conventionally using the web browser. However I was able to use the activity window in Safari to see what elements were being downloaded in the background. By watching the changes in the activity window, I was able to isolate the temporary URL of the Flash Video as it I was progressively downloading from Google Video or You Tube. If I was quick enough, I was able to direct the browser to that URL and download the file. I added an .flv extension to the file so that the operating system would be able to recognize it for what it was. I got the idea from a Fire Fox plug-in and web application called Video Downloader 2 that seems to follow the same methods automatically, but less reliably.
Now that I had the files locally, I needed to convert them to editable files. I was able to convert most of them with QuickTime Pro, utilizing a variety of 3rd party codecs. I utilized Telestream’s Flip 4 Mac (Windows Media Components for QuickTime) for the Windows Media files, and the Free Software Foundation’s open source Perian codecs, for the Flash Video Files. To convert the cashed Real Media streams, I unpacked a Real Media installer package, extracted the codecs, and utilized them the open source FFmpeg command line application through Major’s FFmegX GUI.
To edit the files, I loaded them into Final Cut Pro, and artificially inflated the size and frame rate of the smaller clips to make them all uniform. I
then
edited three sequences to represent the three news perspectives I outlined in my statements.
In order to edit the timing of the clips to encourage synchronicity between them, I needed to view all of the clips at the same time in Final Cut Pro. By exporting out drafts of my three sequences and re-importing them as “different camera” angles of the same event, I was able to “trick” Final Cut Pro into allowing me to use it’s “multi-clip” feature view the clips simultaneously without rendering, as though I was screening simultaneously recorded footage to edit something akin to a music video.
I used Photoshop to create overlays and masks doctor some of titles on the news feeds and remove network watermarks where they were inappropriate.
Then I exported an open media format (.omf) file from Final Cut Pro and imported that OMF into Digidisign’s ProTools. I mixed the audio for the sequences to make them more uniform and understandable utilizing various McDSP and Waves plug-ins. I added audio compression or expansion, equalized the clips, and removed noise as needed to counteract some of the artifacts of the multiple compressions and conversions these files had been through.
I exported my three sequences and converted them in Flash Video files using Flash 8 Pro and used Actionscript to code the functionality of their playback. I coded them all to preload, buffer, and then play simultaneously. The flash application then tracks the x/y co-ordinates of the mouse cursor, related them to the x/y co-ordinates of the center of the videos, and uses the Pythagorean theorem to triangulate the distance from the mouse to the center of the video.
The program then compares the distances, decides which video the mouse is the closest to, and sets the volume and alpha of the closest video in relation to the cursor distance. Simultaneously, it sets the alpha and volume other two videos using an inverse of the same relationship.
