Behind the Scenes – Go ahead, keep your head in the clouds

The Making of Welcome to Night University

Katie Hartraft — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 00:49:28 +0000

For my final project for Domain Fellows, I knew I wanted to make something audio-related. Music is a huge part of my life, but I am no singer and I only know how to play the flute (which is back in my room at home). A close second is podcasts. Choosing a podcast to emulate was easy: Welcome to Night Vale is a quirky, funny, creative podcast — just up my alley.

After deciding I wanted to make my own Night Vale episode, I decided to see if I could find a basic outline for what the basic episode entailed. What I found was even better: a how-to guide for writing a Night Vale episode.

For the music, I went back to where I found the music for my aesthetic video and went to the artists’ page. There, I found a treasure trove of music by Podingtonbear. I combed through the well-organized albums (they’re grouped by genre/mood and I love it) and picked out the music I thought sounded most “Night Vale” to me.

In the initial writing process, I needed to generate ideas. So from Bob’s how-to guide, I used the a random idea generator called inspirobot.

I am an artificial intelligence dedicated to generating unlimited amounts of unique inspirational quotes for endless enrichment of pointless human existence.
-inspirobot

This bot helped me think creatively, abstractly, and (most importantly) absurdly. I also highly recommend mindfulness mode. Editing a couple phrases generated by the bot, I was able to make my introduction and proverb for my episode and continue on writing my script.

Lastly, during the writing of my podcast, I decided to make a cover photo that parodied the original Night Vale art. I mean, how could I resist?? Using the Noun Project and Canva, I made this beauty to the right.

Gotten all the way here and haven’t listened to my podcast yet?? Check it out!!

Aesthetic Fly BTS

Katie Hartraft — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 22:28:54 +0000

This video was a fun little creation I used to (sort-of) teach myself Final Cut Pro. I initially had no direction, I just wanted to combine a bunch of videos I have had saved on my phone for the past few years. Most of the videos I had first taken on Snapchat with no intentions of using them elsewhere. Because I had taken the videos vertically, I had to adjust the aspect ratio to 4×5 to make it consistent across the whole video.

For music, I went to Free Music Archive and searched for something to use in the background of the video. Searching for “indie music” I found one user who had a music style I enjoyed. Upon finding a piece I really liked, I had a better idea for putting together the video. The beat of the music gave me the idea to take sections of the videos and change their speed and reverse them.

Making this video has made me want to create a series of aesthetic gifs or short looping videos. I liked this video, though it made me want to keep changing what I was working on. I decided to finish the video I was working on and I could adapt it to other projects later.

Uploading this video was another challenge in itself. I decided to host it on my Twitter, but getting that video up was difficult. At first the file was an enormous 2GB mov file that wouldn’t download to my phone, so then I had to convert it to an mp4. Then Twitter decided to mess with my mind and make the audio mess up when I tried to view it right away. I really had to scroll through my feed a bit then go back to my profile and bobs-your-uncle the issue was solved.

I could’ve kept editing, especially after my last export finding one thing I wanted to change, but I forced myself to come to a stopping point and move on to my next project.

In case you haven’t see it, check out my video!

The Creation of Winston

Katie Hartraft — Sun, 24 Feb 2019 19:29:53 +0000

A few months ago, in a bucket of lost and broken 3D printed things, I found Winston. His curious demeanor and movability captivated me, and I had to take the little guy home. After having him in my possession for a little while, I thought:

how cute would it be if this little guy had an instagram?

It was just an idea, a fun thing to think about when I was bored or procrastinating. Then, finally, I made this idea come to life. Winston Nanobit came to be…

View this post on Instagram

Hello world! I’m Winston Nanobit ?? pleased to meet you!!

A post shared by Winston Nanobit (@winston_nanobit) on Feb 19, 2019 at 5:49pm PST

I have slowly built him a following, hopefully that will continue smoothly, and I have started taking him on many adventures. I feel he will continue having fun times for a while, so who know where he may go next!

Call for Story Ideas

Katie Hartraft — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 03:28:10 +0000

I put a message on my Facebook story, searching for creative writing prompts. I’ve never used the story function before, though, so I was skeptical about how good of a response I would receive. The idea that I ended up using was from one of my close friends, Grace. She suggested:

“Goldfish attack (the snack)”

So I took that idea and ran with it. Why not start with something fun?

After creating a short storyline, I wanted to add more depth to the story. Instead of using pictures as I am normally inclined to do, I decided to play with adding sounds. I used audio clips from Freesound.org and used the tool Soundcite JS to create the cool in-text effects. This helped make my short piece a little more exciting since anything helps, right?

Check out the final story!