Artist's Statement- Appropriative Narrative (Portal: "Still Alive" needlessly censored)

You may find the finished project here (I recommend you use low volume or headphones for this)

Here is the original song for reference (Contains spoilers for Portal)

For this project, I chose to appropriate a song and turn it from a clean song into a dirty one. I chose this idea because after being stuck with no inspiration for a week, I remembered watching a video where the uploader had placed bleeps onto a video and turned someone else's work into a filthy video (similar to unnecessary censorship segments on "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon"). Initially, I was planning on censoring a video game level, but none of the nominees had enough for me. Then, I decided to settle on a song. The hard part was choosing a song to censor.

For peer feedback on this project, it appeared that I should have used a song which was more common and also consider a kids song. If I used a popular song, the poor video/audio mixing would have left the lyrics still audible and would have likely distracted the viewers. It is also worth noting that by choosing a more obscure song, not many people would know the lyrics well enough to guess where I put censors, leaving out the element of surprise. I also quickly knocked out the idea of using a religious song, as I did not want to lose any sort of honor over this project. As a brony, I decided to consider the songs from "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" if I wanted to use a kids song, but I would only be able to mine out one or two sentences from each song, so I ended up using "Still Alive" because there is enough to censor, originally clean, but mostly because it can sound ambiguous.

The process I took towards making the video was a simple, albeit lengthy one, which involved using only Windows Movie Maker. My initial plan was to make several splices where a censor would be used, (involving relatively precise video splicing) and to bridge the musical jumps with a censor bleep. Since this would involve nearly a day's worth of work, I just downloaded some bleep sound effects of approximately .25 and .75 seconds and copied and pasted where suitable, and told movie maker to give heavy emphasis to the bleep sound effects. After layering bleeps in, I went back to my attempt to splice the video. Unfortunately, the bleeps on the interface would layer themselves into one of the other bleep sound effects and  I ultimately decided that it would be an easier path if I just did not splice the video over and over again. This process took me approximately 4 hours. During the peer review exercise, it was mentioned that I should fully censor the words I bleeped (since most of the original lyrics were still audible). Given how lengthy this would be, I decided to add captions that would signal what I intended at every bleep. Given that to me a visual cue takes dominance over an audio cue, this video should be able to make more sense. The process of adding in captions took about 1.5 hours, totalling this whole process to about 5.5 hours.

The original intention of "Still Alive" was to point out to players that the villain (a computer) was reassembled after the final level ended out with a laboratory going up in smoke. My intention was to be humorous and change the song enough that it is virtually a new context, in this case, the singer describing some needlessly filthy results. One thing that I would like to point out is that most of the censored phrases only make sense in their part of the song, and if combined with another phrase would likely become nonsensical. However, that is part of the beauty of the video, given that uncalled for censorship is not supposed to make sense. I would lastly like to mention that this video was solely for the purpose of humor, and not to be offensive, and I hope you have fun watching this video.

Jacob Bacci