I just came across this beautiful, nutty video mashup on Sean Comerford’s blog titled “Alien Pizza.” Sean was in Carole Garmon’s Video Art seminar last semester and did some pretty amazing videos. This semester he is taking Italian 202 with the ever wonderful Antonella Dalla Torre who has introduced a final assignment that asks the class to take videos from the Internet Archive and mash them up into a two to three minute clip that creates a narrative featuring Italian dialogs they perform and record separately then dub onto the movies. Each of the mashups will also be subtitled with those dialogs in Italian so that the project incorporates both the oral and the written elements of the language.
They just started the project on Monday, and from my brief time in the class today, they all seemed very excited about the possibilities afforded by the fusion of the Internet Archive and their unbounded imaginations. Sean is working with two others on the project, and I think “Alien Pizza” is just a mashup test run they threw together without the dubbed dialogs and/or voice over. I’m not sure if Sean is the sole author of this video, but I’ll try and clarify that shortly.
In the meantime, however, be sure to check out the thrilling results —I personally find them astounding. What I find so remarkable is that a mashup project like this demands focused attention not only to the details of the particular linguistic components of the assignment (oral, written, grammatical, etc.), but also to a more abstracted creativity, playful collage, and a strong command of both musical and visual narrative to achieve the desired effect. Integrating all these elements together seamlessly looks far easier than it really is, and making it look easy is often the tell tale sign of a carefully crafted narrative. Alien Pizza hits the mark on all these points, and must have been as fun to make as it is for me to watch. Enjoy a far out slice!
Download Alien Pizza
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