Sissy Rodriguez Revisions and Citations

Hi everyone. My name is Sissy Rodriguez and this is my e-poem revisions and citation video. I’ll be talking a lot about some of the improvements I’ve made in addition to each of the works that I used to support my process of creating this e-poem in relation to fair use and copyright and infringement purposes. So, to begin with, fair use encourages any students or teachers or any type of creators of work like myself to only use what is absolutely necessary from outside sources to add to an individual work, and I feel like through my e-poem I’ve done exactly this. By definition, in the most general sense of the term, fair use is the copying of any copyrighted material done for a limited transformative purpose, such as commenting upon, criticizing, parodying a copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner, and otherwise fair use allows artists to not ask permission and avoid copyright infringement. For transformative use, which can come off as a very vague or ambiguous term, it essentially means trying to transform the work into your own; it shouldn’t completely resemble the original works, and I feel like with my overlaying of various music and various clips in the poem itself, I’ve definitely made transformative efforts to transform each of the works I’ve used. I’ve also taken the time to look into each of the clips that I’ve used and look at their copyright information on each of those, and I’ve made an effort to make sure that I haven’t infringed on anybody’s rights.

So I began with… The essential meaning of my poem is talking about wanderlust and just travelling and enjoying life and making new experiences with new people, so to begin with, my first goal was to find a song that kind of encompassed the entire theme, which I found in a Dave Matthews song, and in choosing what song to use, I actually came across a video of Dave Matthews talking about the writing process of his songs, and what led him to write it and the experience behind that led to him getting these lyrics, and word-for-word he said, “This song is about the implausible conviction that, no matter where you are or what you are doing, nothing means much without the one next to you.” And I feel like that’s exactly what portrays the relevance of this poem as well; you can travel near and far and all over the world, but once you find someone to share those moments and experiences with, you finally achieve wanderlust for eternity, which is actually the note that my poem ends on.

[2:51] A frame of the e-poem with the words “I’ll have wanderlust for eternity"

So I thought it was really cool that even before… like I knew this song before, but that it would make so much sense in my poem it was such an easy pick for me. And originally when I picked this poem, I knew I wanted to do something with travel originally, and then right when this assignment was due I’d actually just found out that it would have direct relevance to my life at the time, as I had recently found out that I had been accepted into the study-abroad program of my choice, which is called Semester at Sea, for next Spring, and I will travel on a ship over four months through various continents. I will get to visit Japan, China, South Africa, England, New Zealand, among many other places. It’ll be my first time out of the country, and I can’t be more excited to experience this wanderlust for the first time.

[3:43] The first cloud clips from the e-poem are shown

So, to begin with, in the very beginning of my poem, I used these various cloud clips to play alongside the lyrics, and you can already hear the Dave Matthews song beginning. And I made sure the cloud clips I used were free footage, just from some side reel site, so that was fair use.

[4:06] The overhead shot of the truck from the e-poem

Going on, this is actually a clip from one of my favorite movies, called The Last Song, based off a book by Nicholas Sparks, and when I read this line in the poem [referring to “Sunshine in the dirt, life in the rain/ Yesterday stores a far distant pain”] it immediately reminded me of this part of the movie, which, in itself, this part of the movie, like this clip right here, is maybe a second a half, but I slowed it down like 300%, just because I’ve driven down this exact road before and it just reminded me of the words in the  poem, so I thought it would be a perfect fit.

[4:39] A series of clips, including flowers, the rippling of a water drop, and a woman’s hand.

This part of the poem is actually a group of clippings, basically someone else used fair use and made various clips to relate to a different song that they had written themselves, so it was somewhat like an individual music video I guess. So,  that follows along the lines of fair use because these are all individual pieces of someone else’s works, and I just liked the quickness and the sharpness of the images. LIke this is all one part even though it looks like separate pieces, which I really liked, and also helped me out a bit because I’m not very good at technology and piecing everything together smoothly. So I really liked this, how it kind of looks like I added all the pieces together, which I thought was really cool.

[5:42] Clips of trees and nature

So this part of the poem, this clip right here, it’s a timelapse from Manhattan, and I found it online. I knew I wanted a various time lapse just to kind of capture wanderlust in a city perspective, just because you have so many people rustling and bustling, and it’s all about travel and everyone’s moving and everyone’s trying to get somewhere, and I feel like it really encompassed my message in the poem. If you actually look at the website I got this from, I just googled it on YouTube

[6:18] YouTube clip is pulled up

And you can see here I’ll show it on the bottom [of the video], the man says, “This time-lapse production has been a wild and exhilarating ride, with a lot of physical work lugging my 120-130 pounds of gear around all of Manhattan. I bended and maybe broke some laws and made a ton of friends. Thank you for all your support and please feel free to help out a starving artist and share this video all over the world.”

So, hopefully by using his clips in my video, I’ve done him a bit of justice, and I really think his work went really well with the music and the words where this part says, “Where those times of being lost deep inside my pretty mind, are put to rest, no more fears of staying trapped and left behind,” which I think went great with this part, because he was clearly outside enjoying the sun and the fresh Summer breeze or Springtime; I thought it really went well together.

[7:20] 

And then the poet also talks about the city streets paved with the cobblestone, which goes perfectly into this next part of the clip, which is also part of the Manhattan project that he did that shows the cobblestone and the trees and the church. I thought I did a great way of just fitting together or piecing together perfectly. And throughout this process I also… When I originally did my first e-poem, I guess my internet was bad, and so a lot of this lagged and paused, and so this time I made an effort and went back and just revisited the entire website and re-recorded it just to make it a lot more clear and less hesitant. 

[8:02] The final clips of the e-poem are shown, including the shot of the night sky.

And this is probably my favorite part of the poem, where it switches from his clips to another freelance, free use recording that I found online. This one was actually called “Starry Night Time Lapse,” and it was shot with a Nikon, and originally he said that this was like a sixteen minute, or sixteen hour time lapse of a couple nights strung together, and it was also and free use and freelance type of thing, so no infringement, fair use. I really like how it goes “I’ll go on, and on, and on…” and it transfers from this hustle-bustle city life to this beautiful starry sky. And then, my favorite part of the poem… You see the sky darkens, and “I’ll go on until time is done with me, and the man you all fear comes to me.” And then I switched back to the city-life poem, or  clips again. So, more wanderlust and more just like this city bustling. This was an addition I made with my last revision to the poem. It originally ended right here with the starry sky, but I thought that adding this part back in would be pretty cool and a good way to end the poem. And it also ended on a good note of the song I used too. It was kind of like the climax of the piano version of the Dave Matthews song I chose. So overall I think I’ve done a pretty good job with abiding by the various fair use privileges that we were given under the fair use act. I made a point of trying to contact everyone that I’ve used material from; I’ve also shared my link with them. There were a couple people I couldn’t find contact information with, but hopefully none of this infringes on anyone’s rights. And overall I’ve really enjoyed this project, and I think that if you could compare this video to my very first one I created, you would not even think it was from the same person, and I’m very impressed with the work that I’ve come, and if anyone has any suggestions, I’m very open-minded and I would love to hear what you guys think. Thank you so much and I hope that you guys enjoyed my video.