While completing crossword puzzles over Labor Day weekend, I noticed that a plethora of the puzzles contained clues pertaining to a recurring theme in celebration of the national holiday — lyrics to the National Anthem. This inspired me to revolve my project around our Nation’s Anthem; I wanted to see how I could transform The Star-Spangled Banner from (quite possibly) this country’s most recognizable song to something completely unrecognizable.
I decided to use Snapchat, a photo-sharing platform where users can send temporary pictures to other users, as my system; once those pictures have been viewed, they disappear after a number of seconds. As an avid user of the app, I am aware that Snapchat has a variety of video and audio filters. Consequently, I decided to utilize both a video and an audio filter over a video of me (poorly) singing the beginning of The Star-Spangled Banner, and then repeatedly apply the same video and audio filters.
For the audio, I decided to use the “Alien” filter (depicted Far Left), which raises the pitch and increases the vibrato of affected sound bytes. For the video, I used a hue-adjusting filter, the effects of which are depicted by the transition between the Middle and Far Right pictures.
Although I already defiled the National Anthem with my singing, I continuously applied these two filters to my video and saved them all as separate videos, then finally compiled them all into one video. The final result can be seen below: