My name is Melissa Rogers. I am a student at The Art Institute of Seattle in the Digital Filmmaking and Video Production program. This page is for summer quarter of 2014 for Ethnomusicology. My music background is pretty broad due to my 16 years of dancing that I have done. I have done almost every dance form from African to Irish River Dancing to Afro Peruvian to Tap to Ballet and much more. I grew up listening to a lot of African American artists such as Michael Jackson, Earth Wind and Fire, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Count Basie, Janet Jackson, and more. But at every chance I got I would flip the TV to any channel playing the music of our generation such as Christina Aguilera, Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, Black Eyed Peas, and so on. Now that I am grown up, one might even call me an adult, I have kept my same interest in all the the African American music I grew up with but I have expanded my horizons to other forms. Right now I am really into Acoustic music and Indie Rock. When I listen to music anywhere I go if I hear something I like I will look up what type of music I think it is on YouTube and just listen to the playlist that pops up. As much as I like music it pains me to say that I am a little hard of hearing and can’t always hear all the instruments. My true passion is Video production though. I love being behind the camera making my, or someone else work or writing come to life in video form. This is my 10th quarter at the Art Institute of Seattle and so far I have had to take many audio classes such as Audio Technology with Tom Fallet, Digital Audio 1 with Richard Hinklin, and Sound for Film and Video with Jason Devore. A lot of the most important parts of these classes was the “Critical Listening” where all of us as a class had to listen to a song or just sounds and pick them apart by instruments and try to guess where that song or those sounds came from. Also a big part of that was listening to lyrics and trying to guess the same thing. As much as I really don’t care for audio, I realize that it is one of the biggest parts if not the biggest part of Video or movie making. If the audio is not good in your movie, no matter how good the cinematography or effects are, the audience is going to leave the theater and demand for their ten to twelve dollars back. I am actually really glad that taking audio classes was a required part of my Bachelors Degree. I learned how to make good audio for all of my videos and also to make better decisions music wise according to what the subject mater is, if my videos even need to have music in it.
Melilynn 