When I first came across this assignment, Return to the Silent Era, I didn’t want anything to do with it. It looked really difficult, first choosing the movie, then figuring out how to edit the media so it looks old, and then adding title cards to display what the characters are saying. I passed the assignment and kept looking for another fun looking assignment to do. While I was looking for another one to complete a thought came to my mind about doing 50 First Dates as the movie and maybe somehow mashing the song Beat Back Love by Jaron and the Long Road to Love, to create a silent era movie. I went onto youtube and found a trailer for the movie 50 First Dates and downloaded it onto my computer, using PwnYouTube to convert it to HQ MP4.
I then opened the movie clip in iMovie and started to play around with the effects. I first selected the whole clip then clicked on the inspector button where I changed the video setting to antique. I then went to the audio section in the inspector button region and turned the volume all the way down to 0% to eliminate the clip noise. I then watch the video and right clicked on the areas where I wanted to split the clip and then added in a text slide. I added a text slide by clicking on the button with a T on the right hand side of the screen. I added multiple clip slides through out the movie, helping the viewers to understand what was going on. I made sure not to put too many text slides into the movie, because I wanted to viewer to come up with some of their own assumptions when watching it. Once I completed adding the text slides I clicked on the button with the musical note and found the song Beat Back Love by Jaron and the Long Road to Love. I dragged the song behind the video and watched the video to see how well it correlated. It ended up correlating well without me having to edit the music. I then went to the share button at the top and exported it. I pulled up youtube and uploaded it onto you tube with the tags VideoAssignments, VideoAssignments376 and ds106.
Most silent movies use music without words, typically an orchestra was present at the showing of the movie and would play music as the movie played. I thought by using a song with words that it would enhance the meaning of the movie a little more. The song is about no matter how much you try to ignore someone or push someone away, there will always be someone that loves and cares for you. The song related to the movie because Lucy, maybe not on purpose, would push Henry away, yet Henry always cared and was in love with her. I chose this movie to place in an old time era, because the story is about how this guy is fighting for a woman he loves, which i feel is a traditional way of dating. Compared to society now, where I feel there is more promiscuity and it’s rare to find the perfect guy, this movie shows that there are still guys out there that have the old fashioned dating techniques. WIth the movie portraying old fashion ways of a guy winning a girl over, i thought it would be perfect to put it into an old time era.
Assignment Details:
Return to the Silent Era (5 Stars)
(http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/return-to-the-silent-era/)
The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form os the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track, and add title cards for the dialogue. As a prime example, see Silent Star Wars.
If you complete this assignment, share it! If you are signed up with a blog that feeds the main DS106 site just use the following tags when writing the post on your own blog to have your example added below. (You must use BOTH tags!):VideoAssignments, VideoAssignments376
Both of these examples that I watched seeemed to fulfill the Silent Era movie requirements. I like the music that was used for the She’s the Man silent era remake, along with the placement of the script both above and below the movie clip. For the Mean Girls silent era remake I liked how the clip was sped up a bit and that the creator went outside the box and had parts where the characters’ were portrayed. I did find it difficult at times to read the script that was being used for the silent era movie, and I feel like the movie could have been a little more black and white in color. Overall though, the creators of both the silent era movie remakes did a good job and it was cool watching what they created.
The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form is the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track, and add title cards for the dialogue. As a prime example, see Silent Star Wars. One of the best sources for music is Incompetech or the Internet Archive. For the title cards, try a google image search
This is a 5 star assignment
I chose this assignment because it really interested me. I never have seen a silent film and that’s because they were not around when I was growing up. I picked the movie Monsters Inc and the song to go with . I wanted to make this funny Disney Pixar movie to look more scary and suspenseful. I know the assignment said that the movie trailer should be 3-5 minutes but it is hard to find a movie trailer that long.
In my pre production work I reviewed two already done silent movie trailers. One was for the Disney Pixar’s Up and the other was for The Hunger Games Silent Trailer. I really enjoyed watching both of them. I will have to say for the Hunger Games silent movie trailer the music didn’t go nearly as well with what was happening in the trailer. In the Up I thought the movie trailer the music went really well with what was happening in the movie. From these movie trailer I decided to do was to have a song that went well with the movie as well as make the movie look more like a scary movie than a funny movie for kids.
I first downloaded a clip using PwnYoutube that included the Monsters Inc trailer for the new 3D release of the movie. I then put the movie into windows movie maker. I changed the back ground to black and white and eliminated the sound. Then I added the song, I have already had this song previous bought and downloaded from itunes. I then uploaded this video to YouTube.
This is the first video assignment that I have completed, and the first real video editing that I have done. Any comments with feedback will be appreciated on all of my video assignments that I do over these next 2 weeks.
Below is my embedded video for the assignment Return to the Silent Era:
For next week’s assignments I decided to do Return to the Silent Era. I have always thought silent movies were really cool and thought it would be really cool to turn a modern day movie into one. I started trying to think of movies that would work really well with this idea. I came up with Finding Neemo. I’m actually not sure how this film is going to convert into a Silent film, but I am willing to try it out.
To prepare for this assignment, I have downloaded a trailer for the movie using keepvid. I also looked through some of the previous assignments to see what others had done and if there were any tutorials on how to do this assignment. Unfortunately, none of them were using Windows movie maker. But I did get a few ideas of what I want to do.
First, I want to cut out the words already in the trailer. I have a few ideas of words I want to put in to tell the story, but haven’t finalized it yet. Most silent films are in black and white, but I also want to add the “old timey” effect to it. I went and looked at the effects Windows Movie Maker has to offer and found a film age old, older, and oldest. I am going to choose one of those when I upload my clip. Lastly, I am going to cut out all of the sound (it is a silent film) and add a sort of ragtime piano type music. Hopefully, with the combination of all of these tools and effects I can create a modern silent film!
I decided to spend tonight relaxing in my bunk and working on a Video assignment. I chose Alan’s “Return to the Silent Era” challenge.
I really had no idea what movie I wanted to do. Everything I thought about seemed like it would be kind of flat. And the, out of the blue, I settled on a movie that I don’t even really remember liking but that is a quintessential symbol of the decade I grew up in: Teen Wolf.
Then, I pulled it into iMovie. I knew I wanted to make it black and white and use the iMovie “Aged Film” effect. But, unfortunately, in my version of iMovie you can’t apply to effects to a clip. So, I did the B&W effect, exported it, and then imported it back into the program. Then I was able to add the “Aged Film” effect.
Next, I began thinking about where I wanted to insert cue cards. The trailer soundtrack is mostly a voiceover with bits of dialogue beneath. Strangely, they seem to show each of the scenes the dialogue come from, but they are lined up together. I was able to pretty easily figure out, however, what dialogue went with what scene.
I wanted a realistic cue card graphic, so I did a quick Google image search and came up with this one (which is free to anyone to use!).
I pasted that image in wherever I thought the cue card should go, and started typing the dialogue straight from the movie. It was pretty easy to settle on a font that looked right. I did have to play with the title effects so that the text didn’t fade in and out (which wouldn’t make any sense on a cue card).
At this point, I felt like something was missing. I decided to see if I could replace some of the language in the movie dialogue with more “authentic” slang of the silent movie era. I found a bunch of Web sites with 1920s slang dictionaries. This PDF was probably the most thorough and useful. The translation isn’t exact in some cases, but I felt like it added some kind of additional authenticity to the project.
Next, I worked on the music. I knew I wanted to use ragtime piano, and I found this great radio show on the Internet Archive that was available with a Creative Commons license.
There’s a point in the original trailer where Teen Wolf turns on the car radio, and the music in the clip changes. I used this point to switch to a different ragtime tune. I’m not sure if the music works that well, but it is authentic!
Finally, I decided to speed up all of the video a bit. It seems to me that silent movies often have the quality of speed being off, so I thought this effect might work. I think it’s okay.
I added an opening and closing cue card, and that’s basically it! (Note I changed the title because the term “teenager’ didn’t come into use until after 1930! I’m not sure “Young Adult Wolf” is as catchy, though. :-)
I felt I was overdue to sit down and do a ds106 assignment, one to do some iMovie work as a demo for our current students. I was called back to do Return to the Silent Era (one I added myself) with the hopes that I could push iMovie a bit farther than the last one I did — 2001 a Space Odyssey set back 100 years.
The assignment is:
The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form os the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track.
I was trying to think about what would be interesting to set to silent era- it’s easy to look to science fiction or movies from the future. Too easy. I combed through my video drawer and saw the Dirty Harry disc there, and said hmmm, the opening action sequence that defines Harry’s character, his lunch ruined because of some criminal activity that just lands in front of him, the first of the “Do You Feel Lucky, Punk” lines would be fun. It’s the whole juxtaposition of the same lines played out at the end that defines the criminal mind of Scorpio.
The look of the original film had all the stampings of the 1970 era (filmed in 1971), the big cars, mutton chop sideburns, the semi flattened lighting, the lingering feel of the hippie era– all of this seemed interesting to try and take back to a different era via the silent film treatment. Would Harry be as tough with that big gun back in 1908? Would his isolationist character command the same results?
Go ahead…
I started by finding and downloading the 740p version of the scene
I started by making up my title frame in Photoshop, starting with one I found out there. I wanted to add an icon, so I pulled apart the top figure to leave room to insert a 44 Magnum:
(click for full size)
I added some noise and cracelature filter to make it a little more dirty.
Here is a snapshot of my working area in iMovie (this is iMovie 11, so some of the tools and menu names are different in earlier versions):
(click for full size)
After loading the clip in iMovie, I first dragged the graphic for the title card I made to right in front of the video clip. I use the small on the clip to go to clip effects and added the “romantic” one which made it glow.
For the text I dragged the Center style right onto the frame, and added my text. By highlighting the text, and selecting “Show Fonts” I switched it to “Goudy Old Style”. Later I will show you an easy way to replicate this.
The next steps are going through the clip and making splits on key segments. These include points right after some dialogue that I want to add the title cards, pretty much in this case, all of Harry’s lines. To break up clips, just move the cursor to the point where you want a split, press control to get the contextual menu, and select “Split Clip”. I also split in places where I knew I might want to have different clip speeds.
COpying the title card is a matter of clicking once to select its frame (it lights up yellow) and then command C to copy. Move the cursor just to the right of another split to paste a copy of the card.
Then for the title, click an existing title (the blue bar above), and press the option key and drag it until it drapes over the entire new card (the blue should fill the rane, my screen shot is off a bit). This will make a copy of the text track with all the same settings and make it fit in the same length of time as the card.
You might have to mess with the font size to make things fit.
I did this for all the dialogue. Once I had that in place, it is time to remove the original audio. I selected each clip, and selected Mute Clup from the Clip menu (or just command-Shift-m).
The next steps are to give the video the old style treatment; while there is an aged film effect, I dont like it because it does a sepia tone, and it is too bad you cannot apply more thane one effect (like adding a black and white). I have a trick though!
On the small menu on each clip (looks like a gear) first sslect Video Effect, and set the saturation to 0- this makes it black and white:
I then press the Clip tab for these adjustments. I found that the “Glow” effect worked well to give it a washed out look, your mileage may vary and the vignette or the Romantic work well. For the action sequence I sped up the clips in various amounts to give it that frenetic energy, anywhere from 120% to 400%.
I repeated these steps on every section.
There were a few places I trimmed the clip, and one or two when I needed Harry’s mouth moving, so I would copy and paste a clip of him, reversing it so he would not be an exact duplicate each time.
Once the video was all ready, I went to the Internet archive, and found some ragtime music in the 78 RPMs & Cylinder Recordings collection called Ragtime Echos (1918) featuring Samuel Siegel on mandolin and Marie Caveny on ukulele.
I downloaded the mp3 version and dragged it onto the iMovie track, making sure it lined up below the tracks (so it is not made into a background for the entire project). Here is another trick, since my audio track is longer (you can drag the right and of the clip to extend it as far as it will go) I click the audio track gear icon, and chose “Audio Adjustments”. I set the fadeout to be manual so ti will fade before it ends abruptly.
Thats pretty much the editing. I had planned to do a longer feature, a middle clip of the Harry/Scorpio confrontation in the football stadium, and the closing chase scene which bookends the original. But alas, you get the idea, and the “Do you feel lucky” scene sites fine with me as a single thing.
I wanted to try the trick Michael Branson Smith does to add more effects to his videos by using the 8mm app on his iPhone but alas, I could not figure out how to upload it so the app would see it. I hope it is not as crazy as just filming it off the screen!
I’m pretty happy with the way this turned out, but oh, I stayed up way too late doing this.
The dawn of cinema had no audio; silent movies created an atmosphere with music and the use of cue cards. Take a 3-5 minute trailer of a modern movie and render it in the form of the silent era- convert to black and white, add effects to make it look antiquated, replace the audio with a musical sound track.
Backstory
To complete this, I looked at several clips that could be used. I started by looking at trailers, as suggested in the assignment. I considered Jaws, Forrest Gump and Pirates of the Caribbean but I found that the trailers either contained too much talking and not enough action or jumped from one scene to the next too quickly to provide enough context. So, I decided to look for a purely action sequence. Since my previous assignment featured Quentin Tarantino, I figured that I might as well return to his work. I found a clip from Kill Bill Vol. 1 that someone posted to YouTube that already contained two fight scenes. I liked the idea of combining this modern, dark, samurai-type of film with some dixieland music. This incongruous combination appealed to me!
Process
I have worked with iMovie quite frequently to document school events but rarely played with many of the features. I was able to easily convert the clip to black and white and sped up the film to produce what I hoped would look like a silent movie but the image still felt too crisp. I decided to Google some advice and found iCreatemagazine.com which I immediately added to my Flipboard! It offered easy to follow tips for making a silent movie look and, I’m hoping, will have a decent feed to follow. One tip that I found there suggested that I should not accept the default of 30 frames per second but instead reduce that to 24 to achieve a jerkier motion. It also explained that the Aged Film effect would add those vertical lines one sees on old films. However, since I had sped the film up, these lines were not visible. I decided that I should speed up the film and make it black and white and then export it. I could then re-import it and add the Aged Film effect. Worked like a charm!
Best:
My original clip was 10 minutes in length. I doubled the speed to seem more like an old movie but, at 5 minutes, it still felt too long. I am hoping that the further two minutes that I edited out are not too obvious. This is where I impressed myself most: I was surprised how seamless the final version appeared! I took out a good chunk of the first fight scene (more obvious) and several sections (mostly amputations) in the second. This allowed me to keep the video to just 3 minutes. I was pleasantly surprised with how the scenes still flowed from one another.
Disappointments/ Ideas for Next Time:
Only the Organic Main template seemed appropriate for a silent movie but the iMovie Titles are a dead give-away to the fact that one has used that software. I wish that there was an easy way to create your own. I suppose that I could have created my own and saved them as jpegs and then inserted them as photos. Maybe next assignment…
Music was a challenge. I really need to do some more audio work. I started to fool around in Garageband but didn’t find the sounds that I wanted to easily create some dixieland music so I opted for the built-in iLife jingles (Gelato, Vino and Tigris). I added these three themes to my movie and left it at that.
Take-Away:
I may have taken some liberties with this task but I did learn more about iMovie than I knew before… if nothing else, the quick keys for splitting a clip (shift-command-s) will come in very useful in the future!
I need to remember to take some in-progress screenshots to add to these posts. In the meantime, enjoy Silent Bill.
My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Piraino (you can imagine the nicknames we had for her), was a teacher that loved creativity. Every year she transformed her entire room into Santa’s workshop, letting her students build life size reindeer out of cardboard and decorate the walls with paper-crafted strings of garland. During the small group novel studies, she encouraged students to build dioramas, even entire set pieces for scenes from her favorite books. But while she would let our creativity run wild for large projects, I always sensed that her comfort with letting her students “play” with learning concepts was always a bit more straight-jacketed.
What elementary student wouldn't find this both funny and awesome?
I remember while learning about homophones, she read aloud to us from “A Chocolate Moose for Dinner“, a popular children’s picture book filled with images depicting what idioms and homophones might actually look like if they were real. She gave us an assignment to try and come up with our own homophones and idiomatic phrases, then illustrate them for comedic effect (i.e. “my dad put a new wing on the house” would turn into a drawing of a house with a feathery wing stuck to the side of it.). I failed miserably at the assignment. It wasn’t from lack of effort though; I illustrated half a dozen homophones that I hadn’t seen or heard in any of the books my teacher had used, and I was proud of “playing” around with the concept. Sadly, I had the assignment returned with red marker all over it, so I gave it a second go; still no good. After a week of trying to play around with the concept, and receiving little to no feedback beyond the red marks of “try again”, I finally just turned in some copies of illustrated homophones and idioms lifted from one of Fred Gwynne’s books. I passed the assignment.
While Mrs. Piraino had an amazing streak of creativity that I will be forever thankful for, I remember that one assignment as an example of how she didn’t really allow us to “play” when learning new concepts, or rather, she didn’t take into consideration or make note of the progress we were making while we played, and sometimes struggled, to make sense of some new piece of information. To this day I’ll never know if I actually understood homophones back in 5th grade, but what I did take away from the experience is that as a learner, I feel that I’m learning best when someone is supporting my playful learning, failure, and struggles, rather than just saying “copy what’s in the book”. I’ve found that trying to build new understanding, whether it’s difficult topics like encouraging social activism or just learning how to edit in Adobe Premiere Pro, I usually learn best when working, failing, playing around with ideas, and building something new with the support of a community.
Which is why I’m so enamored with the ds106 community. They are a powerful community of educators that understand how to support one another through play, social media, and constructive criticism. To be fair, the ds106 community has its own set of quirks, trolls, and problems, but any group of people that gives me the opportunity to re-mix the train chase at the end of Back to the Future 3 as a silent movie, and then applaud my sophomoric video editing efforts, deserves high praise in my book. Check out “Silent Era Back to the Future – Dr. Brown to the Rescue”, my “Return to the Silent Era” ds106 assignment submission below. If you want to view it on youtube, just follow the link here.
So why the lengthy introduction for this movie? I felt my experience offered some value in helping to better understand how I learn, and why I teach the way I do. Whether it’s working with young learners or adults, I have always despised the “carbon copy” approach to learning, in which the students are expected to produce a reasonable facsimile of the teacher’s example in order to prove they’ve acquired new skills. Whether it’s learning a new writing form, practicing math skills, or learning a new piece of software, I find myself growing ever more fond of allowing learners to create what they want to create, or at least giving them a challenge to create something in a particular style, but giving them completely free reign over the subject. I followed that belief in my attempts to learn Adobe Premiere Pro, a terribly difficult video editing platform (I come from several years of just using the simple iMovie and Windows Movie Maker), and rather than just follow some simplistic “paint by number” tutorial on how to use the tools that Premiere Pro provides, I decided to do it the hard, yet infinitely more enjoyable way, by choosing a project and jumping in with both feet.
How I made “Silent Era” Back to the Future – Dr. Brown to the Rescue
In order to make it look like it came from a silent film, I had to get it downloaded from the web first, so I used my good friend KeepVid, which allows you to download many different formats of YouTube videos. I chose the 480p version in hopes that would keep my video project on the small side. After downloading the clip I imported it into Premiere Pro and used the “razor tool” to slice it up and remove some of the bits of video. Note, the razor tool was great after getting used to it, but I much prefer having a nice keyboard shortcut so I could just line up the playhead and cut away with the shortcut. If I missed that shortcut, or an easier way of using the tool, please share!
You can find the razor tool with all the editing tools, but I couldn't find a keyboard shortcut
After slicing and dicing the original video clip to remove a few unwanted portions (although in retrospect I would have cut a lot more out to create a more polished flow with the music), I was ready to start playing with the “aging” process. Apparently there are a a lot of thoughts on how to best make a piece of footage look like it came from the silent era using Adobe Premiere Pro. Some people suggested using posterize and fast blur effects on keyframes to produce the “jumpiness” and uneven exposure of old silent film. I wasn’t quite ready to dive into key frames (perhaps on the next project), so instead I just focused on the degradation of quality, black and white, and film grain.
I selected all of my video footage and then applied some of Premiere’s built in video affects by dragging them over to the Effects Control pane. Noise, Black & White, and Gaussian Blur effects helped produce the right low quality look I was looking for, while the Lighting Effects allowed me to add that “vignette” like effect with a few soft spotlights.
The video effects and the setting I used to create the "aged" look
Merely making the film look old didn’t quite do it for me. I played around with a lot of the other video effects (there are a ton more than what I’m used to in iMovie), but none of them seemed to add what I was looking for without investing a lot of time fine tuning each setting. That’s when I decided to go digging around the internet some more and came up with this great Particle Illusion project that had a video overlay of 8 seconds worth of film grain, scratches, noise, and flickering. I simply looped the 8 seconds over and over for the entire length of the film to ensure that it had all of the same noise from beginning to end. Making the film look like it had come from the silent era was only half of the task, however. After making sure that the video footage looked reasonably old, I had to make sure that it sounded right (since silent films were typically accompanied by a piano), along with some title cards to share dialogue spoken on screen.
I decided to complete the title cards first, since I like to save music and audio for the very end. By finalizing the video and stills first, I have a clear idea of just how much music I’ll need, so I started looking for a “silent film” title card. I came across this awesome silent film title card by Farrin who blogs over at CopyCatFilms. Not only was this a high quality piece of work that she had produced using Adobe Illustrator, she had provided it for free, yay! If you take a look at an image of the original title card below and the final version you’ll notice a few changes. I opened up Farrin’s title card in Photoshop, removed the fleur-de-leis, and replaced it with a snippet from this graphic of the flux capacitor (it’s what makes time travel possible, don’t you know). I’ve already blogged about the awesome Back to the Future font that I found on dafont.com, so I just used it again to create each of the title cards. I turned down the opacity of the flux capacitor image and the text to help age it a bit to match the aesthetic of the original title card. Notice the “yellowish” tint to the final card? That’s from the film grain and noise video overlay that I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
title card before I made a few modifications
title card after adding the flux capacitor and text
Once I had successfully spliced together all of the title cards, my aged video footage, and the video effects, my last stop was music. While many people have commented that they would have liked to have seen this video with an “old timey” piano version of the Back to the Future theme, I was hard pressed to find one. Oh sure, you can find plenty of piano renditions on YouTube of the main theme, but many of them aren’t terribly polished, and none of them really captured what I was looking for. It worked out for the best, because I was able to find this amazing collection of royalty-free silent film scores over at Incompetech (such as awesome name) by Kevin Macleod. I used a couple of tracks from the site, one being “Iron Horse Distressed” which was perfect for producing that stereotypical “silent film train chase” atmosphere while Doc Brown and Clara are struggling to hold on for their lives. The second piece, “Merry Go Distressed” was a chance to be a bit playful with the storytelling, as this much more cheerful music kicked in after Doc successfully rescues Clara with the help of Marty and the hoverboard.
The original speed of the tunes didn’t quite fit well for me (they were too slow for the action in the video), so I used the Clip Speed/Duration pane in Premiere to adjust the speed of the audio clip to produce a much more “frantic” train chase. Although I didn’t alter the speed of the video, having the faster music almost makes it appear as though the action is sped up as well to me. Having access to “distressed” music also helped add to the ambience of the piece in my mind.
playing with the speed of a music clip can often change he entire mood of a video
Once everything was tweaked to my liking, I then had the the fun task of learning a new way to get my finished project out of Adobe Premiere and uploaded to the internet. It seems as though no two video editing application are alike for even the simplest of tasks like exporting your final piece; iMovie uses the Share menu, Windows Movie Maker Live has you Publish your videos, and Adobe Premiere uses a much more straight forward Export command. My first attempt to export the video resulted in a helper application being opened, the Adobe Media Encoder. While it was quick, I realized I had exported a low quality version of my movie, so I went back to the FILE>EXPORT>MEDIA command, choose the Quicktime format to export too, and then checked a tiny little box that I hadn’t before called “Use Maximum Render Quality” which took a bit more time, but apparently didn’t need to open the Media Encoder (at least I didn’t see it open), and produced a much higher quality video.
Sometimes it's easy to miss little things like this checkbox
With that, my day long editing and remixing task was over! While I had worked on this piece off and on for the better part of the Friday before Spring Break (I had the day off of school), in total I must have spent about 5-6 hours editing this together; not terribly long or difficult, just time consuming as I learned what each of the video effects did, searched for tips and resources, even stopping to figure out just how to export the final product. It probably took me longer than if I had followed some basic tutorials in a text or watched a few prescribed videos, but the end result was a labor of very playful love, and I value the time spent with the entire project that much more because I was able to play, and fail a few times, on my own!
I chose Jurassic Park because I used to be fascinated by old science fiction movies such as The Seventh Voyage of Sindbad.
Peers’ tutorial blogs were very helpful for me. Thanks to the weeklyupdate, I downloaded Videopad, an editing soft and thanks to cryptovalence, I used Incompetec for free music resources.
Videopad has an effect function to make a footage seem to be an old film. But the problem was Videopad worked very slowly on my computer.
So I used Moviemaker for editing and used Videopad only for the last process, which was using “old film effect” and ”noise effect.”
I found the background (?) of text from google image. Then, I put the logotype of Jurassic Park by using GIMP, a photo editing soft.
The durasion of each text is five seconds. To prevent the footage from becoming lengthy, I removed several cuts from the original footage. Brightness of video was increased to show silent film-like exposure.
I put three musics on the footage, but the musics needed to be shortend to fit the story. In order to shorten musics and to combine them with the footage, Moviemaker is fine enough.
This Return the Silent Era video remakes the 50 eggs eating contest in the 1967 classic prison camp movie Cool Hand Luke. On a sweltering stormy night, the prisoners are dreading the closing of the windows of the barracks as it will mean a sweaty night of misery. Luke (Paul Newman) takes the bunch off guard by flippantly suggesting he can eat fifty eggs. Even his biggest fan Dragline (George Kennedy) finds it hard to believe this is possible. Soon a wager is born and the camp is again distracted from their suffering through Luke’s impishness and levity.
The contest scene takes about ten minutes in the movie and I was pretty sure I wanted to keep the silent version much shorter. So I decided to cut out most of the haggling over the rules of the bet as well as speed of the film. At times I made moments as much as 2.5x faster than the original footage, which quickened the pace but also reflected the unnaturally fast footage often seen in silent movies which were shot at frame rates lower than the 24fps standard of sound pictures.
Another hard decision was to choose which pieces of dialogue to place on title cards. The most important elements of time and the number of eggs eaten were included, as well as a number of Dragline’s colorful comments as he coached Luke through the contest. Also I hoped the Dueling Banjos soundtrack would provide an emotional substitute to a lot of lines.
I edited the film using Final Cut Pro and made the title cards in Photoshop. But I again found a good use for my iPhone as part of the process, similar to my recent discovery of using it in my designs. The 8mm app has some really awesome antiquing filters for video, including a ‘Noir’ and ’1920′ filter. I ran the video through both filters.
Bouncing a three minute video at almost 100MB in size bacj and forth between the computer and the phone and then back again is little cumbersome but the effect I think makes it worth it. There’s even an included projector sound effect.
For this assignment, I edited the 2005 King Kong movie trailer to make it more like a 1930ish silent movie trailer. This worked out well because the movies plot is set during the Great Depression (1933).
I used Sony Vegas 7.0 for this. I’m usually hesitant about resorting back to my Windows PC, however, I needed to for these video assignments as Vegas is only available for Windows. Sony Vegas has many effects that helped me to accomplish the vintage – old film effect for this assignment. Of course there was the black and white effect, however, I also applied the film grain effect and some film scratch/hair and jitter effects. Also, to make it more vintage, I cut out the current Universal intro/logo and put in the old intro from back in the 1930s.
For the music track, I used one audio layer of “Beauty Killed the Beast Pt 5″ which played throughout the trailer. However, for the intense footage in the trailer, I added a second audio track layered on top and used snippets and sections from “Last Blank Space on the Map.” Both audio files were off from youtube (links below).
Beauty Killed the Beast Pt5 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06odMZRZMBg
Last Blank Space on the Map – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjbASG6dLtY
