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An illusion of sound

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Emotions Through Sound

“Try to convey a certain emotion, such as fear, stress, sadness, etc. by combing sound effects. They can be human sounds, such as crying with laughter in the background, to maybe express someone’s fears or being embarrassed, or you can get really artsy and try to convey an emotion by sound effects– like loud noises to show intensity, thunder to show fear, or quick, chirpy noises to show happiness. Edit at least 4 sounds together to show an emotion, upload it to soundcloud and then tag it with the appropriate tags.”

So today my challenge was to create was to try and make people feel things using only sound effects edited together, I have done a post similar to this before in my Creepy Sounds post.

Again, I chose to try and bring out the fear emotion, I need to stop watching scary movies before i go to bed… I chose to do this assignment because I think it’s interesting that just audio can make you feel something so amazing, how just one audio piece won’t make you feel much. However once its collaborated with multiple pieces it can really make you feel like you’re right in the middle of it all.

Take a listen and then i’ll explain how i made it! :)

Emotion through sound.

So I hoped you enjoyed that, and maybe scared you a little??

What’s your favourite genre?

I created and edited this by using multiple sounds effects and editing them on Abode Audition, you can use audacity. Firstly I can to come find some sound effects to use, to do this I looked through YouTube and to find sound effects that would suit my genre.
Jaws theme tune
Thunder
Heavy Breathing
Sea Storm

After downloading and importing these into Adobe Audition, I would put them all into into a multitrack so I could put them all in place and listen to what sounds good in what place, what i found out worked best was to add thunder in the silent parts of the theme tune to create a tense atmosphere.

When I had everything in place the next thing to do was change all the volume levels, this is really simple. So you can either drag the whole yellow line which changed the dB (volume) or if you want to just increase or decrease the volume of a certain part of the audio piece you can just click the yellow line and change the volume however you like.

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Video Assignments: Pre-Production

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Return to the Silent Era

Keeping with my theme this week, for my addition to the video assignment Return to the Silent Era I plan to use a clip from the film The Dark Knight. The clip I plan to use is the final scene that features the Joker, where the Batman and the Joker battle it out on top of a massive skyscraper.

To edit this clip, I plan to use Movie Maker to strip the audio and add the old-timey black and white effect to the clip. I also intend to speed up the clip. Movie Maker is simple and easy to use, and is more than capable of doing the basic editing required to return this movie clip to the Silent Era. If necessary, I may switch to MPEG Streamclip or Adobe After Effects. I have chosen a silent movie theme to apply to the background, though I may choose a different one if I find something that I like better.

Play-by-Play

For my Play-by-Play video assignment, I plan to give a play-by-play of my morning routine, starting with waking up in bed, and ending with walking out the door to class. I plan to use my iPhone to record the video, and then record my commentary with Audacity. Finally, I am going combine the voice-over with the morning routine footage in either Movie Maker of After Effects.

Reviewing Past Video Assignments

As I was browsing the DS106 assignment page for Return to the Silent Era, I came across Terminator 2: Silent Film. The Terminator movies are great, and this silent film adaption of the trailer is no exception. The music used fit perfectly into the theme of suspense and desperation that is felt by the characters throughout the film. The visual effects are very well done, and the dialogue panels that are interjected throughout really bring the trailer together.

The other video assignment that caught my eye was an assignment titled “I’m Bored As Hell And…”, which was created for the Redub the Audio video assignment. I could not find the original blog post that this assignment was posted in, but here is the video:

I have never seen the move that this clip is from, so I have no idea what this scene is actually about. To me this could have been the actual audio and I would have never known. Very well done redub. The expressions on the faces of some of the actor makes it all the better!

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What NOT to do at the circus

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Before coming with your family to the circus, be sure to watch the video below! It provides you with many examples of what NOT to do at the circus to make sure you stay safe on your visit.

Charlie Chaplin was kind enough to make a visit to the circus for us and make lots of bad decisions in order for us to make this tutorial for you!

This was such a challenging assignment! I have been struggling all week with how to make this clip have a different meaning. I looked at examples from previous students and was so jealous of other people’s creativity. My ideas were so outlandish that they seemed too stupid and unrealistic to try to do. So today I was brainstorming some more about this video, and I started to think about how Chaplin makes bad decision after bad decision that gets him into this predicament at the circus. I guess tutorials have been on my mind also because of our assignment this week, so I thought, why not make a tutorial out of his mistakes and show people what NOT to do when the come to the circus? I’m not really sure if this qualifies as a story with a beginning, middle, and end but it was the best I could come up with.

I started out by going to this site to download the background music I wanted to use. I found a clip under the Silent Film section that had an action theme so it would fit the clip. Next, I downloaded the foley sounds for each section of the clip from SoundCloud. Here are the foley clips I used:

Then, I used QuickTime Player to record the video. I used the “Screen Recording” feature which will record anything that happens on your screen. I started the recording and played the video, then just stopped it when the video was over. Save the video to your computer. Easy enough!

Next, I went into iMovie and added the background music to my project. Go under the music note icon and search for your audio. Then, drag it to the project space to the left. The green box should appear like below:

Next, we will import the movie we recorded. Click File>Import>Movies and select your movie from wherever you saved it to your computer.

Your video should appear under events. Select it, then drag it below where you dragged the background music. It should look something like this:

Turn off any volume from your video by selecting it – make sure it has the yellow border around it. Click the settings symbol and then click Audio Adjustments.

Turn the volume down to 0%.

Next, add the foley clips downloaded from SoundCloud the same way we added the background music. Rearrange them as needed by dragging them around. Make sure they are layered over one another so they will all play at once.

To add any text, title pages, or credits, click the “T” symbol as seen below and adjust as needed.

Here is a segment my final product in iMovie:

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Perspective

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I took a film class a few semesters ago and ever since then I have never looked at film the same way. By no means does that make me an expert on film, but my girlfriend sure does find it annoying sometimes to watch movies together. That being said I agree and disagree with Roger Ebert’s argument. He presents a valid argument, but as he states that it is not a definitive action and are more of tendencies more or less. However, movement and placement of characters most certainly invoke some sort of emotion, which is what I agree with Ebert on the most. Though movement and placement are not exactly what makes a film a film. The “shot at a time” analysis of a film is an excellent way to see how these actions play on our emotions, but I feel as if they are more circumstantial than what Ebert intended to argue, which he continuously states throughout his essay. While the placement of characters is an important part of cinematography placement of the camera is where the real emotion takes place. The right or wrong emotion comes from where the camera lays and what angle it shoots from regardless of the placement of characters, especially from left to right.

I know we were only suppose to go through two of the videos on perspective, but I decided to go through most of them because I enjoy it so much. The two that stood out most to me were Stanley Kubrick’s and Quentin Tarantino’s use of the camera, one being low angle and the other being the one point perspective. Personally, Tarantino is my favorite director. I have watched every single one of his films to many times to even count and a few semesters ago I did a project on Inglourious Basterds. The way both Tarantino and Kubrick deploy their cameras, rather than their actors, is what gives their films certain emotions. Tarantino with his low angles gives his actors a great sense of power and control, while Kubrick’s one point perspective enhances the focus on any character in the shot, which also enhances the pure emotions they display whether it be anger, happiness, or fear. However, where Ebert’s argument comes into play is after the placement of the camera. What I mean by that is after the camera is set the placement of characters is vital to keep the emotion flowing continuously rather than awkwardly. For instance take a look at this shot from Kubrick’s The Shining:

Jack Nicholson is perfectly center on the screen and the camera is a straight on still shot giving the one point perspective. Imagine if the actor was placed either to the left or to the right rather than straight on at the camera. It would give off an entirely different effect and emotion and the acting probably wouldn’t be taken as serious. Then again had the actor not portrayed the character in such a way and he was sitting motionless to the left or to the right the effect would more than likely give off the same feeling of insanity because of the movie as a whole.

I think the only way to test if Ebert’s argument is correct is to take a film you have never heard about and watch the film by pausing for every shot write down what you feel and see (while on silent) and then watch the film in its entirety afterwards and see if you were right or if the film gave off an entirely different vibe. While character placement and perspective is important in analyzing a film it is far from an end all way of critiquing a film. Also, when Ebert continuously reasserts that his argument is not an end all notion I have my doubts that it works that way in most situations and believe that again the placement and perspective of characters is more circumstantial.

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Simba’s Dream

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For this assignment, we went brought back the Foley assignment for a 2nd round, taking the clips that the class created and pulling it into the Chaplin video as an exercise of our video editing skills. Additionally, we took time to create introduction, layer on a new soundtrack, and modify the middle of the story.

For this assignment, I used the a collection of clips pulled from our class SoundCloud collection to create the core dialog. I download the original Chaplin clip and a Lion King clip from YouTube using http://en.savefrom.net/. I used incompetech.com to find a lively silent film score that I used as the background music. Initially, the sound was quite loud and overpowering so I used the functionality available on VideoPad Video Editor to pull the volume down 50% for the soundtrack. I used the insert Text feature to create the opening, scrolling credits and then use the same texts to create the closing story line, credits for media sources, and the final THE END.

Below is a screenshot of my VideoPad Video Editor interface.

When picking the SoundCloud pieces, I tried to chose the sound clips with the lowest background noise (lowest median wave height in the SoundCloud interface). I was surprised at how well they fit together. When I was determining how I wanted to edit the middle of the story, my reasoning (and Google key word search) was “Lion Dreaming,” literally. After a brief view of the video clips that came up with the search, I came across the scene from the Lion King where Mufasa and Simba are frolicking through the open spaces of their kingdom. I thought to myself, “what else would a sleeping lion in captivity be dreaming of?” So I decided to include that clip in the middle of the Chaplin clip, right before Charlie wakes the lion. Aside from the slightly awkward transition between the clips, the story line actually works, adding a dimension as to why the lion is mad. Simba was dreaming of a better life, free with his father, and then “BOOM” he is awakened by a human with a funny hat. After shaking off the grogginess from his nap, the anger boils over and he lashes out at Charlie, who scrambles away in fright.

Instead of adding a simple “The End” to the story, I decided to add the closure that some movies use to tell the story of certain characters in the movie. For this particular clip, Charlie and his girlfriend, Spot (the dog), and Simba are the characters who get closure slides before the final curtain (The End).

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The Painted Lady Vanishes

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So there are some pretty serious problems with this as my gif submission for day 1 of the August Animated Gifpolooza Eternum or whatever the Dog and the Doll are calling this end of summer gif thing.

First, you might have guessed (if you know me), that’s not me. That’s Blanche Sweet, a silent-era film actress who starred in a number of D.W. Griffith’s movies including The Painted Lady (where this gif is taken from) and Judith of Bethulia. She’s one of my favorites (I’m slowly working my way through the history of film according to a big World History of Film book that I got out of the Ann Arbor District Library).

The reason that I chose this shot to gif is because the story of the movie (scroll down for the embedded version, well worth the watch, it’s only 15 minutes long or so) seemed to fit with what I felt like were some of the themes possible with a “head disappearing gif,” meaning a loss of identity, a fear of feeling or seeming invisible to other people.

The Painted Lady is about an unnamed woman who, because of her father’s rules, declines to wear makeup or dress up to meet men. Because she doesn’t dress up, men ignore her. The only one to pay any attention to her is a man who is really after information on the woman’s father’s business dealings. After she [SPOILER ALERT] catches him burgling her father’s papers and shoots him (not knowing at the time whom she is shooting), the woman dies of grief. This shot is from the woman’s final moments alone on a bridge, where she imagines meeting her suitor again, miming the motions of their first meeting. Here she looks at the mirror; she is about to flip out, disgusted by her appearance, but here she is still hopeful [END UNNECESSARY SPOILER ALERT].

The second problem is that I wound up making part of the pole behind her disappear, not just her head. When I had the gif in photoshop, though, I mistook that part of the pole for a kind of halo around Blanche Sweet’s head, even though there’s no obvious light source there. I still like that interpretation a little, though, so I didn’t fix it.

Here’s another gif pulled from the movie, and an earlier head-replacement gif that didn’t quite work out like I wanted, and the movie The Painted Lady.

Same As It Ever Was

Get out of the way, dude

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A Visit to the Doctor…

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NPH and the Search for Color from bellekid on Vimeo.

I went to the doctor to try to figure out what was wrong with me. Was it my mind or had all color drained from the world? Was I going crazy? Was I going blind? Was it my Trouser Weasel playing tricks on me?

I chose to do the Return To The Silent Era assignment, making the Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion in Doctor’s Office episode of Neil’s Puppet Dreams into a black and white silent film.*****

I started by using KeepVid to download the clip as well as Dama May by Kevin MacLeod as my music for the clip and title cards from Michael Branson Smith to use in the piece.

I imported the clip into iMovie, where I muted the sound track and changed the saturation of the clip to zero to make it black and white. I then made title cards and inserted them throughout the film at appropriate points, which was honestly the hardest part of the process. As I was working on it, I decided that the end of the film would be the first signs of Neil’s recovery and chose to make the last bit of film after the dream partially in color by changing the original clip’s saturation to 51%.

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May the odds be ever in your favor

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So far I’ve completed 7 stars of Video Assignments. My next assignment is a BIG one, with 5 stars. I was a little nervous taking on a 5 star assignment, and while it was time consuming it wasn’t to terribly challenging.

My 5 star assignment was a “Return to the Silent Era“. For this assignment, you take a modern day movie trailer and turn it into black and white, remove the audio and replace it with a new sound track.

I chose The Hunger Games movie trailer for this assignment. It is a fairly new movie and I thought it would be a fun movie to recreate as a silent film. So, first I used KeepVid to download it as an MP4 to my computer. KeepVid is my go to for Youtube downloads, I find it the easiest and fastest program to use. From there I uploaded it into iMovie I cropped out parts that were not actual film (ie: release date info, etc).

When I decided to do this project, I looked at examples (which I usually do before fully committing) and the first example took me to Kelsie’s blog and her assignment was AMAZING! That girl is talented! But I read that she got her cue cards from google, so I headed over there myself and found a great choice for my video.

I plugged those into iMovie and added my script. I then went into each clip and transformed it into Black and White and cut the sound. All I had to do was put into the music. I went over to Freesound.org and just typed in Silent movie music. I chose this sound for the majority of the trailer. Then I typed in dramatic sounds and chose this sound because I felt it was perfect for two different parts of the trailer. After those downloaded, it was just a matter of putting them into iMovie and getting the sounds to match up with one another. There are two spots that do not have music, maybe for a couple of seconds. This wasn’t intentional at first, one sound ends and the second is very quiet in the beginning so there is just no sound.

Here is a screen shot of my work in iMovie. I couldn’t get the screen shot in one pictures so sorry for it being split up.

Once I had everything how I wanted it, I just uploaded it to Youtube and you can watch it below. I think it turned out really well and the music fit perfectly! Hope you enjoy.

Do you think you could watch a silent movie? I’m not sure I could, I like to hear the dialogue between characters.

12/16 stars

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Magic

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For my last video assignment, I wanted to really challenge myself. I decided to do the Return to the Silent Era {*****} assignment.

Since we first heard about our final projects, I wanted to make my last video assignment so it could tie into my final project character. There was only one problem, I didn’t want to base my final project character off of one assignment. I wanted to base my assignments off my final project character.

I chose to do my silent movie trailer on the movie Now You See Me (2013). The reason I chose this movie trailer is because I am dying to go see this movie because of the trailer. Movie trailers are created so people will want to go see that movie. If a trailer is dull, it might deter people away from going to see it.

I converted the trailer from YouTube into an MP4 file via KeepVid. I searched for music that I wanted to include in it on Freesound.org. I downloaded this silent movie music clip and decided to repeat it over and over until I would play this haunting clip. I planned to play the haunting clip when the tension is rising in the trailer.

Here is a screen shot of my work of art:

I liked the idea of the cue cards when putting in some words to keep the viewer on the same page as the storyline. If there weren’t any cue cards, I think everyone’s creative minds would be going at the speed of sound!! I also thought the cue cards played an interesting role. Obviously in movie trailers, there is a lot of dialouge going on. Having cue cards for this assignment made me pick out what words were important enough to have their own cue card. I got my cue card image from Google and used the ‘Stencil’ font to make it look old.

Here is my silent movie trailer:

Blog post title: Magic – B.o.B (ft. Rivers Cuomo)

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Up & The Avengers Movie Trailer Mash-up

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Movie Trailer Mashup

Take your favorite movie trailer and mash it up with a different trailer to completely change the meaning of the original trailer. For example, if you have a funny movie trailer, give it the sound of a terrifying movie; or vice versa. You may need to clip the audio or the visual, use imovie and audacity to cut the clips to give you what you need. Good luck!

This is a 4 star assignment

Before starting this assignment I reviewed two other examples that helped me get an example of what I needed to do.

Toy Story 3 Horror Recut Trailer: I am reviewing this because I love all the Toy Story movies. I really liked this mash-up for the movie. The music and the editing of the clips made it seem like this movie would be really scary. Though this trailer was really good it reminded me more of the assignment Return to the Silent Era.

A Different Interpretation: I decided to review this assignment because I love all the Harry Potter movies. I really liked how this mash up included two different Harry Potter films. I like how one of them was used just for the music and background of the movie, and one for the actual video part of the movie trailer. Though not everything went well together with what was happening in the movie, I liked how there was a mash-up of two films from the same series. It was a very creative idea.

After reviewing these two examples and a few of the other ones I found under the assignment, I decided to make a mash up of the movie Up and the movie the Avengers. I thought that these two movie choices were very different and I think that is what a mash up is supposed to be. Combing two very different genres of movies to make it look like one. I decided to keep the movie trailer for the movie Up and use the background music from the Avengers. I first found the movie trailer for Up on YouTube and downloaded it to my computer using PwnYouTube. After that I then found the movie trailer for The Avengers and converted it to an MP3 file using Pwn YouTube. To convert the file to MP3 using PwnYouTube I clicked on the link that said share/mp3/convert. I then followed the instructions that were given to convert my video file into an MP3 file. Afterwards I then opened up Window’s Movie Maker and added the Up movie trailer and the Avengers sound. Though not everything matches up with what is happening in the movie trailer I think these two trailers mashed-up go well together. This mash-up gives the movie Up a new meaning, making it seem like there’s more action and adventure to the movie.

Below is my embedded YouTube video: