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Silent Shrek

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So I saw this assignment and knew I had to try doing it. Unfortunately, Movie Maker isn’t the best at making this appear silent movie-y, but I tried my best. I went onto YouTube and looked around for random scenes from movies that I could possibly use. I ended up finding this one from Shrek:

It seemed perfect for this assignment. There’s some dialogue and some running away, the two staples of silent movies. I downloaded the scene and threw it into Movie Maker. Whenever there was some dialogue and then the shot changed, I inserted a title card to show the dialogue. I wanted to try using some actual title cards off the internet, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to insert them into Movie Maker. Instead, I just used an old timey font (Poor Richard to be specific), and hoped for the best.

I was able to use Movie Maker to make the whole scene in black and white, though I wasn’t able to add a filter that made it look like it was on some old film, which was disappointing. If I were to redo this, I’d want to figure out how I could add that in, since the grainy effect would do a lot for the final product. I also sped up the scene a bit, since it always seems like the action in silent movies is a bit faster than in real life. Lastly, I listened around on YouTube for some good silent movie music. I ended up finding one that I think fits the scene pretty well. I considered using several pieces of music, but I felt like that’d be a bit much for a scene that only clocks in at about 4 minutes.

Here’s the final product!

 

Kingsman: The Secret Service Silent Trailer

For this assignment, I had to make a 3-5 minute movie trailer formatted the same way as movie trailers from the silent era where the trailers had black & white, silent dialogue, musical backgrounds, and title cards.

The movie trailer that I decided to use for the assignment was Kingsman: The Secret Service. I chose this trailer because it was right at 3 minutes at 2:55 and I actually really liked this movie. It was action-packed and comedic, which are exactly the types of movies that I have always liked. Plus, I figured a spy movie would be perfect for a silent era trailer.

For completing the assignment, I used Firefox once again to convert the trailer from Youtube to the compatible MP4 used in iMovie. After importing the trailer into iMovie, I placed the silent era filter onto the trailer; but it still had sound, so had to use another feature of iMovie to mute all sound.

I didn’t know what title cards were until I looked them up. Then after putting the trailer together, I tried to spreading them out throughout using vague explanations to keep the audience still informed about what the trailer is about. It was quite easy to create the cards because it was yet another feature that could be used in iMovie.

The last thing that I needed to do for the trailer was put in some movie soundtrack music for the background. I wanted music that was instrumental and would build up throughout the trailer. I searched through my iTunes looking for anything instrumental, until I realized that the only movie soundtrack music I had that was instrumental would fit perfect with the trailer. It was the soundtrack music from the first Transformers movie by Steve Jablonsky called “Arrival to Earth” and the song was continually building up. I decided to test out the music on the trailer, and then watched it. It matched everything that I wanted out of the trailer; so I kept it in the trailer.

To conclude, I am really proud of the end result of this silent era trailer.

 

A Modern Take on Silent Films.

Continuing along the path of curiosity, I delved down deeper into the history of Disney movies and decided to watch the creative company’s most recent one, Big Hero 6, as this particular four-and-a-half star assignment required to transform a modern film into a silent one, which was a quite common form of entertainment during my teenaged years.

Even during all those times Beau and I frequented the cinema, we never saw a film quite like this! Though there is some notably good art to be found in my day and age, I never imagined that interpretation and animation would have become so astoundingly awesome! Nor did I imagine that the central subject of the film would be a ROBOT … I haven’t laughed so hard since I don’t remember when, nor have I cried. Clearly Baymax and Hiro are an utterly endearing pair if could be moved to such emotion!

The future of art and creativity in genereal is incredibly bright, and I simply can’t wait to see what’s to come.Screen Shot 2015-03-28 at 10.13.24 AM

Perks of Being a Wallflower: The Silent Film

This week for one of my video assignments I did the Return To The Silent Era assignment. This one was a lot of fun. I chose my one of my favorite movies, The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I liked the feel of the film a lot and when I was going through the trailers this one stuck out for me. I took out parts that I felt did not belong in the silent film era. And then edited the rest to make the video silent, black and white, and a couple other minor effects that I felt added to the trailer. I did all of this in iMovie. Fun first project!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the Silent Era

The next video assignment that I chose to complete was Return To The Silent Era. The goal of this assignment was to take a scene from a modern day movie and turn it into a silent movie style video. To start for this assignment, I needed to chose the movie and scene that I would be turning into a silent movie. When trying to do this, I determined that I wanted to use a scene that was upbeat, it needed to have a lot of motion within it, and minimal talking. This being because adding conversations in silent movies is very difficult. The movie I finally settled on was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), which is only fitting because this has been one my favorite movies growing up. And the scene I chose was the fight nearing the end of the movie, just prior to the fight with Shredder.

From here, I had to download all my audio and video clips for this movie. To do this I used ClipConverter to download my scene from YouTube. To obtain my audio track for this assignment, I used Incompetech. When using Incompetech, I simply searched for all audio within the “humorous” category, and listened to all the tracks until I found one that fit the tone of my video well. I also needed to download a title slide card that fit the silent movie theme well. From here, I edited this movie using iMovie.

To do this, I essentially dragged all my video clips into my video. Split clips, and added text and title slides in the areas I deemed fit. I tended to add these in the areas where dialogue was needed. Although there were few areas where dialogue was needed, I still needed to add some dialogue so that the talking within the video didn’t go completely unrecognized and out of place. After this, I added my opening and closing slides, and added my music to the video. From here, the last thing I needed to do was add a video effect to my clips to give them a more silent era film. To do this, I chose the video effect black and white. I think this effect is simple enough to get the job done, giving the clips the black and white tone that is predominant in all silent films. Finally, here’s my movie:

Overall, I really liked this assignment. I think it really helped me learn more about silent films, and how to add specific effects to make create movies similar to those of the silent movie era. Not only did I learn more about silent films, it also again helped me work on my video editing skills.

This assignment was worth a total of 4.5 stars out of 5.

Giving me a total of 20.5 stars for the week. If you would like to check out this assignment you can find it here. Other than that, I hope you enjoyed all of my video assignments for this week, if you haven’t checked them out make sure you do. They’re definitely worth it. I hope everyone’s had a great weekend. Til next time peeps.

Silent Movie.. Fall Of A King *Spoiler Alert* Video Assignment 376

***SPOILER ALERT***Attention:  If you have not seen Episode 11 in Season 3.  Don’t Watch my Video! ***

This assignment is for “Return to the Silent Era”: Video Assignment 376 for 4.5 stars.

Okay, you’ve been warned…  This is a silent movie made to display my favorite scene in Season Three’s Episode 11.  I titled this movie, Fall Of A King.  To me, this truly is the fall of one of the Kings of The Wire.   Here is a link to my movie…

This movie was created with Windows Live Movie Maker.  With Clipconverter.cc, I was able to pull two movies from Youtube to use for this movie.  I pulled the scene titled “The Wire Clip – Omar and Mouzone take out Stringer Bell” by hoodpolitics by pasting the link into Clipconverter.  This allowed me to download the scene as a mp4.  I also searched for silent movie music on youtube.  I was able to find a song by Frances Scott Key called Sunflower Slow Drag.  I also used Clipconverter to download this clip as just a music file by downloading it as a mp3.

Once I had the movie clip and the music downloaded, I went online into pizap.com and set up a black background and added a border that I liked.  I then found a font and used it to set up each phrase that I wanted to add to the movie.  Once I had them all saved, I was ready to start the project.  I first added the movie.  I eliminated the volume so there was no “talking” on the movie.  I then watched the movie and inserted splits in the movie so that I could insert my words that had already been saved.  I then uploaded each page of words as a picture.  Since any uploaded picture goes to the end, I had to drag them into the movie split into the spot that I wanted it to go.

Next I added the music.  I had to adjust the volume and I also had to paste a second copy of the music so that there was enough to last the entire movie.  I also faded the music out the last 3 seconds of the clip.  Next, I adjusted each “word” screen to only exist for 4 seconds. (it automatically came in set up for 7 seconds)  I also added a title screen that would fade out, and added an ending.

I could have never done this without Meredith Fierro!  Thank you so much for working with me in the tutoring center!  If you need help,  She Rocks!  :)

 

The Book of Life Silent Film!

Hi there! I thought this assignment Return to the Silent Era (4 1/2 Stars) would be a good one to tackle! Last week in the DKC (Digital Knowledge Center) We focused on video editing. So as part of our training we get to work with different assignments in the ds106 assignment bank. Because of this, I was definitely ready for this week!

As part of this assignment I was to take a trailer and render it so that it would look like it came from the silent film era. Meaning, I added a black and white filter, and took all of the audio out, replacing it with a silent film soundtrack. I also added different slides to add dialogue like a silent film would do. So while I was looking at different trailers to use, I went to this YouTube Channel MOVIECLIPS Trailers. This channel is chock full of different trailers, of new movies that are just coming out this week to older movies that have come out this year. I stumbled upon this trailer and I thought I would give it a shot:

So once I had my trailer picked out, I converted the video so that I could download it to import it to iMovie. I used ClipConverter to do this. I then imported the video file into iMovie. I first turned the entire clip into black and white so it would look like a silent film. Then I went through and split the clip, within the film strip, into smaller pieces where there was some dialogue. This way it organized the trailer so that I could add the text slides. Here’s a shot of it in iMovie:

This also helped when it was time to move around a small clip. The title of the movie was moved from just before the end to the end of the trailer. Once I had the clip split up, I went to create the text slides I added to show the dialogue. I found this border on google that I thought was great to use. The original was white so when I added it to photoshop, so I changed it to black to match the traditional silent film text slides.

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Here are the finished slides!

After adding all of the text, I went through and muted all of the sound so I could add the music. Then I went to find some music. I wanted it to sound like it would be used in a silent film but I also wanted it to work with the mood of the trailer. I tried different YouTube videos until I found this one. I found this video with a compilation of silent film music.   After I found the music I wanted I downloaded it and added it to the video. I ended up using the first song that was in the video because I thought that one fit the best with the trailer.

 

This is the final product, and I have to say I really like how it turned out. But anyway I hope you enjoy it!

Also here is probably my favorite part of the entire trailer:

Return To The Silent Era: Moonrise Kingdom

“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.”

Pre-production:

The challenges for this assignment was choosing a film in the cinematography world. There are so many good films but what would fit the culture of bowties & skulls. My girlfriend threw the idea of the first movie we ever saw together, Moonrise Kingdom. Wes Anderson films have so much to offer as far as visual substance among other things.

Another challenge, was choosing the right music that would sync perfectly with Moonrise Kingdom. After searching for awhile on youtube. I found this video

and extracted the audio.

For the cards that show up every so often in silent films, I used this

SilentMovieCard-NTSC-DVwidescreen

Next, I would need to take the original movie trailer from youtube, seen here

Now that I had all my tools for pre-production, I was able to actually start my work

Production process:

Windows Movie Maker can be a frustrating tool, especially when it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles you expect it too. I remember a few years back, there was an old film filter but they have taken that feature away in there new versions. Finding this out, I thought it would limit me from what I was trying to accomplish. I already started in a bad creative mind but I continued.

The process involved killing the audio from the original trailer file, a lot of choppin up the trailer, and adding in time cards where necessary to tell the narrative of the story. I also had to create a font color that would blend in nice with the sepia effect.

A great thing about Windows Media Player is that you can put it straight on your Youtube account without extracting and saving the file on your computer, streamlining the whole process. I loved that.

Well, here ya go!

Silent Film assignment

Valued at 5 stars!

Return to the Silent Era

  • Return to the Silent Era, in this assignment we had to show a trailer and turn it to grayscale, make it olden day looking and lastly add music and sayings from the movie, and here is is the link. I watched the example given to us about Star Wars to get an idea of what I wanted to do.
  • I chose this assignment because this was an opportunity to make something original. The back story of this is that I always wondered what peoples perspectives were of olden looking movies. Now a days these kind of movies are bringing back the film noir of back then.
  • This is taking a modern day film and making it into a film of olden times. Its interesting because you really have to have a certain type of movie to make it seem realistic. as for mine I think its best as a modern day film. To make this movie known as a comedy I feel like the text had to be added. Of course the text is modern as well.
  • I used youtube to find the movie trailer of Think like a Man. Then I also found the song Love on Top instrumental on youtube for the audio. I used Windows Movie Maker to put this whole assignment together. I added the effects of gray scale and old age to the movie. Lastly I added text where I wanted to put through out the video.
  • I showed my roommates and they agreed that it looked good but it one thing they said is this movie Think like a Man should be kept in color.

My version of a Silent Movie..

This week we’re beginning to make movies of our own in attempts to tell stories in that way. The task was to complete at least 16 stars worth of Video Assignments.

The first assignment that I decided to take a swing at was creating a movie trailer from the “Silent Era“. The goal of this assignment was to focus on the music and cue cards to make the movie trailer as interesting as possible. The movie assignment showed an example of the Star Wars movie trailer displayed silently with only words and music to draw you in. I think the example assignment did a good job of setting up how the movie should look and how it actually seems like a movie trailer from the “Silent Era’. I also watched another video from a student that decided to do the movie “Finding Nemo” and use different captions and a really good song to express the trailer for that fun loving kid movie that everyone would enjoy. I chose this assignment because I’ve never really been a fan of silent movies or movies from the old days, but I’ve always been one to support people having their own interpretations. I thought that it would be cool to make a modern movie silent and see the difference in it’s meaning when the actual words from the movie weren’t involved. “The Dark Knight” is actually one of my favorite movies and I just love all the intensity it has along with it’s actual story.

Through my Silent Era assignment I attempted to tell a story of the movie “The Dark Knight” and it’s major events by showing the trailer and providing captions that allowed someone to understand it. The actual trailer to the movie has words and dialogue that give you a glimpse of the movie … I attempted to do the same thing with my captions and music, but instead I summed up the key parts that I took out of the movie when I watched it initially. I started my clip off by saying where it took place and what the main purpose was… I made sure to include the lead actors in the movie as well. I then added another interesting point about the movie and then continued to have various captions of traits and actions that are found in the movie. I let the trailer do a lot of the talking, but I made sure to sum up the points I thought would be important for someone who hadn’t seen the movie to see.

In creating this trailer… I simply used www.keepvid.com to download the actual youtube movie trailer of “The Dark Knight” onto my computer. After doing so … I simply imported it into my iMovie and created a new project. I then adventured around with different features and figured out how to mute the sound and change the color into black and white. Then I adventured around with a song that I might want to play and figured that the “Halloween” theme song fit the action in the movie the best. I then downloaded the song as an mp3 file and placed it into my iMovie project. After watching the originally trailer multiple times and recalling the events I took from the movie myself … I decided I’d think of ways that I could display the story using the trailer. After I decided what I wanted to display in the movie … I added captions and found different places to put the font in order to use each scene as best I could. After all of this I did a lot of reviewing and editing to make it turn out as perfect as I could. Thankfully…. I have a few friends that are interested in the work that I do for this class and were willing to pitch in some ideas as well as watch my final piece. They each gave me different feedback and suggestions that I either chose to ignore or went back and edited. One of the suggestions that I received was to slow down some of scenes so that the captions I could posted could be read easily. A lot of my friends enjoyed my clip and said that it looked like it was hard or took a lot of time. I plan on posting it on my twitter as soon as I’m done with this post… maybe I’ll get a few comments & more feedback from there as well.

1 vote, average: 5.00 out of 51 vote, average: 5.00 out of 51 vote, average: 5.00 out of 51 vote, average: 5.00 out of 51 vote, average: 5.00 out of 5
Total= 5/16 Stars!