If there is one well known legend that has been retold again and again, it is the legend of Mulan. What started as an anonymous ballad that appeared in 568 CE has undergone numerous renditions in the forms of plays, films, television shows, and literature. That’s why I thought doing the Character Evolution mashup assignment (4.5 stars) for Mulan would work out, especially with the new Mulan coming out in July this year (fingers crossed).

For this assignment, I had to mashup clips of a character from different remade movies to show the evolution of the character through the films. I have seen the 1998 Disney adaptation Mulan and the 2009 Chinese live-action Mulan: Rise of a Warrior, and I have read the script for the 1939 Chinese film Mulan Joins the Army. The latter two I had done for my Gender in Chinese History term paper Spring 2018.

Unfortunately, it was hard to find or download videos from the older films, so I had to settle on trailers from the 1998 Disney adaptation, the 2009 Chinese live-action version, and the 2020 Disney adaption version. After watching each trailer, I chose to use the audio from the 2020 Disney adaption trailer, and most of the clips used in the video are from the trailer while I interspersed clips from the other adaptations’ trailers throughout the video.

The most difficult part was syncing up the audio with the clips, but while I could’ve done better at showing the other movies, I did what I could to have some consistency with the audio. I also accidentally uploaded this on my other YouTube account, but oh well. Other than all that, I enjoyed this assignment, and I highly encourage you to watch Mulan: Rise of a Warrior (2009)! The original Disney animated version is my childhood, but this Chinese rendition my personal favorite.

Video credits:

Mulan (1998) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers

Hua Mulan Official Trailer with english subtitles

Disney’s Mulan | Final Trailer

For this assignment, I had to look deeeeep into Cinderella’s past.

No but really, I had to find many of the remakes of a particular character and involve it in a evolution video of them. I found some really weird, surprising Cinderella movies, but I decided to make it PG (don’t ask) and only include the popular, appropriate ones, many of which are my favorite.

To do this assignment, I had to first find video clips of Cinderella on youtube and download them to iMovie. It was there that I put it all together, fixed the sound, played with moving different clips around, and matching music to it. It was pretty time consuming, but I loved it because Cinderella is probably one of my favorite princesses.

Hope you enjoy it!!

-Caty

For my second assignment this week I chose to do this one for 4.5 stars. The goal of this assignment is to create a video featuring the evolution of a particular character through multiples films/appearances as so often we see so many remakes and films featuring the same character presented in a different way.

This was certainly a challenging assignment! I thought it was interesting when I saw it since I like video editing, and I tried to think of a character that’s represented in multiple movies, and I thought of Hannibal Lecter, a character that was first created through novels and adapted in many movies and a TV series. To find out how many there were and the titles/dates for each movie because I didn’t remember them all I checked out this Wikipedia page and discovered there were even more movies than I thought there were (I hadn’t ever seen Manhunter before). The movies/shows shown in the video are from the following:

Manhunter (1986)

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Hannibal (2001)

Red Dragon (2002)

Hannibal Rising (2006)

Hannibal (2013-2015)

After this, I searched YouTube for some clips to use with the 4K video downloader, finding a few I liked. Then I used Adobe Premiere Elements 15 to edit together the video that you see adobe, adding the appropriate titles and credits that listed each movie/show used and the song I used in the video. The most difficult task here was editing the clips together and choosing which ones I wanted to include. I noticed that there were so many scenes of some character, either Clarice Starling or Will Graham, visiting Hannibal in his cell for the first time, as he is often a character introduced from someone else’s perspective, so I decided to mash those together in the beginning, then in the second half of the video I chose scenes that featured Hannibal himself more prominently. I also chose the song, which is Bach’s Aria of the Goldberg Variations, because it is a song featured in both NBC’s Hannibal TV series and in Silence of the Lambs, as it’s supposed to be a song Hannibal enjoys. I hope you enjoy the video!