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I did the impossible. I made 28 Days Later look like a happy, totally normal movie. At the same time, I also created a sick ad for DS106. I’m insanely proud of what I did with this assignment so I hope you guys check it out! You might see yourself in it(most likely) and you’ll definitely relate.
To create this ad for the Mash a Movie assignment, I used 4K Video Downloader to download some clips of scenes I wanted from YouTube. I really recommend this for people who don’t want to or can’t download the entire film and chop it down! When I first started, I realized that 1) the violence of most of the movie would depict DS106 in a negative light and 2) there isn’t much dialogue to build off of. So ideas started forming in my head and I decided to use the two happiest parts of the film to create what you just watched. I chose some areas to dub over the audio with DS106 appropriate soundbites. I also added text and the DS106 logo to make it a cohesive representation of both what we do and what is great about the class. My favorite part and the most challenging part was adding text of things we do and making it so Selena “puts” them in her grocery cart. I used the movement controls in iMovie but it was hard to get it in a seamless movement. Hopefully the text is readable! I had a lot of fun making this whole promo.
As for the original 28 Days Later… I can’t say it was my favorite apocalyptic film. Going in, I knew it would be different from the usual types of movies I picked. Although I had watched Train to Busan previously, 28 Days Later seemed more like a thriller and gore movie than one really fixated on emotional issues and character development. This was partly true when I watched it. Throughout the movie, you get glimpses of the lives of Jim, Hannah and Frank pre-apocalypse but almost no background on Selena, a main fixture in the film. This may have been purposeful to show her as the “tough” girl with a mysterious, closed off past and to some degree, she does reveal this is true. However, she was the character I grew invested in and I was disappointed I didn’t get to know more about her.
The film’s cinematography and editing style is very notable. I wasn’t a fan of it but I can appreciate what they were trying to do and the innovation of the technique. Whenever there was an intense moment, the scenes would have quick cuts of camera angles and sound to represent the chaotic moment without showing it in its entirety. I’m bad at explaining it but you can view an example of it in the video above. This was an interesting technique that was very jarring and unsettling. However, it could be dizzying and make you feel like they skipped through core moments from big battles.
One thing I really liked about the movie was how it switched courses about 2/3 in, from a simple infection-based apocalypse movie to a more intense action-thriller with a social commentary. A big focus of the end of the film was on the military response to the infection in the UK. They single-handedly plan that the future will be one with sex slavery of women and find their victims in the two main female characters. They’re thankfully rescued but the viewer is left, or at least I was left, with reminders of tragic atrocities committed during wartime and in times when the structures of society fell apart. It was interesting to see a different sort of theme permeate this apocalyptic story.
All in all, I found the characters likeable and the action captured my attention. If you watched 28 Days Later, let me know what you thought of it below!
The movie I watched this week was The Quiet Earth. On Tuesday, after lunch, I decided to go to the DS 106 movie watching meet-up, but I was the only student there during the whole movie…BUT it was an entertaining movie and it was nice to watch it on a larger screen! I really enjoyed the plotline and how semi-chill this apocalypse was. The characters, for the most part, were enjoying their time as the last three survivors rather than the movie being the stereotypical zombie/ terrifying apocalyptic story. One issue that stood out to me personally was how they made the one woman seem a bit week and dependent on the men, and I think it would have been nice if she were a bit smarter and more independent. However, overall, I enjoyed this film and I would recommend it!
After watching the movie, I thought that I wanted to do the Swede a Scene assignment, but I did not really want to force my guy friend to wear a dress and spew angry sentiments on campus, even though he kindly said he would. I also thought about doing the alternate ending, and make the woman more of the hero and strong character at the end, but with my busy schedule for the week, I was not sure when I would be able to film some of my friends for this. So, after looking at the assignments again, I decided to complete the Mash a Movie Assignment.
Now, it said that you can add the DS 106 logo onto an object in the scene, but I was not sure where I would put it. However, I was inspired by all of the cardboard cutouts in the scene, so I decided to put Prof Martha’s face on Richard Nixon’s body. I do not really want to talk about how long this took, but I must accept that it is necessary. It took me two hours to do this. I took the picture from her Twitter and used pixlr to edit away the background. I watched a video on how to add overlays to iMovie, which helped me so much, but it was definitely still a painfully long process of switching between picmonkey and pixlr, but eventually, I got it and I put it into the video. I am not sure if you all will think it is funny, but I cracked up when I saw it in action for the first time, though it may be because I spent TWO HOURS making it happen.
After that, I was not even done yet. No, I still had to add the voice-overs. Fortunately, that did not take very long and I was able to easily change the pitch to sound more manly.
This video was definitely quite a long process, but I did enjoy myself and I learned a lot! I hope you all enjoy the scene!
It’s time to swan dive back into ds106, I seem to have lost by absence note for the last six weeks. But here, at the tail end of video week comes something more massive than a MOOC, a ship that sails like no other, and for which no iceberg will generate a plot:
This is for the Mash a Movie for ds106 assignment:
Download different scene clips from one movie to create a short commercial for DS106. Clip, trim and remix them to let people know what DS106 is all about and how they can find us at ds106.us. Challenge yourself to overdub the audio to have the characters saying DS106 where it would be appropriate. Also try and add the DS106 logo onto an object in a scene.
Now that I read it again, I did not exactly do the assignment. So what? It’s not following rules or stapling yourself to some rubric that counts. I saw this assignment from Rochelle a few clicks back, and was motivated after seeing the masterpiece John did for BrigaDS106.
So what could be a more bloated big movie about a bog thing than to parody Titanic? (“Collide with Destiny” was one of the taglines, others were just as juicy). My starting point was latching on to the “King of the World” yell with the ship proudly setting out, not the mushy scene with jack and Rose, but when he and Fabrizio first skip out to the bow:
What nailed it was when they were excitedly pointing to the dolphins, and I had the idea they would be pointing to Headless ds106 blogs.
I did feel like it needed a graphic poster for an opening, which sent me down another design/photoshop/fun rabbit hole:
based on the original poster that I liked for the simple image, words
As usual, in Photoshop, I start with a duplicate of the image so I can use the original as a reference. I clone brushed out the title with the texture of the ship’s hull.
The closest font I had in my pile was “Haettenschweiler” with a bit of tracking extended to 75 so make the letters a bit more spread out. I command click the layer to make a selection of the text, create a new layer, and use Edit -> Paste Special -> Paste Into to paste in a texture file I found of steel with rivets.
Boom. Good enough.
But I did not want Jack and Rose in my poster, so I removed them out (a bit of magic wand selection to remove behind the ship rails.
For the space behind the image I would use, I created a new layer below this one. I made a foreground color selection of the blue in the original and a background color of the lighter white there. I then used Filter -> Render -> Clouds to make a background fill layer in case the new image did not completely cover. Yes, you can see a seam, but I can smudge out that boundary later if needed
And who to put in the sky? I immediately thought of the bizarre multiple mashup image of Nana-Tine-Little-Alan
cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Rochelle Lockridge
I added a Underpainting filter and some gaussian blur to make the couple more dreamy. With a bit of brush erasure, I made the image blend in the background.
And all of that work was just for the intro part of the video.
The video work is all iMovie, the clip downloaded from Youtube as an MP4 and put into the project (trimming out the ends of the original). Here is a glance at the final workspace
(click for full size)
I keep the option (small blue button bottom right) to show the audio waveform- this makes it easy to “see” the audio, and quickly adjust levels if needed.
To do the cuts to the screens, I use the advanced tools, so when I drag and drop an image from the Finder into a clip segment I can use the Cutaway option so the video cuts to m image but the audio remains in tact. For the bit of ds106 text that overlays the video, I use a transparent background PNG and use the Picture in Picture tool.
For each cutaway, I resized the ends of it to match the cut points (essentially when the shot was not of the two characters). In each clip, I edited the cropping to remove the Ken Burns effect for most clips). While iMovie lacks all the features of a full editor, with use of these tools I can get away with most effects I want in ds106 movies.
The voice over recording tool is insanely useful for redubbing the dialog- I can just talk over as it records, and the automatic ducking knocks down most, but not all of the original so I can talk over
So the captain’s assistant says “680 blogs sir” instead of “21 knots” and when Fabrizio says “I can see the Statue of Liberty, already” in my movie he says “I can animate a GIF, already”…. and then the boom line “I AM KING OF THE WEBBBBBBBBBBBBBB”
The intro and outro are additions with the poster. To add audio my technique is to select small clip of the original with the music I want. I then select the clip and use “Detach Audio” to separate the video and audio tracks. I insert my image, slide the audio under my image, and delete the original clip. This allows me to extend the music.
And there you go. The biggest ship in the ocean. It looks like the icebergs hit the lesser ships.
The ds106ic: It may Collide with Destiny bit it ain’t going down. Jack and Rose can GIF it on.
So at the start of this week I though I’d get back into the headless course and do some video assignments. I spent a while looking through them but this one looked like it would be fun:
Download different scene clips from one movie to create a short commercial for DS106. Clip, trim and remix them to let people know what DS106 is all about and how they can find us at ds106.us. Challenge yourself to overdub the audio to have the characters saying DS106 where it would be appropriate. Also try and add the DS106 logo onto an object in a scene. You can find an example at The DS106 Matrix
from: ds106 Assignments: Mash A Movie For DS106
Looking back at the description I see I’d completely forgot about the logo bit, I also didn’t dub the characters. Rochelle’s example is great and I started looking for some sort of SF connection, but somehow ended up in Brigadoon. Perhaps because cogdog visited Scotland last weekend.
Also because I only read the assignment once I got it into my head to make a trailer. I found the Brigadoon trailer on youtube:
Mt first idea was to find the clips used in the trailer without the text and recreate it shot by shot with new text and voice over, of course I could not find the same scenes on youtube. I did find a few clips and decided to go with the timing and titles from the trailer with different scenes behind.
I expected to do the editing in iMovie but quickly realised that its titling was not up to the zooms and swings on the original. I switched to Screenflow as I knew it could do nice transitions of text. There I found that the text could be animated nicely but not curved. So I opened up Fireworks to make transparent titles which I could animate in Screenflow.
By now I’d spent a fair bit of time on this with nothing to show so I only spent a few minutes realising that recreating the text accurately would take more time than I had. I just found a vaguely similar font and used that. I also used a brighter yellow that the original.
The workflow was, copy a frame from QuickTime of the original trailer, paste into Fireworks. Add text, messing a little with the spacing. Then aligned the text to a path if I needed a curve, dropped a shadow, grouped and gave a quick blur. Hid the scheenshot layer and exported as a transparent png. I hide all the layers, added the next screenshot a did the next bit of text. All the graphics from one document for laziness.
Back in screenflow I edited the clips, animated the overlay and added a voice over. Screenflow is a pretty nice tool for this sort of thing and would be good and doing the animated typography sort of movie too.
This took a fair amount of time, if I had ben willing to spend more time it would have been less rough, the text could have been better, the voice over I just used the first take with my macs inbuilt mic as I did that bit at lunchtime in work. I had to extract audio from different bits of video and move it around, again I did a fairly quick and dirty job of this, trying to balance time and fun. THis is the final effort:
You might notice that some of the characters are aligned weirdly or rotated a bit, this was first due to accident, I could have cleaned up the path they were aligned to in Fireworks but left them in and made some more for extra klunky charm;-)
Download different scene clips from one movie to create a short commercial for DS106. Clip, trim and remix them to let people know what DS106 is all about and how they can find us at ds106.us. Challenge yourself to overdub the audio to have the characters saying DS106 where it would be appropriate. Also try and add the DS106 logo onto an object in a scene. You can find an example at The DS106 Matrix
”Do you want to know what IT is?….Unfortunately, no one can be told what DS106 is. You have to see it for yourself.” – Morpheus from The Matrix
I’ve been working this week in Headless ’13 ds106 learning how to read movies. The initial part of the week 10 assignment to analyze a scene from a movie will be posted soon. I had decided on using the lobby shoot out scene from The Matrix. A portion of the assignment asked us…
To get practice in basic video sequencing, locate at least two smaller portions within these clips that demonstrate the points you made in your analysis above. We want you to put these scenes together in a short montage, sequencing them together so that you get some basic experience with video editing.
Remixing of video and other digital media is a skill I’m familiar with already. [See Talky Tina - Sweet as Tupelo Honey]. So I modified the assignment to give me a bit more of a challenge. I remixed the clips to create a montage/trailer for the DS106 course experience rather than demonstrating the points made in my video clip analysis. I tried to find a DS106 video assignment or mashup assignment for something like this, but didn’t see one. Did I miss it? If not, I think I’ll create one for us. I created one for us: VideoAssignments1232
I downloaded 3 clips from The Matrix with the Firefox add-on Video Downloader.
I was drawn to snippets of the dialogue that I felt I could string together to have them talking about the chaos we experience and the perplexing situation we have trying to tell someone else what DS106 is all about.
For my video editing software I used Adobe Premiere Elements 12. Making the clip transitions cleanly from one to the other took a bit of fiddling around by shortening and lengthening the clips so that I didn’t have massive jumps between shots that looked out of place. At about 20 sec in there’s one cut that didn’t quite work right. The rest I’m pretty satisfied with. I really had a chance to see and understand how the cuts from one character to another or one scene to another are made as I put this together.
The audio went pretty smoothly. There were two spots where I wanted to dub in “DS106″ – one with Neo and one for Morpheus. It helped that my voice at the moment is pretty low due to a cold, but I’m not really satisfied with the quality of the dubbing job. I opted to let it go since I didn’t want to work that hard to make it “perfect”. I know I could’ve taken the audio into GarageBand and played around with effects and stuff, but it was good enough this time around. Personally I think it’s funnier that it stands out as being dubbed anyway.
The DS106 logo overlay onto the elevator was created with the addition of a .png formatted still image onto a new layer above the video track. Reducing the opacity down to 70% made it look more realistic. Finding the location to place the logo was the hardest part. I had to look for a somewhat logical spot in the video that had a stationary image for at least 5 seconds. Above the elevator worked fine. The logo had to be resized initially, but no zooming or tracking was required. Both a white and a black version of the logo are attached below for others to download and use in their projects.
They’ll have a transparent background.
