So for the assignment Chipmunk Style (2 1/2 Stars), I decided to use the Paper Bag speech from season 3 episode 2 of the Wire. I decided to use this scene because it was a serious part of the season and I thought this would be an interesting take on this part! I saw Brittany’s post Stringer and Avon Fighting Chipmunk Style and I knew I had to do this assignment! I found the clip on YouTube and used the handy dandy ClipConverter to grab the file. Here is the original:

I imported the file into iMovie. iMovie has a cool feature where you can change the audio of the project without actually changing the speed of the clip (you can also speed up the clip just like the audio). But for the sake of this assignment I only focused on changing the pitch of the audio. So when I had the entire clip in the filmstrip (and selected) I went to the three overlapping circles, and clicked on Audio Effect.

A new window popped up and I selected the Pitch Up 3.  This made the entire clip sound like a Chipmunk. I played around with different sound pitches and effects settled on pitch up 3 because it wasn’t as high as pitch up 4 and it was higher than pitch up 2, which only changed the pitch very little. The other effects are hilarious to play around with and I almost wanted to use the robot one! 

I really enjoyed playing around with the different pitch effects in iMovie! Here is the final product!

For this assignment I chose to speed up the theme song of The Wire. I tried other scenes, but I liked this the best. I downloaded the video off of UMW Media Hub and opened it in Movie Maker. I then used the split tool to cut the video and simply sped it up by 2. Enjoy!

Corbin Bleu once said, “I can do a really high-pitched cartoon voice. Everybody always say they like that.” I like it when McNulty and Jay talk in a really high pitch voice. Jay sounds really funny when he talks like a chipmunk. I laugh so hard, I’m like:

So for the video assignment I did (2.5 stars), I took the clip from Season 2 of The Wire of when McNulty comes back into the office and was looking for Jay. I love that scene. I wondered how Jay and McNulty would sound like if they were chipmunks. I found the perfect video assignment to do that. So all I did, I used the same video program which was wondershare. After putting the video into the timeline, I double clicked on it and went to the audio of it which I changed the pitch to the highest. It sounds so funny that I would love to hear every episode of them talk like this. Here’s the video and hope you guys enjoy it:

For my first video assignment this week I decided to do “Chipmunk Style” (2.5 stars). I figured it would be a good introduction to how Windows Move Maker works. Not super hard but not super easy either. When I was watching the episode I knew that I had to do this assignment for that scene. I knew it was going to be hilarious and it didn’t let me down. I laughed all the way through it, especially when they were actually fighting and Stringer was on top of Avon yelling at him. Oh it is great. Here is the original video:

And here is the high pitch version: (I trimmed it a little because I just wanted the fight scene):

How I did it:

Well this was a bit of a struggle to make but eventually I got it. First I found the scene on YouTube and opened the Free YouTube Downloader that I have on my computer from when we were making our GIFs. I first downloaded the video as an AVI file. But that wouldn’t open right in MPEG Stream Clip. Then I re-downloaded it as an MP4 file. I opened this in MPEG Stream Clip in an attempt to trim it. However, I don’t know if it was too long or what but MPEG Stream Clip did NOT want to trim it for me. It kept crashing. So I decided to try to open the MP4 up in Windows Live Movie Maker and edit it there. After messing around for a little in Movie Maker I figured out how to trim it there. Then I tried to chipmunk-ify them in movie maker. I looked around a little and couldn’t figure it out. Speeding it up just made it hard to watch and listen to. So I googled it to see if you can adjust it in Movie Maker. I saw a few videos on how to do it but I guess I have a different version of Movie Maker than the one they were using so I couldn’t figure out how to do it. However, I knew that I could make it high pitched in Audacity. So I went back to Free YouTube Downloader and downloaded the same clip as an MP3 file. I imported that into audacity and went to Effect>Change Pitch and changed it so it sounded chimpmunk-y enough for me. Then I trimmed it to where I thought it would fit with my video. I imported it into movie maker and the sound was a couple seconds off from the video so I had to go back and trim the audio a little more in Audacity. The second time I trimmed it it fit perfectly! I was happy that it only took two tries to work. In order to post it on here I couldn’t just post the WMV file because it didn’t like that so I used zamzar.com to convert it to an MP4 file and downloaded to my computer and then uploaded it to my blog.

Anyway I am super, super happy with how this turned out and I hope it makes you laugh a little!

I had fun with this chipmunk style assignment. I chose a scene from episode 8 where the techie guy is joking around with his computer abilities. I thought it was one of the lighter moments in the season so I downloaded the video, cut it down to the scene I wanted on Mpeg Streamclip and then uploaded it to iMovie. There I sped up the video to give it the high pitch quality I wanted and voila! Fin!

2.5*

I decided to do the Chipmunk Style video assignment, which requires you to take a pre-existing video or scene from a TV show or movie and either speed it up or adjust the clip so that it sounds like a chipmunk.

I knew that in order for this to be effective and hopefully humorous, I should select something involving characters with a deep voice. I decided that I would do Samuel L. Jackson’s reading of Go the Fuck to Sleep.

Here is the original version:

I downloaded this video using KeepVid and imported it into iMovie. Then I just used the audio effects to raise the pitch. The chipmunk effect is typically obtained through speeding up speech, but that speech is typically spoken at a slower rate so that it can be understood when it is sped up. I decided to adjust the pitch instead as that doesn’t affect the speed.

Here is one of the voice actors from the recent Alvin and the Chipmunks series showing how he has to say the lines so they can be edited and still coherent.

After doing the minimal audio editing, I exported it as a file and uploaded it to YouTube.

I think it’s really interesting to hear how much more humorous this sounds when there isn’t a deep voice reading it.

For this two week segment you should complete two more ds106 video assignments, each should be posted to your blog, appropriately tagged and categorized. All videos should have an opening and closing title/credits sequence.

I was trying to think what assignments to do this week that would make me laugh and be interesting to make. This one about making a normal scene sound like a chipmunk when you speed it up was great. I decided to take an iconic song in Dream Girls that Jennifer Hudson sings and turn it into a chipmunk version. First the song is sung slow and takes a while to build up so it was perfect. Not only that but everyone knows it so it would also get a laugh. I went to YouTube to find a video clip of her singing it and downloaded it using http://en.savefrom.net/. Next I use my movie editing software to play around with the speed. At first I made it 4x but you couldn’t make out the words so I toyed around and settled on 1.75X. I then added a title and closing credits, put in some transitions at front and after/before each text that comes in. Finally, I played it and laughed at my work. Oh and I am a big fan of the Chipmunk movies too so this is great way to do my own version too. Hope you enjoy!

My changed one where she is only thinking like a chipmunk that wants her nuts is here:

The original is this clip here in case you want it:

Screen shot of my video editing:

Screen Shot of Video Editing

Not bad overall right? Was interesting concept.