Turns out the most popular video in youtube history is still entertaining to watch just for the weird visuals and funky dance moves.

For my first video assignment, i decided to start off confident and do the “Musicless Music Video”. This was a little difficult for me. No music in a music video? Come on! That’s torture. So, let me show you exactly how i created my masterpiece.

Video: My first step was to choose a music video. Wow, this was hard. Should i go with something safe and from this century? Sure, i could. Could i go retro and pick a cool music video because let’s face it, old music videos are freaking weird. Yes. I could. Which i did! One of my favorite older bands are the Talking Heads. They’re just perfect. Choosing my favorite song by them was difficult but good thing i didn’t have to. All i needed was my favorite video by them! I went with the classic “Naive Melody”.  The video is very interesting so i figured i’d mess around with that.

Taking Out The Music: Like i said, this was torture. Why would i deprive the world of this great song! It’s insane. What i decided to do was take out the song and replace it with something else. I just didn’t like the idea of adding sound effects other than the song itself to the video. It wouldn’t have come out right with this video. I could have switched videos and picked something i could have worked with better but… that’s not me. I HAVE to use this video. I don’t think i’ve ever mentioned the Talking Heads in DS106 and i’m making a point to now! I remember a while ago i heard a cover of this song that was fantastic. Well, as i thought harder and longer, i remembered that the cover was done by Arcade Fire. Now there was no going back. I needed this video and this song. Arcade Fire and Talking Heads have a pretty close relationship. David Byrne (lead singer) went on stage with Arcade Fire once. Now, their cover of Naive Melody is kind of old and if you’re not a fan of Arcade Fire, you won’t like it. Oh, well. I love it! What i decided to do was take out the original song and add in this cover to the video. I was really excited but this is just too perfect (the idea). Now that you’ve read my background, let me show you how i completed this!

Steps:

1. I went on youtube and looked for a good version of the Naive Melody music video. Considering this video is really old, that was hard. I stumbled on this video which seemed decent, compared to the other versions of course. Once i picked this video, i opened up Imovie because i have a macbook. What i had to do here was a little difficult. I’ve never made videos like this before so i had to search around for tips. I realized that you could use the Quicktime Player to record your screen. I decided to do that and record the video as i played it. This was pretty easy but also kind of difficult because i had to choose the right time to record. Finally, i saved this recording to my “Movies” file on my laptop. The next step was to open this in Imovie.

2. Imovie. After saving the recording of the music video, i opened it up in Imovie. I had to make sure it uploaded properly and such. I edited out some frames because my cursor was in the shot from pressing and play and minimizing the screen. After i made sure it uploaded properly and made the frames good, i wanted to add the beautiful music to the video.

3. Adding music. I was grateful to have Imovie work so conveniently for me. I clicked on the sounds section and found out that you could upload music straight from itunes. Perfect! I went to youtube to find the cover (which was performed live) and converted it to an MP3 through this sketchy website. I then made sure i had the whole video highlighted so the song would cover the whole video. This worked out pretty well. The music matched up to the time of the video and all was well. I’m almost done!

3. Finalizing everything was my last step. I had the music ready and the video set. So i literally clicked on finalize my project and it saved it. Imovie allowed me the option to upload directly to youtube so i did that. It was really a breeze. My biggest fear was having an upload error but so far so good! Below i’ll post the original of everything and then my video. Enjoy!

Original Video:

Original Cover Video:

MY VIDEO!!!!

STARS: 3.5

Here is Smooth Criminal – Michael Jackson that has the audio stripped and replaced with scary sound effects. The video itself is kind of weird and spooky looking so I decided that a scary sound effects backgournd would match up pretty well.

I decided to do the Musicless Music Video assignment.

I’ve seen some weird music videos in my day, so I knew I needed to track down the best of the best, the one that would truly come across as strange or awkward when the music was stripped away. And I thought of the perfect one: Panic! At the Disco’s “Girls/ Girls/ Boys.”

Here’s the original:

It’s basically the lead singer, Brendon Urie, sensually and expressively dancing around naked. It goes great with the tone and topic of the song, but take away the song and it gets really weird.

Here is the video without music:

It’s really strange.

So I thought I’d see what would happen if I incorporated some sound effects available in iMovie. (Spoiler Alert: It just got weirder.)

I decided to add some club-like music as well as some child sounds and police sirens to create this creepy pedophile narrative. (I watch a lot of Criminal Minds, okay?)

Wanting to redeem myself for creating such a sinister subtext to the music video, I decided to turn Brendon’s little dance into something that people are laughing at him for. Cue copious amounts of sitcom laughter clips. I love how some of Brendon’s facial expressions work well with being laughed at and seem to suggest he’s trying to stay composed despite being laughed at while he’s obviously baring his soul in a very vulnerable manner.

If nothing else from this assignment, I see how a good music video doesn’t make sense without its music and how changing the sound can affect how you comprehend the narrative of the video. Just think of all the movies where sounds are used to clue you in on what’s about to happen or toy with your emotions. It’s basically turning manipulation into an art form.

For my second assignment I did the musicless music video assignment. I don’t watch music videos often, so I told my friend he could choose for me. This is the result of a very dramatic music video by Lindsay Lohan and my cruel humor combined. I tried to make it interesting and had a little too much fun with some animal noises. I tried to make the video lighter for all of its drama and difficult topic. I hope it is sort of funny and enjoyable!

To make this I struggled a bit. I downloaded the video from YouTube easily by using the ‘pwn’ web address to download the video from a site. Then I struggled with finding how to edit it. The mp4 would not go into iMovie, so I uploaded it to Mpeg Streamclip and changed the video to a quicktime video. Then I could upload it to iMovie, turned the sound on 0 and then dropped in some sound effects. I tried to do overall interesting sounds, meshed with some sounds that lined up with things actually happening in the video. It was a struggle at first but now I know how to do this and feel pretty cool. I’m sure this skill will be useful in the weeks to come!

3.5*

This was another fun one for me–music videos can be some of the strangest films, even when the actual music is playing. Just like the actual song, a music video is often a piece of art and an artist’s expression in and of itself. That’s why I like this assignment so much. It lets me ruin an artist’s vision and create my own! That sounds awful, but I think it’s a lot of fun to be able to take inspiration from other people and turn it into something new. As you might have expected, I decided to take a comedic approach to this. I chose a very dark and sinister music video (Raining Blood by Slayer), and decided to make it a little lighter. I found a sound effect of a guy laughing in a sinister manner, but he has a cold so it doesn’t end up sounding very sinister. Then, just as the band hits the stage, the Benny Hill theme song comes in. Seeing a heavy metal band headbanging to the Benny Hill theme is definitely something special to behold! To cap it all off, I added in a little girl giggling at the very end because who wouldn’t want to laugh after all that?! Check it out here: