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“Video Essay” 5 Star Video assignment (“The Notebook”)

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I must say that attempting this video essay assignment really put me at ease. The main reason is because I love to write! The second reason is because i didn’t have to worry about nor have the hassle of editing certain clips and trimming the movie since i searched on YouTube and found the movie that had every single one of my favorite clips in it! So this made the process for doing this assignment way easier. I chose to talk about the movie called “The Notebook” for my video essay because overall, I think this movie is just beautiful, creative, romantic, and the actors really played their part to the “T”. If you play the video above it shows you all of my favorite scenes from the movie. So, I’m going to start telling you guys about the first scene and why I think the director did a amazing job producing the movie, as well as writing the script. Well in this first scene I love the way the two characters are interacting with each other and how the guy is trying to break the girl out of her shell and make her dance with him because he knows she to has feelings for him just like he has feelings for her. So the way both characters portrayed the role of flirtation and trying to hide their lust and love for each other was terrific. Now, I wanna talk more about the movie in general from beginning to end….all of the scenes in the clips above all represent the true meaning of why the director chose to name the movie, “The Notebook” i would say. The reason for being so, is because if you watch all of the clips any type of audience can understand automatically how the title of the movie and the characters are in comparison with one another. For example, in the scene where the girl and the guy are in the rain and the girl stops to tell the guy why he hasn’t replied to any of her letters in the past.. well that relates to a “Notebook” because in a notebook you clearly have papers and chapters inside, and according to the movie and the characters both the girl and the guy are living in a kind of notebook or diary if you must call it since their true feelings for each other were hidden for years. So the director made a excellent comparison to the tile by making the script correlate back to the title i think. I love this movie so much and I recommend that everyone really sit down and watch it so that they can understand the script, and maybe even understand the true meaning of love. Thank you:)!

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The Dark Knight Essay

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this is my video essay on the dark knight. I think this may be the only movie I’ve seen in theaters more then once. The editing for this project was pretty challenging because I wrote out the script in advance so timing the clips to the audio of the essay was a little challenging considering the length and variety of scenes i wanted to include.

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Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

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Video Assignment: Video Essay

One of the obvious reasons why I chose to do the video essay on this movie was because it stars Michael Cera. I also really enjoy the style of the movie and it’s something that is different from other movies. There were a lot of special effects in the movie that made the transitions between scenes move really smoothly and fit with the theme.

To create this video essay, I used mainly Windows Live Movie Maker and Microsofts sound recorder to narrate the essay. I already had a digital copy of the movie so it was easy to get all the clips I needed for the essay.

After waiting for the video to upload to youtube, I tried embedding the code into this post but received an error saying “Embedding disabled by request”

Then early this morning I received an email from youtube saying that my video contains content that is owned by NBC Universal. So for right now the video will not be on this post but I am going to try another video uploading service.

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Trying to analyze a movie.. fail

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For my video essay, http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/video-essay/ I decided to do P.S. I love you because I love the movie and thought it would be easy to talk about. I apologize for the last scene having subtitles in another language. I wanted it though because it was the turning point in the movie. I used the soundcloud [...]

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Taxi Driver: Film Essay

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Taxi Driver is a Scorsese masterpiece with one of film’s most powerful protagonists, Travis. It’s Travis’s many contradictions that makes him one of the great characters in film history. In my film essay, we will be watching the final shootout scene in the brothel. During this scene we will be discussing how editing techniques reveals Travis’s disjointed state and decent into psychosis.

The Process:

I ripped the film from Youtube. I have the original DVD but I could never get MPEG to convert the files into .mp4 or any form really. Next, in iMovie, I was able to add my voiceover audio with a push of a button! I drew up a script and recored myself.

The main difficulty was normalizing the audio. The is a strange echo during the scene with Travis talking to the Pimp. I struggled for hours trying to play with audio settings but I was only successful in mitigating it but not fixing it. For the other scenes it seems to be fine but those scene already had distorted sound.

Real movie editors have tough jobs. Hours of tedious work that only realizes small successes. It’s tough work and I cannot say I will be applying for any of those positions any time soon. or ever.

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If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes

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For my video essay assignment I finally completed my long overdue video discussion of the motif of eyes in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). I love how visually lush Blade Runner is when it comes to themes, motifs, and larger ethical questions about the human condition. Where Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was a sterile vision of the future punctuated by a monolithic jump in universal consciousness—Blade Runner is a gritty, retro-fitted struggle over creation. The realities of exploited bodies, exploited labor, and the exploited environment takes on new dimensions when the underlying sanctity of humanity is problematized—and contains the time-honored themes that made the HBO series The Wire so compelling: how our culture has dehumanized the people within it. The film marks the moment of the commerce of the human soul on an industrial scale, one wherein humanity itself is purely a product. And for that reason alone there are few more horrific visions of the future than Blade Runner, but all the while it is laced with poetry and a sense of hope, however meager. Signs of the highest achievement in my mind.

Anyway, I really wanted to keep this video essay short and somewhat conversational. I noticed I pause a lot when talking, and I had to do a bit of editing to work that dead air out. This commentary was a first pass, and it’s really focused on the motif of the eyes. I wasn’t really able to expand out about the replicants as labor, exploitation of the environment, a corporatized future, etc. Nonetheless, I do enjoy how focused this essay can be, and hopefully it brings out how rich film can be when an extended visual metaphor is handled with such subtle brilliance and care throughout the film. The themes in many ways take over the film through the camera, rather than the narrative or plot. Once you start thinking about the motif of eyes in Blade Runner it is kind of hard to stop, and for me that says something powerful, or does it show something powerful?

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Video Essay – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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I chose One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for my video analysis. iMovie was a great tool for taking clips that I had taken from youtube. The assignment: you need to select several scenes from your favorite film (or one of your favorites), and edit them together and comment on some of the filmic elements of the scenes? Why do you like these scenes? What strikes you about them? What makes them good cinema? Is there a subtext at work in this film? In short, construct an essayistic commentary on the scenes as a narrator explaining to your audience what you find important about the scene, and why. What’s more, what do the details you have pinpointed say about the film more generally.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest is one of my favorite movies. Editing the scenes together was pretty easy thanks to iMovie (as I mentioned before…). I was also glad to find that it was easier to download the clips from youtube than I had expected. I used the microphone tool to add in commentary over the film. Realizing that I could control the volume of my comments as well as the film clips themselves was very handy. I also liked that I could use different transitions between clips, so that it didn’t look too choppy. One of the most difficult things I thought was cutting all the clips I wanted to show down to 5 minutes or less. I think that choosing perfect sections of the film, that illustrate why the film is so great was apart of the challenge of the assignment. I also found that it was a lot easier when I wrote a script, and stuck with it. I tried to improv with bullets at first, and it was very unorganized, and I took up more time because of awkward pauses. In the end, here’s what I got:

Assignment worth 5 stars.

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5 Minute Movie Summary

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This assignment took a little more time than I thought it was going to. The hardest part was figuring out how I was going to summarize a 4 hour long movie in 5 minutes as well as finding the appropriate clips. However, after some elbow greace and sprained finger tips, I was able to find a good amount of information to put it together and came up with this analysis of the Titanic.

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Dark Knight Commentary

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This is for the assignment Video essay

hey guys this is my commentary on my favorite scene in my favorite movie the Dark Knight i hope you enjoy it

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Fellowship of the Ring: Video Essay

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I’ve been working on this all week, and have just put together the audio today. Ta-da! My short analysis of the Fellowship of the Ring. I mostly talked about acting and music; while those seem like really basic aspects of a movie, in my opinion, if a movie doesn’t have those then you don’t have a good movie. There weren’t a lot of other parts that stood out to me as strongly as the music and the acting of the supporting character. I thought a little about camera angles and lighting and stuff, but I don’t know enough about those to really understand what’s significant, unless it’s an extremely obvious thing. Anyway, here it is: