One of my favorite movies, Children of Men directed by Alfonso Cuarón, makes almost religious use of long, winding shots that stay on the characters far longer than the viewer realizes. Cuarón loves to use these kinds of shots on all of his films, and the technique has become synonymous with his directorial style, but I watched Children of Men just as I began to take more than just a passing interest in film and this was the first of his films that I really paid attention to the form of. The long takes are used to give gravity to a scene without leading the audience by the hand and shouting THIS IS IMPORTANT! Rather, Cuarón simply says “Look at this, and don’t look away.” This gentler coaxing leads to a more enjoyable and engaging viewing experience for the audience, and is just my taste.
Most of this film is made up of long takes, which makes the shorter takes even more apparent. While a longer take might lend importance to a scene, the rare short cuts can purposefully jar the viewer, simply by virtue of their rarity. You might notice that many of these clips are from conversations, but some of the other scenes might serve this purpose well.
I basically did this by going through the movie scene by scene and selecting only cuts no more than a few seconds long, and supercutting those together.
For my final assignment bank task of this week, I’ve chosen Michael Branson Smith’s 5-star prompt to create a supercut montage of something that’s overused in film, be it a quote, song, or filmmaking technique. As someone who has a lot of appreciation for the technical side of filmmaking, and to also tie this assignment in with last week’s topic, I decided to have my supercut be a compilation of “dolly zooms,” otherwise known as “the vertigo effect.” This technique is achieved by changing the zoom of the camera while moving it towards/away from the subject, creating a bizarre effect where the background seems to move further away while the subject appears to move closer. This dizzying effect is most commonly used to evoke a sense of uneasiness. The term “vertigo effect” is derived from the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo (1958), where the technique was used for the very first time.
In my supercut, I’ve assembled clips of various movies throughout the years, ranging from the 1970’s to the 2010’s. I located these scenes using TV Tropes, a website that assembles all known instances of a certain trope in TV, film, video games, and more. Just as before, I used Vegas Pro to edit everything together. I didn’t go over the top with the editing, since I wanted this to be more of a relaxing educational video. Despite its relative simplicity, I still worked hard on this video, and I’m very happy with the end result.
For my final assignment of the week (which also happens to be one of two five-star assignments I did this week) I decided to create a supercut video. I’ve seen many supercuts, because they seem to be a popular thing on YouTube. I was curious as to why this was labeled as a five star assignment, because it didn’t seem like that much work. I was completely wrong!
A supercut video looks simply, but is actually very complex. First I had to come up with something to supercut. At first I considered a continuation of my western theme from last week by making a supercut of every time someone says the word “plan” in Red Dead Redemption 2. I then lowered the bar slightly to focus on one character, but soon discovered I don’t have the time to go through hours worth of cutscenes. I also don’t have anything to record screen-capture on my PS4, so I quickly ditched that idea. But that doesn’t mean I won’t come back to it later! Maybe when I have some free time I’ll continue this idea, but with the semester winding down I have too much going on.
My second choice actually came to me as quickly as the first: Supernatural. More specifically, every time Dean Winchester says “Cas” (or “Cass”) or “Castiel.” Castiel is, of course, another character in the show. For anyone unfamiliar with Supernatural, it’s a show about two brothers (Sam and Dean Winchester) who hunt all the supernatural creatures that go bump in the night. You’re introduced to demons as early as Season 1, and then the angels make an appearance in Season 4 with the onslaught of the Apocalypse. The angels turn out to be just as bad as demons, except for one that chooses to hang around the Winchester brothers named Castiel, the Angel of Thursday. There’s a bit of subtext to be talked about in the relationship between Dean and Castiel, especially since the angels in Supernatural can literally appear out of thin air and Cas always shows up when Dean calls. I actually stopped watching the show sometime around Season 9, but I do know it ran for 15 Seasons. I plan to watch the rest one day to finish off the show, but for now I wanted to create a supercut containing the many, many times Dean says Castiel’s name.
I discovered immediately that this assignment was a lot of work. Thankfully I didn’t have to scour YouTube for videos because I own the seasons I used on DVD. This was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because I had everything at my fingertips. A curse because I had to go through each disc individually and record my screen for the clips I wanted. I used Screen-Cast-O-Matic for this, because I don’t know of any other software that lets you record your screen other than Zoom, and Zoom hasn’t been working good for me lately. Little by little, piece by piece, I recorded clips I wanted to use. Once I did this I laid them out in OpenShot in an order that I though worked well. Some are in order by how they appear in an episode, others are not. Since it’s a supercut I did not think it needed to be in any chronological order, and just ordered it however I wanted. Afterwards I added a title and end screen, before taking an extra step and adding music to the intro and outro. Supernatural contains a lot of rock’n’roll, and “Carry On My Wayward Son” by Kansas is sort of the unofficial theme song of the show. It plays during every season finale so I thought it was a good fit. Thankfully I have the Kansas album this song is on and didn’t have to hunt it down either! I simply ripped the track from the CD, sliced the audio so it covered the intro and outro, and finished the video!
I managed to do this all without OpenShot crashing on me, which I consider a miracle in and of itself! After I uploaded it to YouTube and it thankfully didn’t get blocked! So, without further ado, here is my supercut! I hope you enjoy!
Please tell me what you think in the comments down below!
For my final assignment of the week (which also happens to be one of two five-star assignments I did this week) I decided to create a supercut video. I’ve seen many supercuts, because they seem to be a popular thing on YouTube. I was curious as to why this was labeled as a five star assignment, because it didn’t seem like that much work. I was completely wrong!
A supercut video looks simply, but is actually very complex. First I had to come up with something to supercut. At first I considered a continuation of my western theme from last week by making a supercut of every time someone says the word “plan” in Red Dead Redemption 2. I then lowered the bar slightly to focus on one character, but soon discovered I don’t have the time to go through hours worth of cutscenes. I also don’t have anything to record screen-capture on my PS4, so I quickly ditched that idea. But that doesn’t mean I won’t come back to it later! Maybe when I have some free time I’ll continue this idea, but with the semester winding down I have too much going on.
My second choice actually came to me as quickly as the first: Supernatural. More specifically, every time Dean Winchester says “Cas” (or “Cass”) or “Castiel.” Castiel is, of course, another character in the show. For anyone unfamiliar with Supernatural, it’s a show about two brothers (Sam and Dean Winchester) who hunt all the supernatural creatures that go bump in the night. You’re introduced to demons as early as Season 1, and then the angels make an appearance in Season 4 with the onslaught of the Apocalypse. The angels turn out to be just as bad as demons, except for one that chooses to hang around the Winchester brothers named Castiel, the Angel of Thursday. There’s a bit of subtext to be talked about in the relationship between Dean and Castiel, especially since the angels in Supernatural can literally appear out of thin air and Cas always shows up when Dean calls. I actually stopped watching the show sometime around Season 9, but I do know it ran for 15 Seasons. I plan to watch the rest one day to finish off the show, but for now I wanted to create a supercut containing the many, many times Dean says Castiel’s name.
I discovered immediately that this assignment was a lot of work. Thankfully I didn’t have to scour YouTube for videos because I own the seasons I used on DVD. This was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because I had everything at my fingertips. A curse because I had to go through each disc individually and record my screen for the clips I wanted. I used Screen-Cast-O-Matic for this, because I don’t know of any other software that lets you record your screen other than Zoom, and Zoom hasn’t been working good for me lately. Little by little, piece by piece, I recorded clips I wanted to use. Once I did this I laid them out in OpenShot in an order that I though worked well. Some are in order by how they appear in an episode, others are not. Since it’s a supercut I did not think it needed to be in any chronological order, and just ordered it however I wanted. Afterwards I added a title and end screen, before taking an extra step and adding music to the intro and outro. Supernatural contains a lot of rock’n’roll, and “Carry On My Wayward Son” by Kansas is sort of the unofficial theme song of the show. It plays during every season finale so I thought it was a good fit. Thankfully I have the Kansas album this song is on and didn’t have to hunt it down either! I simply ripped the track from the CD, sliced the audio so it covered the intro and outro, and finished the video!
I managed to do this all without OpenShot crashing on me, which I consider a miracle in and of itself! After I uploaded it to YouTube and it thankfully didn’t get blocked! So, without further ado, here is my supercut! I hope you enjoy!
Please tell me what you think in the comments down below!
For my second Video Assignment Bank I chose the Supercut It assignment. I again used iMovie to cut the clips and mash them together.
Given the current crisis the matter everyone has been talking about has been the spread of the Coronovirus and its prevention. I first went to YouTube to find clips from the news, radio shows, and talkshows. I then uploaded the film to iMovie and cut down the videos even more. Finding the videos was one thing, trimming them down to mere milliseconds is another. I have a whole new found appreciation for the people who put together the new montages or lip sync videos. This is time consuming to say the least.
In the end my product is a slight deviation from the assignment as the phrases do change a little throughout, but the concept is all the same.
For this video assignment I did a super cut of Michelle Tanners famous line from Full House, “You’ve got it dude!”. It took me a while to decide what 80’s themed phrase I could super cut, and full house popped into my head! There were already a few super cuts on you tube, but I found a weird amount of people putting up videos of their children saying the catch phrase. I decided to take these clips and put them together with the Olsen twins. At first I thought it was weird that so many people would put videos of their children up on YouTube, but I guess it is 2019.
I used Adobe Rush and 4k video downloader to create this video.
For my last video assignment, I chose to do a Supercut of one of my favorite cartoons, Scooby Doo. A supercut is when a creator will take short clips of reoccurring themes, styles, or lines from different movies or television shows, and put them altogether with no transitions. The idea is to showcase whatever theme or line you choose in a very quick way. I decided to take multiple scenes from Scooby Doo where the villain is unmasked and out them altogether.
This process took a LOT of time. First I had to find the clips of old Scooby Doo episodes. I found a channel on YouTube that made this process very easy, since they had a playlist that contained shortened clips of the show that were labeled as a “reveal”. After finding the clips I liked, I used the video downloading website SaveFrom.net to download them onto my computer. Because the cartoon is so old, it made downloading them very fast due to the fact that the resolution is already so low.
Once I had all of the scenes I wanted to use, I put them into iMovie and began cutting them down. This was the most tedious task out of the whole process. I had to make sure that the clips were long enough to get the point of the scene but short enough to make sure my video was still considered a Supercut. After I had all of my scenes cut down to size, I added a title and an ending and uploaded my video to my YouTube channel.
This process was fun, and I think I would enjoy making another supercut if I took a long time to do it. When I say a long time, I mean months. It would be a really fun project to pick a line in a movie or a camera technique just casually come by them and add them to a supercut.
Overall I am pretty happy with how the final product turned out, but I do wish it was a bit longer.
Create a supercut montage of overused dialogue, themes, motifs, filmmaking techniques, etc. for a particular character, tv show, film, and/or public figure. A supercut is a “fast-paced montage of short video clips that obsessively isolates a single element from its source, usually a word, phrase, or cliche from film and TV. Supercut.org collects every known example of the video remix meme.”
I loved the example video for this assignment, so I thought it would be fun to try to make a video like it! Instead of choosing a phrase of dialogue, I decided to do a montage of people sitting up in bed after a nightmare. This is definitely not a full montage of all of the movies that have these kind of scenes, but it gives an idea of how often it happens.
It was really fun making this video. It was a little hard finding the right scenes of people waking up. Sometimes the videos I found would just have the dream the character is having, but not include the part where they jump out of bed. I like the clips I found, even though I honestly have not seen most of the movies. This website gave me a list of movies with the kind of scenes I was looking for, and I found it extremely useful. Editing the video together was not hard. The most difficult part is trimming each video in a way that the project flows as a whole. I also wanted to mix the movies up a little bit, with some cartoons mixed in with the live action movies. I would definitely do this assignment again just for fun.
So I decided to watch the film Children of Men as my second film.
I enjoyed this movie way more than Night of the Living Dead. Children of Men was very beautifully done. The message of faith and hope was really shown throughout the film. The only thing that bothered me about it was that pretty much everybody dies. I’m not a huge fan of movies, or stories, like this. However, the story was just brilliant, and I was especially a fan of the use of long takes. I know how much work gets put into long takes such as these, so all I could do was appreciate it immensely as I watched the film.
Throughout watching it, I kept thinking about what I would do my Supercut It Assignment on. I had several ideas that I could do (this includes things specifically involving characters such as smoking, alcohol, cursing, etc.), but I ultimately decided on the long takes. I think this filming technique was just really important in the feeling that the film gives the audience. There were actually quite a few of them. In my compilation I included 6 long takes. There were some more that weren’t quite as long, so I didn’t feel like I could count them, but there were quite a few instances where it amazed me it hadn’t cut yet. These 6 were the most amazing ones.
I chose the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still” as my second movie that I watched. As I have never seen this movie before I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see what happened. The copy that I was able to attain was through YouTube.
