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. Due to copyright infringements I think the people that had posted this movie had distorted it a bit as to not infringe upon these copyright laws. Other than the movie being a little off center and there being what looked like small boxes on the screen the movie was pretty good. This movie was created back in 1951 but some of the techniques they used to film this, were ahead of their time.
After watching this movie I see that nothing has changed. Shoot first, ask questions later. The townspeople had shot the alien from a distant planet before he could get out what he wanted to say, typical Americans. These aliens from far away had learned English from the radio broadcasts from the United Nations, I’m sure that you can’t do this anymore with strict laws that are out there. I was ever so glad when the man/alien had escaped. And that he offered the kid some fine ass diamonds for $2.00, where do I get a hook up like this? Just like in the movie the world super powers are making atomic bombs threatening to use them against each other. Like I said this movie was made in 1951, yet these same topics are still relevant today, nations at odds with each other. It took someone such as this alien to make the world see that their hatred for one another would only lead to disaster. Overall a good movie.
I did the “Supercut It” assignment to go with the movie, I ended up using the word “ship or spaceship” because I felt it was the most used word within the whole movie. I felt that we could not forget the real question. Why was the spaceship here? I ended up using the 4k Downloader to intially get the movie and edited through the program Open Shot, as this was my 3rd or 4th video edited, I was able to move through the process quite quickly. Here is my clip below:
I chose Children of Men as my second movie. This was about a world in which everyone is infertile, and no babies have been born in eighteen years. Britain is the only country that has a high standard of living, and immigration is greatly looked down upon. However, a woman who is not a British citizen becomes pregnant and has to find a way onto a ship to escape to safety. The people she originally thought were helping her ended up wanting to use the infant as a symbol for their revolution, which they termed The Uprising. A man, Theo, then journeys with the new mother to save her child. I found this movie interesting, and can see it happening in the not so distant future. Although, I think that if someone were pregnant in a world without infants, she would not be fearful of her citizenship status. Being taken advantage of is one thing, but the government would probably see that baby as a prized possession, much like Baby Diego was.
I completed the “Supercut It” assignment to go with the movie, and used the word “baby” because of how often I noticed them saying it. As I pieced together every time they said baby, I discovered that those one-second snippets reveal the plot of the story in themselves by the urgency in which the word is being said. While I am mostly happy with the outcome of the video, there were some difficulties creating it.
I was only able to watch the movie on StarzEncore (or something like that. I do not often use an actual TV, but I was unable to stream it on my computer), so I had to record the TV. This caused difficulties such as the audio being quieter, and a glare. I tried to fix the glare by blocking off the windows with blankets (as the curtains are partially see-through), but that still left some light on the screen. Although, it was not nearly as noticeable as it had been before.
I also faced the issue of my dogs barking every time any creature with four legs was on the screen, so they eventually found themselves locked in my room for about ten minutes while I finished recording.
If I could change anyway, I would find some way to record the TV directly so the problems that come with recording a TV with a cellphone wouldn’t be there.
I’ve seen supercuts circulate on the Internet before (such as the famous No compilation) so I decided to try my hand at this assignment by creating a similar one that focused on emotional screaming. In constructing this, I noticed a particular pattern. Most of the screams are silent, or at least have subdued music/noise in the background. In addition, many have a slow-motion quality to them that heightens the moment. The footage I grabbed (using File2HD again) included Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, Eomer in The Lord of the Rings, V in V for Vendetta, Wolverine in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Harry in Harry Potter, Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, Ruth in Fried Green Tomatoes, Deadpool in Deadpool, Superman in Man of Steel, Bruce Wayne in Batman v Superman, Thor in Thor, and Westley in The Princess Bride (which I already had a copy of on my computer).
I moved back to my usual video-editing software, CyberLink PowerDirector, to stitch the footage together.
The result was a nice collection of screaming. I especially enjoyed ending with the prolonged Sound of Ultimate Suffering from The Princess Bride. This was another great exercise for looking at commonality and tropes throughout film.
I decided to do the supercut assignment with a movie I like a lot, Akira. Two of the main characters, Tetsuo and Kaneda, call each other’s names a lot during the course of the movie, to the point that it’s become something of a joke amongst people who’ve seen the movie. Because of this, I decided to make a supercut of all the times their names were said during the course of the film.
To make the supercut, I obviously needed the video file for the movie. I own a DVD copy, but after a lot of trying, I found out that I really can’t mess around with the files on it. I looked around on the internet and managed to find a copy that I could mess around with, so I downloaded that and went to work. At first I tried to make the supercut manually, but it wasn’t really practical. I remember my girlfriend made a supercut for a different class last year, so I asked her what she used to make it. She used a tool called videogrep, which uses a subtitle file to grab clips from the movie when certain things are said. I searched around and found a subtitle file (couldn’t access the ones on the DVD again), and ran the program. I ended up getting this:
It’s a little rough, since the software isn’t perfect, but it still turned out pretty well! The clip around each instance of “Tetsuo” and “Kaneda” isn’t particularly long, but the video still ended up being four and a half minutes long, so you can tell their names are said a lot in the movie, primarily by each other.
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.”
Good news for this assignment! I finally figured out a way to make Window’s Movie Maker work on Windows 10. After intense Google searching about video editing alternatives for Windows 10 users, I found out that I can get Windows Movie Maker on Windows 10 by just going to Microsoft’s site and downloading “Windows Essentials 2012” which includes Movie Maker among other things. Now I won’t have to deal with the giant watermark that was in my first assignment anymore.
To do this 5 star assignment I had to think of an overused word in a show I’ve seen. It wasn’t long before I stumbled across a funny picture that included Rick from the walking dead screaming “CARL!” at the top of his lungs, so I decided to go with a supercut of all the times people have said “Carl” in “The Walking Dead.” To do this assignment I finally got to use Windows Movie Maker.
Then all I had to do was search YouTube for clips of the characters in The Walking Dead yelling “Carl” and put them together in Windows Movie Maker.
Having already earned eighteen stars in the form of my last four challenges, this last one does seem rather pointless in retrospect. Then again, both this and my mandatory assignment are all that’s left to do before Kyosuke’s birthday this Sunday, and the latter is also going to be the toughest task I’ve had so far, as I attempt to pull off a visual trick worthy of David Copperfield in his prime. With that in mind, I would like to present to you my warm-up act for this weekend’s proceedings.
Create a supercut montage of overused dialogue, themes, motifs, film-making 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.” For examples and descriptions of supercuts visit:
It was during a visit to the latter site on this Video Assignment post that I saw the inspiration for my penultimate bit of editing this week, as someone managed to find all of the times in the first thirty episodes of the animated series, Darkwing Duck, where a variation of DW’s signature entrance is used in one form or another. Naturally, the basis for my supercut would be the next thirty episodes of the show, at least according to when they aired as part of The Disney Afternoon in the early 1990s. Before I get things started, however, it should be noted that there is a reason why the “Supercut” challenge was worth five stars at the time I chose to do this particular task. That’s because the footage you’re about to witness at the end of this entry is the direct result of two whole days of trimming non-existent film reels, just so I could find more of the times Drake Mallard told anyone within earshot of him that he was “the terror that flaps in the night!”
For this particular task to work, I started by signing up with another website: KissCartoon, which focuses on Western animation, yet still allows users to download episodes for free, much like its sister site, KissAnime. After finding and saving all of the necessary files on my computer, the hard part kicked in, as I spent countless hours on Windows Live Movie Maker, finding and editing every last clip to the best of my ability. To help me find the clips faster, I decided to watch the separate episodes, while editing the footage, on my computer. As soon as I found the footage I needed while watching the footage, I would locate it on Movie Maker, split and splice accordingly – for no less an important reason than making the final product as presentable as possible – and delete any excess footage once the edits have been made. I kept everything in a chronological order, according to when each episode was put up on the site, and thus premiered on The Disney Afternoon. There is no background music playing this time around, as I wanted to keep everything intact for this piece.
After doing this for thirty episodes’ worth of material, despite the later revelation that some of the episodes I chose didn’t even have the phrase be said at all, I made my opening and closing credits using the closest color scheme possible to those of Darkwing’s signature domino mask – purple, with sky-blue for the eyes. As for the font, I settled with Showcard Gothic, since it seemed to be the most accurate of the choices I had, regarding a matching font for the show’s logo. The lynchpin of the entire piece was a post-credits stinger, from the episode, “Slime Okay, You’re Okay,” when DW’s sidekick, Launchpad, essentially tells his friend to “work on a shorter intro.” Once I was satisfied with the combined product, I saved everything as is, exported the footage to a separate file, and uploaded it to my YouTube channel to conclude my broadcast day.
To sum up, once I crossed the sixteen-star threshold, I felt like the only real challenge left was my mandatory assignment, which I’ll get to next. However, this one was my toughest assignment to date, and I think it may have been for the best. I now have a lot more respect for editors in general, and the movie industry as a whole, through a task that tried to help me identify one of the most prominent clichés in all of cinema, and for that, I couldn’t be more grateful. Overall, these twenty-three stars of mine were definitely well-earned, and now that all my efforts can be seen on both my YouTube and Vimeo accounts, it won’t take long to see why.
He’s a man of the people. He’s also a man of few words. Really. VERY few words. Here they are: Ha ha, loads of fun on this video assignment. I hadn’t seen a supercut video before stumbling across this assignment and it was a lot of fun picking out scenes and trimming them down in order […]
The instructions for this assignment were to create a montage of an overused or widely recognised trope or movie theme. Initially, I had wanted to do “love at first sight” and create a video montage of that one scene where one person looks at another one and they stare at each other quietly for a second before getting all awakward. However, I did not have internet access for the past week, and so I had to get crafty with what I already had instead, since I had no way of aquiring any examples of the aformentioned scene.
Instead I decided to do something with Disney movies, since I have a lot of them already on my computer. At first I had simply wanted to transfer my “true love” idea onto the disney movies, since that is a recurring theme, but I decided that I’d be wasting movies, since not all animated Disney movies are about love, or even people. Instead, I decided to focus on the villain, since every Disney movie has some kind of bad guy.
I decided to make a collage of the “Villain Song”, something that has been present in nearly every animated movie Disney has put out since Beauty and the Beast. While there were “evil” songs I could have included, I really wanted to focus on movies where the bad guy actually sang and/or danced, as opposed to just a sad or creepy song. I included Elsa because she is, in my opinion, the closest thing Frozen has to a villain. She causes every problem in the film and literally shoots a shard of ice into her sister’s heart.
Also, the reason Beauty and the Beast is on here twice is because while I thought that the first clip I used was much more poignant and striking, I couldn’t pass up Gaston’s use of “screw your courage to the sticking place” in an assignment for an English class.
This assignment asked that I “create a supercut montage of overused dialogue, themes, motifs, filmmaking techniques, etc. for a particular character, tv show, film, and/or public figure.”
The first thing I thought of was Obama’s repetition of “let me be clear,” but it turns out that TIME magazine and the Associated Press have already compiled those into a video. I went with the next best thing: I pulled several different episodes of The Daily Show off of YouTube and used iMovie to trim, arrange, and stick them all together.
You can find the link to my supercut montage here.
I was having a really difficult time thinking of a phrase or theme to super cut in one of my favorite shows, which is hilarious because as soon as I decided on this one it was relatively simple to find examples of Frasier screaming at his brother, Niles. This was by far one of the most entertaining assignments to do, because it involved watching Frasier, which I do on a regular basis anyway.
At this point in the semester, I had myself worked into a routine for each specific assignment. I always first find my clips, and then download them to my computer. From there, I edit segments in MPEG Streamclip because I find it really simple to do with this program. After this I would put everything together in VideoPad. I usually like to put in final edits, like music or transitions, using YouTube editor. That’s how I did this.
A lot of the good video editing softwares that were recommended weren’t compatible with my XP so that’s why I ended up using VideoPad, which was relatively difficult to get the hang of. Lesson learned though, and as soon as this class is over, I’m formatting my computer so I can get all the cool stuff.
