Here is my new take on Charlie’s story! When watching the final clip, once I was able to get the audio to line up, it reminded me of a dance. I decided to base my new take on the story as if Charlie and the Lion were competitive dancers on Dancing with the Stars. I used a clip from the show for the intro and and a piece of audio from another clip for the conclusion and saved them using savefrom.net and a google chrome extension called Backtick. I edited the video in Microsoft Movie Maker and compiled the audio in Audacity. Here is a screenshot of the video editing.
I then added the music soundtrack (Bushwick Tarantella), and the soundbyte at the end from the show.  and I had to do all of the sound editing in Audacity because Movie Maker limits the user to only being able to layer one audio sound over a video, and it took a while to line everything up.
It was much more difficult than I originally anticipated, but I am happy with the result!
For this assignment, we went brought back the Foley assignment for a 2nd round, taking the clips that the class created and pulling it into the Chaplin video as an exercise of our video editing skills. Â Additionally, we took time to create introduction, layer on a new soundtrack, and modify the middle of the story.
For this assignment, I used the a collection of clips pulled from our class SoundCloud collection to create the core dialog.  I download the original Chaplin clip and a Lion King clip from YouTube using http://en.savefrom.net/.  I used incompetech.com to find a lively silent film score that I used as the background music.  Initially, the sound was quite loud and overpowering so I used the functionality available on VideoPad Video Editor to pull the volume down 50% for the soundtrack.  I used the insert Text feature to create the opening, scrolling credits and then use the same texts to create the closing story line, credits for media sources, and the final THE END.
Below is a screenshot of my VideoPad Video Editor interface.
When picking the SoundCloud pieces, I tried to chose the sound clips with the lowest background noise (lowest median wave height in the SoundCloud interface).  I was surprised at how well they fit together.  When I was determining how I wanted to edit the middle of the story, my reasoning (and Google key word search) was “Lion Dreaming,” literally.  After a brief view of the video clips that came up with the search, I came across the scene from the Lion King where Mufasa and Simba are frolicking through the open spaces of their kingdom.  I thought to myself, “what else would a sleeping lion in captivity be dreaming of?”  So I decided to include that clip in the middle of the Chaplin clip, right before Charlie wakes the lion.  Aside from the slightly awkward transition between the clips, the story line actually works, adding a dimension as to why the lion is mad.  Simba was dreaming of a better life, free with his father, and then “BOOM” he is awakened by a human with a funny  hat.  After shaking off the grogginess from his nap, the anger boils over and he lashes out at Charlie, who scrambles away in fright.
Instead of adding a simple “The End” to the story, I decided to add the closure that some movies use to tell the story of certain characters in the movie. Â For this particular clip, Charlie and his girlfriend, Spot (the dog), and Simba are the characters who get closure slides before the final curtain (The End).
So this week’s assignment was a doozey! Good thing I had a Saturday night free and a good glass of wine! Â I won’t belabor the technical/computer issues I encountered because they are completely my own fault but I will give you the high-level overview of how this all went down and all the tools and media I used to complete the assignment.
Next, I perused the foley samples of other DS106ers. Â I have to say, my method was give a quick listen and practically choose at random. Â My thought: Make the video/audio and decide what the story is when it’s done.
Here are the clips I chose:
Next – putting it all together.  Once my iMovie completed it’s 1hr. of updates (since I never use it) I was ready to go. Well, once I was able to swallow that small lump of panic in my throat that arose when I realized I had NO idea what I was doing.  Thank goodness for YouTube and  other tutorials!  Once I inserted the audio tracks I gave a listen from start to finish.  Not too shabby!  There’s a point in the clip where the Charlie Chaplin character says, ” uh, am I dreaming? ” so I decided to make this into a dream sequence.  Charlie starts out being chased by a pony but once he enters the lion’s cage we hear the dream-like music (I added a track found here) come in and we realize that he’s in some sort of surreal dream state.  He encounters the lion, the tiger, the annoying dog, and the strange girl that wants him to escape. It’s all very confusing.  Since Charlie is in a dream, he doesn’t feel the panic to get out of the cage that a lucid person would feel.  Finally, the lion roars loudly enough to wake him from his dream state and we watch him run off into the distance – supposedly to wake up.
I repurposed this 02:55 clip from Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 film “The Circus” to create an anachronistic story about a mime who missed the ultimate Darwin Awards top prize. The criterion for the Darwin Awards follows:
“In the spirit of Charles Darwin, the Darwin Awards commemorate individuals who protect our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives. Darwin Award winners eliminate themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species’ chances of long-term survival.”
Darwin Awards Honorable Mentions recognize individuals who survive their misadventures with their reproductive capacity intact.
I used the recommended site to download Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus from YouTube.
One of the challenges of this assignment was finding the appropriate foley for each segment of the clip. My method was to turn down the volume on the Chaplin video clip and then listen on SoundCloud to each of the submitted assignments to see if it married well with the segment. To find the submitted assignments, I followed the tags listed on the Week 6 & 7 page. However, I found  that some of the SoundCloud submissions were not set to be downloaded. I found the fourth segment, 01:31 – 02:00 to be particularly challenging, as some of the submissions either did not have any sound or were not set to be downloaded.  I also discovered that while I had tagged my WordPress assignment submission, I didn’t apply the correct tag to the SoundCloud file, so that when it came to the fifth segment, I did not see my assignment listed. I immediately applied the correct tag (chaplin-lion-05), so it now shows and can be downloaded.
I saved each downloaded audio file with the segment in the file name (e.g., 0000-0030.mp3)
I used The Tokens’s “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as the main soundtrack, which I downloaded from MP3Skull. Because the entire song was shorter than the video clip, I supplemented it with several trumpet audio files that I downloaded from FreeSound. This was a good review exercise for using Audacity and working with the timeline and layers. Below is my Audacity screenshot:
The foley does not match up perfectly with each segment, but given that this is the first time I’ve used this application, I am satisfied with the results.
After finalizing the Audacity project as an mp3 file, I added it to the Windows Live Movie Maker project. I then added captions in select areas of the video clip. Below is a screenshot of the Movie Maker project:
Windows Live Movie Maker screenshot
In keeping with the travel theme of this blog, here is a slideshow of my own Darwin Award-worthy lion encounter in southern Africa in 2011:Click to view slideshow.
This was my first video creation/editing experience! I learned a lot from this assignment and it was cool to see how easy it can be to add in things like a title and credits. The trickiest part for me was adding in the overlay audio, but I ended up using Audacity to create the “layered” audio that I needed. The story that I used was that the man in the video was a new employee looking to join the Circus’ fraternity and part if joining it, he needed to prove his “worth” by entering the lions cage. There really wasn’t any main reason as to why I chose this storyline, it’s just something I thought of and went with it. For the audio, I used Avicii’s Levels (video below)
Here is the final compilation after my video editing using the Windows Movie Maker software in conjunction with Audacity.
Then I grabbed the Foley sound recordings of current and past classmates to provide the sound effects..
As you can see in the below screen shot, the audio section is all one file that I imported from Audacity.
Initially I drew a blank when trying to think of a new story for the clip of Charlie Chaplin in the lion’s cage, but then it reminded me of the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom television show which suggested some possibilities. Wild Kingdom is a wildlife adventure show from the seventies similar in ilk to the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and Steve Irwin’s Crocodile Hunter. Â It is narrated by a silver-haired Marlin Perkins who sits safely in a safari vehicle or in a television studio while his sidekick, Jim, confronts wild animals in various dangerous situations. Â Over the years it has been the subject of several spoofs.
I downloaded all the DS106 Foley sound clips and YouTube videos which had Wild Kingdom theme music and John’s Denver’s Calypso song. Â The audio was stripped from the YouTube videos using PwnYouTube. Â To edit the music clips I used Audacity to create shorter clips and to remove the voice over parts from the Wild Kingdom music. Â I used iMovie to remove the original audio from the Charlie Chaplin clip.
My iMovie Workspace
The video clip was pulled into iMovie then the Foley sounds were added. Â iMovie’s title function was used to create the title slide and the credits slides. Â It was also used to add the narration by Marlene Perkins. Â This may sound easy, but every step of the way was accompanied by rabid googling.
After having created a 30 second foley sound file a few weeks ago for a Charlie Chaplin silent film, this week we used other students’ files to create the whole film.
This was mostly helpful in figuring out how to place audio in MovieMaker, as it doesn’t always fit in exactly where it should be at first. Â Other than that, this was basically implementing the skills we learned last week with using mpeg streamclip and programs of the like. Â MovieMaker is far easier than I remember it being a few years ago! Â Probably not the best for higher-quality stuff but definitely got the job done for me and was easy to use.
Okay. I’m gonna admit something. I haven’t laughed this hard in a long time. This assignment was absolutely hilarious! Hearing people’s sounds was awesome. People were incredibly creative and surprised me!
Here’s my rendition:
Here are the sound clips I chose to use:
It took me only a few minutes to find the song I wanted to use.
Oogie Boogie’s Song is one of my favorite songs, and it fit the upbeat movie I was trying to create.
My story was that a date had gone awry, and the guy was trying to escape her. Only problem is he got lost in the circus and was run into the lion’s cage! He’s scared and trying to escape, the girl finds him and is slightly angry that he left her. Once she’s there, though, he gains a little confidence at her fainting. He’s stronger than any ole lion! He suddenly finds the courage to face the lion (sort of) then shows off to win her favor again.
…the lion sleeps tonight! Well, except in this case! As apart of video week, we had to take our classmates Charlie Chaplin Foley sounds (see here for previous work!) and put it into the video. This is what the past couple of weeks was working to get us to work towards, and be able to do with ease. Easy work, right? NOPE, definitely harder than it seems. So I’ll give you the step by step of how it got done!
1. KEEPVID! Honestly, the best website for video assignments! i used it to download The Lion’s Cage, which took about five seconds. I’ve used it in just about every single assignment thus far, but no shame in my game! it makes things a lot easier (but ha! take that Youtube, you can’t keep us down! )
2. I used iMovie to detach the audio, it was easy enough! It’s also one of the best things about having iMovie, I’m not sure if PC’s offer this but if not, then you are surely missing out. Before knowing this option, i used to manually strip it but it wouldn’t always work.
3. I downloaded the links of the ones that I thought fit best into the video, even though they were all really good! I had to go back and replace some but overall, I didn’t have trouble finding good enough ones! ( I used 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6!)
3. The video stillll seemed too plain, so I downloaded additional soundtracks from TheEarlyCinema on Youtube!
4. Since I downloaded videos, I had to use keepvid again in order to detach the audio and use it! But keepvid was nice to me and didn’t argue Here’s my work in progress:
At first, I had to play around with the music because it wasn’t meshing well with the scenes but then finally I found out through iMovie how to lower the music and be able to hear the sounds. I think the music does what it’s suppose to; it compliments the scenes perfectly. We learned that music can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. I think I did an accurate job getting the two to come together and really make the video. I even renamed it in the beginning to add some originality to my clip! Here’s my clip and how I decided to re-assemble it all! ALSO, please be sure to let me know what you think of the music and whether it adds or takes away from the scene:
but let’s be honest as to what’s going on:
This is Peter. Peter’s surprising his girlfriend, Annie, at the circus where she helps take care of the animals. All the animals adore her so they’re a little bit jealous of Peter and never really treat him nicely when he comes to visit. But can he blame them? They freakin’ love her! One day they just decide to play with Peter a little bit, and well, Andy the donkey got a little carried away but how did he know Peter would end up in Goliath’s cage? Good thing it was Goliath’s nap time but with any wrong step..Well, Peter would wake him! So he had to be super careful, and he was..Until he decided that visiting Tiana the Tiger would be smart; he got lucky though on this day because her usually ear splinting roars didn’t wake Goliath..neither did Marty’s yapping! Marty’s always trying to get Peter in trouble, and even as Annie sees this, she still does not take Peter’s side, instead, she laughs in amusement at both sides! But Annie was so distracted by the two that she didn’t notice Goliath right there, and she usually isn’t so close to him because he still scares her. Peter’s trying hard to not to be loud to wake her, so what does he do? SPLASH HER, what a gentlemen, huh? Well that doesn’t wake Annie up. Nope, instead, Peter turns around just to see Goliath wake up and realize…Butter knives are more threatening! Especially since Goliath is so docile and no one ever gives him a chance to show them that. Annie misses that bit as she gets up but she does make sure to give Peter a good scolding, even though he tries to play coy around Goliath. However, no one messes with Goliath, he is the king of the jungle and gives Peter a run for his money with one good roar. Peter so far so fast that he ends up on the top of the pole, and won’t come down until Annie promises him that she’ll quit her job, which she refuses but then Peter realizes he’s afraid of heights and comes down. He realizes that if he loves Annie enough to put up with her job. THE END.
That’s how this is done, FOLEY STYLE! I really enjoyed how we recorded this a couple weeks ago and it wasn’t swept under the rug and instead it was brought back. It was an awesome way to really mix audio, and video together but having to use our wits to really get it going. I liked having to download each bit but also stripping the original piece to make it into one! I hope we do something similar to this again but it was fun to gel so many classmates together and really be able see what everyone is capable of!
A couple of weeks ago, I made a foley clip for part of Charlie Chaplin‘s silent film, the Lion’s Cage. Â Once everyone had made their own clips, we had to assemble them all into one smooth foley story.
I downloaded the original video of The Lion’s Cage from YouTube via Keepvid and uploaded it into Windows Movie Maker. Â I muted the music and then downloaded each foley clip I wanted to use.
The song I wanted to play in the background was Naive by The Kooks, Â because my story had a couple fighting, just like in the song. Â Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to get the music to be added to the movie since the original soundtrack was still there, but just muted. Â After fidelling around for an hour, I just gave up and used the song as background music to the intro, and unmuted the original soundtrack to play during the film.
I didn’t add any closing slide, because I wanted the viewer to imagine what happens to the couple from then on, instead of telling them.
Here’s my work in progress: