Probably one of my all time favorite Disney lines is that title. Who doesn’t love a good forced pun being said by the odd muse out? But seriously, Hercules is super dreamy. I mean who doesn’t love a modest super hero son of a god? Come on, it’s not even fair. Plus you can total tell that he is sincere with the way that he treats his princess, Meg. He is just immediately blown away by her looks, I mean who wouldn’t be? Her hair is flawless and when she turns around she disappears for a second because she is THAT skinny. Seriously, it’s ridiculous. But I always loved the scene where they first met. I’m not sure if it’s because it reminds me of me when I met my first boyfriend (is this tmi? oh well). But just seeing someone and getting too nervous you can’t even speak. That’s how Herc feels (I like to think that we are on an abbreviated name status). Want to see if for yourself? Check out this clip that I used for my assignment (which I will explain in a jiff).

So what am I doing for this? The four star Hitch cut assignment of course!! Still need more elaboration? Well the general idea is pretty simple. You show a character’s look, then show what they are looking at, and then cut to their reaction. Then the real fun starts. You change what they saw in the beginning. Changes the whole meaning of the clip, and can sometimes make people look pretty bad (but Hercules never could look bad)!

So what is the opposite of skinny little Meg? Well Hades of course! The villain who turns from ice to fire when he gets mad certainly is different than Meg and all of her feminine wiles. So here was my final result:

Pretty awesome right? I know that it was supposed to only be looks, but I decided to keep Hercules’ stuttering in because it shows his shyness in talking to Meg, but then later can be used to show him being scared of Hades. It’s just interesting to see a hero being afraid of a villain in a Disney movie since usually they always seem so strong. Not so strong anymore, not are you Herc?? However, once I decided to keep the sound in, I decided to keep it in for Hades as well, just to show that there was a conversation going on between the two of them. I had a lot of options to pick from with this clip, but ended up going with the first freak out from this long list of them.

Now I needed some background music!! What kind of movie doesn’t have music?? Exactly. We need music. So of course I went to the songs from Hercules and decided to go with Meg’s song of “I Won’t Say I’m In Love” in which she realizes that she loves Hercules. I listened to the song about 4 times (because who doesn’t love a great singing session) and decided to go with a part in which she says “this scene won’t play” while the beginning of the Hades clip starts. While it’s a small detail that no one would have caught, I thought it was pretty clever myself.  I guess Meg is scared of falling in love, Hercules in now scared of Hades, and that’s just how it all panned out once Hitch’s cut was performed.

Once again, I made this in Windows Movie Maker, it was seriously such a headache to work with, but I’ll explain that in my weekly summary. This was pretty easy with just importing the clips and then from there adding the soundtrack, I really used the zoom tool a lot in this case in order to make the cuts more accurate, and I extended Hercules’ first glance in the second session as well (hence the shaking of his head) in order to get the message across. I just used the copy and paste tool in order to do that once I had the section cut off that I was using.

Thanks for reading!

Princess Karissa

So for this assignment, we had to show how changing a simple cut of a video could change the view of a character’s values, beliefs, etc.  The idea came from this Albert Hitchcock video where he changed the middle clip in between two others of a face and another face and some stuff happened…  This explains it better:

Anyway, I planned this one out last week and ended up bending the rules a bit for mine.  I did three different shots because they all demonstrated what I wanted to do and all had different effects.  I don’t think that any are better than the others, so that was part of the reasoning.  I think it ended up looking pretty good.  I ended up using the disgust face because it was different.  Here’s the final cut.

The first shot was a picture of my girlfriend making  a normal facial expression.  The third was a shot of her making a disgusted face.  I used these in all three clips.

The first clip has her making a face of disgust after looking at a bag of peas.  This gives the sense that she either does not like peas or does not like vegetables.  We would have to wait more shots to determine what was really true.  Or maybe both are true.  Who knows.

The second clip is where I cheated a little bit.  I used 2 clips in between the faces because it was hard to determine what was actually going on in the shot without the tin of Skoal being shown in a closeup.  But anyway, the whole shot gives the idea that chewing tobacco is disgusting, or maybe she was just disgusted at the person, the handlebar mustache–probably all of it.

The third shot is the ambiguous one, which makes it a lot of fun.  Here, we have a foreigner–my roommate–walking into the house as she looks on.  Is she a racist here?  Did he just fart as he walked by?  This one has a lot of interpretations that could be held, which is the fun of this shot.  Obviously I would have to get a lot more done or include some dialogue to reveal the true motivations.  Film is fun.

My only critique of this is that there is not any continuity of the shot.  It is just her in front of a door, and then I filmed everything else outside–but hey, it’s a nice day out.  Wouldn’t want to waste it inside doing this, would I?  I also made a mistake in the first clipping of this film, but it’s fixed