I was looking through the mashup assignments for another one to do and found the Movie Mashup. For this assignment you have to combine two different movies together into one movie poster. I decided to combine two famous trilogies together of different genres that are often compared as classics. I chose Lord of the Rings and Star Wars.
I used the movie poster from Star Wars episode six Return of the Jedi as my main layer. Then I found images of Gollum and Frodo. I was able to cut them out of the pictures they were in and insert them into the original layer I was using. I was a little rusty with gimp since we had not been using it as much over the last few weeks but I was able to piece things together.
Here was what I came up with Star Wars Rings of the Jedi. Hopefully everyone enjoys my combination of a couple of classic movies.
For my final assignment of the week I decided to complete the mashup assignment Inappropriate Laughter. I used the scene from season 4 when Colvin takes Namond and 2 others to the Ruth’s Chris Steak House. It is an interesting scene from start to finish. In the beginning the kids are all excited to go out and try to act the way they should. Then they realize how much they are out of their comfort zone and go back to their old ways by the time they leave the restaurant. Using youtube to get the scene and the laughing sounds I obtained the stuff I needed to create the movie. Then using windows live movie make I added some laughter to the areas I thought it would fit well to get my final product:
For my video game mashup worth 4 stars I choose Amnesia and Dark Souls. Both are two of the hardest and creepiest games I have ever played and watched youtubers play. I made the assignment a little bit of my own though. Both Video Covers do not allow much for interpretation or adding pictures without being incredibility awkward. So, I incorporated both titles and two main elements of the game in my mash up collage.
I made the mash up with Picasa and found all my photos on youtube. This assignment was fun for me and after finals I sure know how I will spend my time now.
For my second new assignment, I decided to create a mash up assignment called “Picture A Day.” The idea of the assignment is to take a picture of yourself every day for a week, and make it into a video. Not only should it be a week long effort, but it should attempt to tell some kind of story about your week or how something changed.
I got the idea from the classic “Noah” video, where a guy takes a photo of himself every day for 7 years.
While these projects obviously take a lot longer than a week, they are a great way to show change. The man in the video above used his project as a way to showcase how he has grown older and changed. In the video below, a man used it to show his journey walking through China. It’s a really neat, visual way to keep track.
While my video is nowhere as impressive as walking through China, I used mine to document my week of Thanksgiving break. I tried to take the same type of picture every day, but I messed up a few times- specifically on Thanksgiving when I had completely forgotten to take a picture, so I took an awkward selfie with some cornbread and a stone turkey.
2 1/2 stars
This video documents me leaving for break, coming home, sleeping for three days (I’m wearing the same shirt in three pictures, which is only slightly embarrassing.) There is also a hysterical picture from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving when it snowed! I tried to take a photo outside to show my dissatisfaction, but the whole thing got blown out weirdly. Still might be one of my favorite photos though. The last photo in the series is from right before I drove back to school. I really miss my dog when I’m not home, so I let her have a cameo in the final picture.
The next I assignment I completed was Movie Mashup. The goal of this assignment was to create a movie poster based upon a mashup between two movies. This assignment was pretty difficult for me considering photo editing is one of my weak points. To start, I had to think of the movies I wanted to mashup. I landed on mashing Up and Monsters Inc. because they are both Pixar movies and have a very similar tone/design to them. From here, I simply downloaded a horizontal movie poster for the movie Up, and this is the movie poster I downloaded:
From here, I had to figure out how I would incorporate Monsters Inc. into this poster. I landed on taking images of Mike Wazowski and Sulley and having them holding onto balloons and floating in the sky. For this, I had to find png’s of these two characters, this being because I didn’t want a colored background surrounding their images. I also wanted images that included their hands so that I could make it appear that they were holding onto the string of a balloon. And trust me, this was the most difficult part. I went through plenty of pictures on google trying to find a few that would work, and I finally did. Here is my final movie poster for this assignment and the movie Up With Monsters.
To create all this, I simply cropped, resized, and placed all the different images using Google Draw. This included the images of Mike and Sulley, and the wordart of the word “Monsters” from the movie Monsters Inc.
Overall, I think I did a very good job with this, I think it really fit the assignment well, and also had a consistent tone within the poster. This assignment really helped me, again, not only develop my photo editing skills but my creativity as well to create a movie poster that could convey the combination of two different films at the same time.
This assignment is worth a total of 4 stars out of 5.
Giving me a total of 16 stars for the week. If you’d like to check out this assignment, you can find it here. Til next time my friends, hope you all enjoyed!
This assignment I, surprisingly, didn’t find as difficult as it seems a lot of people did. I had a bit of fun with the spaces we were to fill in, and Popcorn Mash up maker didn’t error more than twice. I got lucky!
Basically, Alan decides he wants to go to Scotland on vacation, and brings his pomeranian and saves up enough money by selling his Hannah Montana DVD (as we all d0). Here it is,
For my first mashup assignment, I chose to do the Techno Viking Music Video assignment (5 stars). First, I downloaded the original techno viking video, then the difficult part came: what to pair it with? I tried to go for something funny, like Britney Spears or Spice Girls, but for some reason my computer wouldn’t allow me to download a lot of videos. I assumed it may have been disabled by the people who uploaded those videos since they’re so popular, but it left me wondering what options there were. In the end, I went for a performance of the Jackson 5 singing ABC. I successfully downloaded that, then uploaded both videos to iMovie.
Then came the REALLY difficult part. I tried to figure out how to sync the two together on my own, but that was unsuccessful. Then once I searched how to do it, I couldn’t follow the directions, which seemed so simple. It was asking me to extend the audio of another clip, which wouldn’t work and I couldn’t figure out why. After experimenting a little bit with different things, I figured out how to overlap two clips (when dragging the clip, drop it overtop of the music video , and just muted the techno viking clip over a part of the song that seemed to sync well together. The A-B-C, 1-2-3, beat seems to go well with techno vikings movements, funnily enough.
Once that was complete, I exported the video to my files, then uploaded it to YouTube, and here’s the final product!
This post is dedicated to my completion of the Mashup Assignment Inappropriate Laughter. The idea of this assignment is to take a serious scene from a movie or tv show, and add “inappropriate” or “untimely” laughter to it. To do this I had to do a few different things to accomplish this. First off, I needed to chose the scene I wanted to use. In the end, I landed upon a scene from Star Wars Episode I. The scene included the final fight between Darth Maul and Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) and Qui-Gon (Liam Neeson). I chose this scene because it is a very intense fight scene, and one of the most thrilling scenes in the entire movie.
To create this video, I used iMovie. I simply downloaded the scene from YouTube using ClipConverter, then I uploaded it into iMovie. from here, I simply had to add some transitions and cuts, so that the video was not incredibly long and dragged out. After this, I downloaded crowd laughing sounds from freesounds.org. I decided to download multiple clips, so that the audio did not appear to be the same every single time. From here, I simply needed to determine where I wanted to place the laughter. I determined these points by making it appear that the audience was laughing at Darth Maul. If you watch closely, almost every time that Darth Maul appears, making a face or gesture, the crowd laughs.
Finally, here’s my video:
Overall, I really liked the final product. I think it does a good job of completing the task, but I also think it does a good job as a remix alone. This assignment is worth a total of 3 stars out of 5.
Giving me a total of 3 stars for the week with more to come shortly. Til next time everyone.
For my first Mashup Assignment of the week, I chose to do the assignment called Movie Music Comparison – Can You Score?. For this assignment, I was tasked with taking two musical scores from two different films and combining them in a meaningful way. At first, I dabbled with a few original movie songs, but I ultimately decided to use two lyricless songs for my mashup.
The two scores that I chose to use were “The Dark Knight Theme” from the film The Dark Knightand “Of Their Own Accord” from the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. I know that a video game is not a movie, but the musical score used in the video game could have easily fit into a movie. Also, many video games are essentially movies that are played, so I felt that using this song would not deviate from the assignment too far. I included both of the original Youtube videos that I took the audio from.
Both of these musical scores are from the same composer, Hans Zimmer. Zimmer is a musical legend, composing musical scores for movies such as The Lion King, The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, and the recent film Interstellar. As the two songs that I used are from the same composer, they both feature a similar style and blend well together.
To create the mashup, I downloaded the audio files from Youtube using Savefrom.net. With the clips downloaded, I imported them into Audacity.
Surprisingly, the audio scores complimented each other quite well with little editing. The only real editing that needed to be done was trimming the musical scores to the same length, as well as adjusting the volume of certain segments throughout both clips so that both could be heard simultaneously.
Separately, both musical scores tell a story of their own. The Dark Knight Theme‘s rapid tempo gives off the feeling of urgency felt by the Batman to stop the Joker which is in turn felt by the viewer throughout the film. In Of Their Own Accord, the feeling of hopelessness felt by the U.S. Marines in the video game is personified by the somber mood given off by musical score. In the particular part of the video game where this song appears, the player and his allies arrive at Washington D.C. to see it has been ravaged by enemy bombings. Together, a bit of each score’s mood spills into the other. The desperation felt by the Marines could also have been felt by the Batman, while the Marines also feel the Batman’s sense of urgency with their task of preventing global thermonuclear war.
This assignment was incredibly frustrating to me on several levels. I am somewhat of a perfectionist when it comes to editing, and the lack of effective editing tools inside Popcorn left me disappointed with the final product. Most of the pictures simply looked like they were pasted on top of the video (which they were). I did not see that it was not required to complete the entire mash-up in Popcorn until AFTER I had already finished. On the bright side, I got some good experience with the program. I also made my mash-up from the raw video, not the edited mash-up with helpful notes and cues. This added an unnecessary level of difficulty to an assignment that was already challenging.
For his vacation, I decided to send Alan to Alaska! I figured that most others would send Alan somewhere sunny and warm, but I thought that maybe he would enjoy an expedition to the Alaskan Tundra. The objects that I had Alan “find” throughout the video fit into this Alaskan theme. The gold nugget that he uses to pay for his vacation came from his previous trip to the state, while his winter parka would be more than necessary for the below freezing conditions in the Land of the Midnight Sun. The song that “played” on the turntable came from this Soundcloud post.
Overall, I am happy with what I produced with Popcorn. The program has its limitations, but overall it is good for a free browser-based program. Here’s my final Mash-up!
