Natalie Portman

 I didn’t really grow up with her. But audiences were able to watch her grow up in film!  Natalie Portman has been acting since the mid/early 1990′s and is still appearing regularly in films today.

For the “Growing Up With” assignment, I was required to mash up clips or pictures from films an actor or actress has been in throughout their life, showing their development as actors.  I chose Natalie Portman because she is a personal favorite and has been acting since she was very young.  Finding clips of her was surprisingly difficult as there are apparently very man people making fan videos of love songs paired with images and clips of her romantic involvements in movies.  I managed to find several though and made sure I was not using clips longer than 30 seconds (same for any audio clips I used, like part of the score for Thor).

For FTR!,  I decided to take the office photo with the picture frames on the wall and put a portrait of  Cory Doctorow into the frames.  Both the picture of Doctorow and the photo of the office were taken by Jonathan Worth.  In order to do this, I had to measure the dimensions of each frame by recording the coordinates of each corner and finding the width and length.  After recording them, I scaled and pasted as a new layer the picture of Cory and moved them to their appropriate frame.

This was more tasking than I was previously aware.  For some reason I couldn’t figure out how to make the first image I placed (the one you can see in the screenshot above) to fit the frame, but I think I did a decent job with the rest of them.

Here’s the final product:

For my second assignment that I created I made a remix assignment.  While going though the assignments for remix I found myself wishing that there were more.  I made a note to myself that I needed to create one for this category.  There were some ideas that were similar to what I came up with but nothing exactly that same so I ran with it.

For my assignment I decided that I would have participants create a remix of a character over a course of time.  They could pick any character (however TV characters from a show that has been on air for a while will probably be the easiest) and use clips of videos to show how they have grown up over a certain about of time.  This can be done in any video editing program as long as they are able to show the character growing up.

For my character I picked Stephanie Tanner from Full House.  I picked her because she is great and because Full House was on long enough that you’d be able to see plenty of change in her character.  I started doing this assignment by looking up clips of Stephanie at all different ages.

After finding my clips I used Mozilla Popcorn to make my mash up.  I entered in each clip one at a time and cut them to the size I wanted them.  I then layered in the next clip doing the same thing until I had them all lined up. After all the clips were in I added a title and saved my video.

Here’s what I came up with.  Enjoy Stephanie over the years:

 Mashup 2 (four star’s!):

The final finale of stars, and all the glory they hold! For my final star assignment, I did as I usually do and i had fun with it! I decided to the Actors Transformation assignment, which involves picking an actor and making a video that shows their careers as they grow older. I decided to do Dakota Fanning, who I’ve always been a fan of, even though we’re only six months apart. She’s one of the few child stars that have been in the spotlight but never steered off the right path. While I understand that all stars are human too, it’s also important that as a star, they have a significant influence on younger generation with what they say or do. Therefore, I chose Dakota because she has always been a strong actress, an amazing one at that too, that remains a strong inspiration. She doesn’t give us a reason to wince when she shows up on OK! magazine, and I think that’s very admirable! So I was proud to take four clips (here, here, here, and here!) of Dakota’s work over the years to stress her career as an actress! As usual, I used Keepvid to convert them then iMovie to do the rest of the nitty gritty work (tutorial here!). Here’s what I got!:

It’s the last time we will ever do stars, fellow DS106ers. How bittersweet. For my two mashup assignments, I decided to have as much fun as possible with them BUT to also make sure I really get my points across while making some sort of impression on DS106 as a whole.

 Mashup #1(four star’s!):

For my first mash-up this week, I decided to do a Movie Trailer Mashup, which is where you take two movies (either their trailers, or scenes from them) and you switch’em up. By switching I mean, I used the movie Insidious and The Ring. I decided to go with the trailer from The Ring but use the audio from Insidious. I was worried at first because I was afraid that the voices would be heard with the lack of mouths moving. However, when I looked at other examples, I found comfort in that no one actually cared too much about that. It was more about how well you could get them to fit (or not fit..!). There was a small portion of editing but overall, it was easy and quick! I used Keepvid to download both of the videos, then iMovie to do anything editing that i needed. For my details, check out my tutorial here! Otherwise, I used the two following trailers:

And i put them together to form my own:

Another assignment that just… spoke to me: Movie Trailer Mashup.

Take your favorite movie trailer and mash it up with a different trailer to completely change the meaning of the original trailer. For example, if you have a funny movie trailer, give it the sound of a terrifying movie; or vice versa.

It took me a few minutes of thinking, but then I knew the movie trailer I needed to mash up for my own entertainment: Twilight (2008). Who doesn’t like a good spoof?

Now the task was to find a trailer with audio that matched the video of Twilight. I searched a lot of dark, horror films that have come out in the past year, and then found Evil Dead (2013).

You can see both trailers below:

I only had to do a little editing at the beginnings and ends of both clips to have them match up. I tried taking out pieces/speeding up the sound to have it match up better, but it created jumps that stood out far too much for me.

I used PwnYouTube and Windows Movie Maker for this one. Adobe Premiere Pro hasn’t been working for me lately, so I had to work with what I had.