This week I made a ‘supercut it‘ video featuring Agent Ziva from the television show NCIS. Her character is originally from Israel and English is her second language. She is constantly trying to use American idioms and butchering them. I haven’t seen this show in ages but used to watch it in high school with my parents and she was always my favorite character. Unfortunately, the majority of clips available of the show are mashups of her saying these ridiculous things, but I still picked my favorites and cut them out of other videos. Here’s the end-result:
My favorite is the “porcuswine and porcupig” mix up.
This was the first assignment I did on moviemaker, and so it’s a little rough. I chose to do the sports mashup, which involved piecing together clips of great sports plays, but they were supposed to also tell a story. I picked rugby as my sport, even though I could have probably picked any number of them. The reason I chose rugby is because there is generally a set method for how to move the ball down the field; first there is a scrum between the forwards on each team and the scrumhalf pulls the ball out of the back of the scrum; they then pass it out to the back line, who run/pass/kick the ball down the field in attempt to score a try.
I pieced together solid plays (for parts where there’s no real way to do anything interesting) and impressive plays for the whole process, starting with the scrum and ending with a really awesome move.
I unfortunately forgot the tips from last week involving resizing the clips so that they all fit together, but I will try to do better with the other assignments.
The video assignment called Sports Mashup, which called to create a video mix of a bunch of great moments in sports history, was a lot of fun and got me pumped up to go out and do something! This assignment was one that I got prepped for a couple of weeks ago. I found all the videos on YouTube and chose which parts of those videos I wanted to put in my mix. The sources for all the videos are found in my original post.
I decided to go a little out there and not do any football moments, because I feel like that sport is the most common one to get pumped about. Instead, I chose snowboarding, rugby, parkour, soccer, and boxing. I used keepvid to download each YouTube video and then opened them in MPEG Streamclip. Once I trimmed down the part of the video I wanted to use, I exported it as an avi file and opened it in Windows Movie Maker. To get rid of the audio, I muted each clip and added in a song by Deadmau5 called “Ghosts n’ Stuff.” I used Audacity to trim the audio and create the fade in and out effects, which I uploaded into Windows Movie Maker. I first heard this song in a documentary called The Art of Flight and knew it would be a good one since it got me pumped up and excited to be watching these amazing snowboarders (by the way, I really recommend watching that documentary!).
As for each clip I chose…I love watching Shaun White snowboard, so it was a no brainer to me to put some of his stuff in. I also thought it was a good one to put first since the action was immediate and you could see him do several tricks. If you know anything about soccer, you know Wayne Rooney has a golden foot and has so many amazing videos of his goals already on YouTube. I had to choose a goal that would keep none-soccer fans interested, so I chose one that was more than just kicking the ball into goal; it has him doing a backflip with it. As for boxing, I only know a few boxers, but when I watch boxing movies and there’s a knockout, I get super pumped so I put in a clip of Sergio Martinez knocking out Paul Williams with one punch. As a rugby player, I couldn’t do a sports mashup without a clip of a great try by a world class team. It shows that you have to not only be fast, but also an accurate kicker and have good predictability of a ball shaped like that bouncing around. Finally, I saw a video of this guy, Damien Walters, on Facebook a while back, and couldn’t resist putting him in. His longer videos are really fantastic and I could watch them for hours. It’s amazing what he can do.
Finally, I uploaded the video onto YouTube et voilà!
For this video, I attempted to do a video for the DS106 Video Assignment, “Music Video“. For this video I chose the song, “Hit the road Jack“, and the movie was, “Forgetting Sarah Marshall“. I chose this movie because it was more comedy to me than drama even tho the scenes I used were more of the dramatic line.
So after downloading the audio from YouTube and sourcing the movie, what I did first was to edit the song to just what I wanted using the, “Select” and “Trim” tool in Audacity. Next I listened to the song to hear the different sections and note the time lengths between Ray and Margie.
With this done I then moved to taking my selections from the movie, once again using MPEG Streamclip which is great in that it allows you to “Select” and “Trim” out the section of video you want frame by frame using the keyboard arrow keys.
After making all my scene selections from the movie and saving them to MP4 formats, I was then able to open all my clips in Windows Media Maker once again along with the audio file(song). Next step was to mute the video clips and arrange them in the order I wanted. In Movie Maker you can also further edit your clips if needed by using the “Trim” tool. This was quite similar to my Sports mash-up, except for that video the sound was altered around the video, while in this clip the video was altered around the sound.
I also decided to add some credits and this is pretty simple in WMM. You simply select the credits button at the end and type up your credits. Here you can also adjust the duration time for the text to go with the clip duration. Which is great since I was able to try adding some text to the beginning of the video. Then when you’re through once again, save the entire project if you want then save it to MP4 YouTube format. Endless Possibilities.
For this week the class was asked to do a mash up based off of one archetype I chose to do the archetype of the toughest coaches by showing coaches from different films and how tough they are . I chose the Karate kid, Coach Carter, Gridiron gang, Remember the Titans, and Miracle. Here is what I did:
For three stars, I chose to do the Sports Mashup Assignment. This assignment called for creating a compilation of great sports within a theme. As an “avid New York sports fan”, I chose to do a New York theme for the montage, and layered Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind over it. The process was fairly simple, as I had plenty of moments in mind, and the brunt of the work was searching through youtube for the best quality videos. After I selected the clips I used Keepvid to download the files to my computer. Once I had all the files I used iMovie to trim and edit the clips. Here’s a screenshot of my screen during the editing process:
One aspect of the final project I am a bit disappointed in is the quality of some of the videos. Several of them were very fuzzy, and I think it took away from the overall quality of the compilation. Anyway, here is the final product.
After hearing about the “cat breading” trend in class, I wanted nothing more than to do this assignment for DS106, but alas, my apartment complex does not allow pets so all my cats are back at home. But this morning, I woke up to find a homeless cat in my living room that roommate accidentally let in. This was definitely a miracle. Clearly God wanted me to smash a piece of bread around a cat’s face.
This video I had a little more fun playing around with. This was done for the DS106 video assignment, “Sports Mashup“. This process was quite similar to my Tough Principals in film video but done a little differently.
For this video I think the hardest part was finding not so much awesome moments in sports, but moments that impacted the individual themselves as well.
After downloading and adding my videos to Windows Movie Maker again, I decide to again add some audio. However this time I wanted to add text in the video as well and to have the added audio playing at specific times while the video was playing. The addition of text was pretty simple just basically clicking on the text tool then typing what you want to show in the clip. The altering part is choosing the way text will display and play in its video segment and for the length of time it will play and the speed of the video.
For the audio I was able add the full song I wanted then in Movie Maker I was able to trim the audio and shift it to the area of video I wanted whether it was text or actual video clip. The movability in of shifting the audio in Movie Maker is not an exact science so it can be a bit tedious. Along with adjusting the volumes, of the audio and videos, I was also able to add a “fade out” or “fade in” to the segments of audio I had trimmed for a particular point in the video. Endless Possibilities.
Make a video in which you mashup two movie characters from seperate films to create a seamless scene. Close ups, action filled shots and tight editing will assure the best results. Fight scenes, break ups, cop chases, are some examples of scenes that may work out well – but the possibilities are endless.
What a better way to honor his contributions that a ds106 assignment (well there are likely much better ways), but here you go, Thumbs Up For Ebert:
Just a week after the Spring 2013 ds106 class applied Roger Ebert’s How to Read a Movie to analyze scenes of movies, he went on to that big movie theater in the sky.
For this assignment, create a tribute to Ebert’s love of movies; but do more than just make a montage of clips of him. Put him in context with film characters, musicians, or place him inside one of the movies he loved or hated. Or mash him up, Do anything to show some respect for Ebert’s devotion to not only appreciating film but teaching others.
I started with the song list for Muddy Waters, found a few in YouTube, landing eventually on a live 1973 performance of Got My Mojo Working– “Mojo” is such a gritty and suggestive word, coming from an African custom of a magic charm represented by objects in a bag — ” it is said to drive away evil spirits, keep good luck in the household, manipulate a fortune, and lure and persuade lovers.”
The song was a huge hit for Muddy Waters in the mid 1950s, listed in the top 500 all time songs by Rolling Stone, and has a long list of covers- though it was written by Preston Foster and originally recorded by Ann Cole and there was some copyright spats there. The courts stepped in and said Mojo was un-copyrightable:
MOJO is a commonplace part of the rhetoric of the culture of a substantial portion of the American people. As a figure of speech, the concept of having, or not having, one’s MOJO working is not something in which any one person could assert originality, or establish a proprietary right.
Kind of interesting to think about judges debating the merits of “one’s MOJO working”.
The song is more of a reference to the lack of the Mojo’s ability to work over the charm of a lover, but I thought of the way Ebert and Siskel went at each other, when they disagreed. I found many clips of this, and used ones from a set of outtakes and a bit of their interchange when they reviewed Jaws.
In iMovie, I dropped the Ebert clips on top of the music track, with the advanced features on using the Cutaway edit, essentially adding those clips on a new track. I edited the audio properties on these clips to duck other audio. And I added a few title bits, using the same effect (soft edge) and font.
Click to see full size
For the last title sequence, I grabbed again the first 15 seconds of the video, then detached the audio to slide under the closing title sequence (and deleted the video part of the music). The audio properties were edited for a manual 2 second fadeout.
