I created a trailer mashup where I took scenes from the original trailer for Toy Story 3 and changed it to seem like it’s a horror movie. Of course the creepy piano instrumental really helped to create that effect. Some other stuff I messed with was turning the saturation down to get rid of all the bright colors that were in the original footage. I also added some noise and film grain on top. One of the things that really helped making it more horror-like was slowing down the footage – which allowed it to go with the slow piano tune. Along with slowing it down, I also sped some parts up (seen in the beginning of the trailer). I tried to match the scenes with high and low points in the tune as well to make it seem synced with the music.
BTW, if you noticed the scene shown below was in the video, however it’s a scene from the old Toy Story, not Toy Story 3, but I just had to add it in since that spider-legs doll-head toy thing used to scare shit out of me, and I’m sure most would agree it was the creepiest toy in the seires!
Take a favorite cartoon or anime like show, take some clips, mash them together and add music to it. Try to pick out a specific theme in your clips that follow the theme of the music. Keep an eye out for changes in the music and plan your clips accordingly.
Continuing on a theme of tough cop genre, I made a movie mashup of Steve McQueen’s Bullitt mellowed out with the mellow sounds of Simon and Garfunkel’s 59th Street Bridge Song:
Slow down, you move too fast.
You got to make the morning last.
Just kicking down the cobble stones.
Looking for fun and feelin’ groovy.
That was the sentiment I thought of contrasting to the speed of the chase scene as well as the mostly unspokem tension between McQueen’s Bullitt character and Robert Vaughn’s slimy Chalmers.
I used MPEG ScreenClip to pull the classic car chase segment plus a few of the interchanges Bullitt and Chalmers. With not any dialogue during the chase, you have to imagine them cheerfully singing or at least toe tapping.
This was edited in iMovie, of course the hardest part trying to match music to lip movement- I did a ton of splits to pull our bits of motion. It is still really challenging to match it up cleanly. Mostly I wanted to explore the juxtaposition of the music to the action.
I can’t lie. My music library has not changed since high school. I happily listen to the album, Dark was the Night on repeat for hours. Yet, when I saw this assignment, I knew I wanted to poke fun at famous Beatles’ album cover, 1. Maybe it’s because I don’t get, or maybe it’s because they seem a little egotistical. Nevertheless, I called back to my high school days when Boys Like Girls ruled the hallways and music diehards wore the ’1′ album like a badge.
This is what the original albums looked like:
In Gimp I edited the two albums together. Good-bye weird dripping rainbow and hello bleeding Beatles.
The Indiana Jones movies are just classic and are definitely up there on my Top Movies list. So for the Trilogy Trailer Montage assignment I decided to do the first three Indiana Jones movies. At first I was going to include the fourth one, the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (trailer here if you haven’t seen it) but in the end I decided not to, for two reasons.
One, it really doesn’t fit in with the themes of the other movies quite as well. A lot of people hate the movie entirely for its more science-fiction aspect. Two…I couldn’t find any decent clips that I really liked. So that was enough to kick it out of my project.
So this mashup trailer includes the first three movies: Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Temple of Doom, and the Last Crusade. I tried my best to make it seem like Indy was going on all three adventures in one movie. I realize that the Temple of Doom actually occurs first chronologically, but since most people think of it as the second movie in the trilogy, I just left it as second.
I had to use Audacity a lot to edit a few sound tracks to cover up the silent areas during the text slides, as well as other scenes that I cropped out but still wanted to continue the music. That was definitely the hardest part, getting my music clip to match up with the trailer clip. I think I did okay though.
I used iMovie for the rest of the project.
And now I am going to go watch at least one of these movies to satisfy my sudden craving for Indiana Jones…
http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/movie-trailer-mashup/ While working on the movie trailer mashup assignment, after watching movie trailers and trying to think of what I could do, I had the brilliant idea to take the trailers of two different films, one just the video and one just the audio, from the same movie series and play it off as if [...]
( 4 star)I had a lot of fun with this assignment. I had recently watched the movie The Hunger Games and loved it. Based on the descriptions in the book and their appearence in the movie, the “Capital” citizens and peace keeps (the police force) looked like aliens compared to the others. This gave me the idea of somehow incorporating an alien themed movie. Then I thought of Transformers and decided to take the trailer from the 3rd movie. With this trailer, I tried to give it the effect that the “capital” citizens were aliens enslaving and toying with humans.
To make this mash up, I used the video from The Hunger Games and the audio from Transformers 3. I uploaded the audio file onto Windows Live Movie Maker and took away the audio initially. Then I uploaded the audio track and tried to fit it the best I could. From there I went into the editing process. It did not require much, only some minor increasing and decreasing of the video audio. I tried my best to match up all the speaking parts. However, there were a few moments where their was talking in the video, but not the audio. In order to make it flow well, I decided to just let the normal audio in on 1 occasion. I did this by segmenting the section and making that video segment louder. The rest of the talking seemed to fit in well.
Mashup a children’s book based on another cultural artifact. For example, framing Dr. Who as a children’s book in the aesthetic of a Dr. Suess’s work. See example from College Humor here.
Following the College Humor examples, I decided to merge a classic Children’s book with a fantasiesque piece of culture. As you can see, I merged Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree with J.R.R. Tolkien’s series The Lord of the Rings.
Silverstein was author and illustrator of The Giving Tree, and its cover art serves as the base for manipulation here.
Front Cover of The Giving Tree
I used Pixlr to manipulate the image and add characters from The Lord of the Rings that seemed appropriate on the cover of this children’s book. The little boy reminded my of the small, innocent looking hobbit Frodo from The Lord of the Rings. The apple could be humorously replaced with the Ring, and to spice it up a bit, I decided to include a looming Gollum.
I decided to use the LEGO version of Lord of the Rings characters after remembering their existence.
Luckily, I found a LEGO Wikia containing images for all of the figures.
Main character Frodo from The Lord of the Rings in LEGO form.
LEGO version of the ring lusting Gollum from The Lord of the Rings.
When extracting the hobbit Frodo’s form to place of The Giving Tree’s cover, I hit a few snags. The magic wand tool was giving my a bit a difficulty due to the varying hues of the background image, so I did what I could with the tool and used the eraser to isolate the rest of Frodo’s form. After adjusting the LEGO sizes and placing them where I desired, I matched the color from the original background and switched to the original background layer to give a clean looking image.
I did the same when replacing the apple with the Ring.
The Ring of desire from The Lord of the Rings
The last step was to replace the title and the author.
I wanted to think of something clever pertaining to The Lord of the Rings while remaining true to the essence of The Giving Tree. With a bit of brainstorming, I settled on The Power Giving Ring. However, I nearly drove myself mad when trying to find a font style that matched the original for the alternate title.
I couldn’t find a closely matching style, so I settled on juice ITC and used Gabriola to write Tolkien. (Again, couldn’t find the font style I wanted.)
And that, my friends, was how The Power Giving Ring was born.
This project is fun and simple, and it is somewhat satisfying to create a mashup split-second clips that nobody can guess! I am going to do my tutorial for the program Audacity.
First you want to import your songs into Audacity. This may actually be the hardest part because Audacity will not import certain songs (I still haven’t figured out why, I think it is something to do with songs that you have bought off iTunes that Audacity will not let you manipulate?) so you may have to browse through until you find some that will import.
After you upload the first song, use the zoom tool to zoom in closer to the track, so that it is easier to highlight a small segment of the track. Using the selection tool, select a piece of the track. You need to make sure that you have selected less than a second’s worth. You can determine this by looking at the Selection Start area at the bottom of the window. If the button is highlighted on Length, then you can make sure that it is less than a second’s worth. As you can see in the picture below, I have selected 00.87 seconds of a track, which is obviously less than a second.
Open a new project, then copy that segment and paste it into the new project. Then repeat the above process for five other songs; be sure to choose the segments from different parts of the song; maybe a part that is just instrumental, maybe a part that has a snippet of voice – whatever you can do to make it challenging! You can have a theme to your project, such as doing songs all by the same band or in the same genre of music, or just go crazy and choose songs from all ends of the spectrum. Either way, people probably won’t be able to guess!
Once you have all of your snippets pasted into the new project window, use the Time Shift Tool (the one that has a line with arrows on both ends) to shift the snippets so that they are all side by side. Then you can play through the track seamlessly, with the clips right next to each other. Once this is done you save the project as an mp3, by selecting Save Project As, and choosing mp3. Then upload to SoundCloud and the project is done! See if anyone guesses. I had one person guess a one or two of my songs but that was it.
I have just completed the “Audio Assignments” section of my free online Digital Storytelling DS106 course and I have learned two very important facts. Having struggled through the creation of a 14 minute radio interview, I now have the utmost respect for the technical wizards who work “behind the scenes” to craft a radio show. Secondly, I have a new-found appreciation for the power and possibilities that Audacity, the free Macintosh, Linux and Windows audio editor and recording application, has to engage students in K-12 classrooms. With its wealth of online resources and support, Audacity should be a standard classroom and student application.
My “Interview/Music Mashup” audio assignment followed the Dickie Goodman interview style. Feeling that it was important to share the powerful ideas and learning that is associated with the DS106 phenomenon, I decided to create an investigative radio interview. I directed 20 probing questions at two “anonymous” DS106 students and they, in turn, answered with relevant snippets from popular songs.
The K-12 Perspective
What have I learned during this exercise that might apply to K-12 students?
First, and foremost, students today are engaged when they use technology to support their learning. The fact that Audacity is a free, open source application (that runs on a variety of operating systems) means that students can install this application on their home computers and work on an audio assignment outside regular school hours.
For example, I’d recommend that students be required to collaborate with partners as they produce audio assignments such as the following:
Social Studies students might create a campfire talk between Radisson and Groseilliers as they discuss exploration and fur trading with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Can you hear the cracking fire, the loon and the wolves howling in the distance?
What would two privates, who are in the front line trenches preparing to go “over the top” during World War I, talk about? Imagine the sound effects of battle that could be added to enhance the realism.
Two students could compare and contrast a poem or novel in a Language Arts class.
Music students might make a recoding of a duet together with an added “Extra Features” section which outlines the learning journey that they went through in creating the musical recording.
Science students might create an audio interview where they ask questions of scientists such as: Archimedes, Marie Curie, Einstein, Euclid, Galileo, Frederick Sanger or Jonas Salk.
Students who are interested in sports, might create an interview where they dissect a recent game and compare and contrast different coaching styles and player performance.
Regardless of the audio assignment chosen, I think that all students should include an “Extra Feature” that outlines what they learned during the activity, what they might do differently (if they were to select this same project again), and suggestions and tips for future students.
As an educator you would not want your students to upload their .mp3 formatted audio assignment to a web server. However, students could still transfer their home-created audio files to a USB memory device and bring them to school where they could be shared on a CD or showcased from the teacher’s computer behind the school’s firewall.
Regardless of the subject-specific learning opportunity presented to students, I can assure readers that using Audacity together with technology to tell a particular story is a powerful and engaging educational process.
The DS106 Perspective For me, this audio assignment opened up an entirely new way of telling a story. True, I have used Audacity in past but I have limited my use to a very simplistic process. For example, in past, I simply recorded my voice and added any additional audio into the single, primary audio track in the Audacity application. However, this assignment challenged me to use multiple tracks for the announcer’s questions, the vocal snippet replies, and the the musical interlude. I even played with a robotic modification of the two student’s responses to preserve their anonymity.
I began by roughing out an interview script where I identified “20 questions” (based on the old radio show of the same name) that I thought might highlight some aspect of the DS106 phenomenon. I then searched YouTube for songs that I though might contain lyrics that would apply to some aspect of the DS106 experience. I must admit that I spent a great deal of time searching for the right music tracks. Furthermore, it is often necessary to listen to the entire song to find the most appropriate lyrics or the section where the audio is clearest. Unfortunately, during this time consuming process, there were many songs that were considered but rejected.
One thing that I would like to see is an efficient way to search for all songs that contain a specific word or phrase. For example, when I was searching for music that would help share with listeners the time commitment that students may invest in DS106, the only song that came to my mind was Jim Croce’s “Time in a bottle”. Although the word “time” was in the title, Jim’s lyrics did not help me portray how busy students can be with this innovative DS106 course. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to efficiently search a comprehensive data base containing all the lyrics to popular songs. If you the reader can suggest a search technique to find possible lyrics and music, I would be very much appreciate if you could share your strategy through a comment at the end of this post.
In past, I would have began this assignment by recoding the first interview question into Audacity and then adding the appropriate musical segment as an answer. I would then continue repeating these two steps, which might span several days, until all 20 questions and answers were mixed to my satisfaction. However, knowing that on subsequent days, I would have difficulty making certain that the audio levels and that my microphone position were in the exact same location, I was concerned that there would be a noticeable difference between questions.
In order to maintain the same audio “balance” between all 20 questions, I decided to record the interview question track all at the same time. I had my script written out and I simply read out each question and left a three second placeholder interval between questions. Once I saved the respective Audacity project file (e.g. “interview-V1.aup”), I then could add in an additional track containing the vocal lyric answer which could be slid along the timeline and tweaked to fit into the respective “placeholder interval”. Knowing how much effort I was putting into this assignment, I made certain to save my “creations” on a regular basis. I used my traditional “version” naming convention and simply increased the “version value” each time I added a new lyric reply to a new question. This process allows me to save filenames as: “interview-V1.aup”, ”interview-V2.aup”, “interview-V3.aup”, etc. Should a “hiccup” occur, I can always go back and retrieve an earlier version to continue my work.
Extra Features
My tip to others who wish to create a Dickie Goodman-style interview using Audacity with musical lyric replies is to pay very close attention to the “sampling rate” of all components. Where possible, it is best if all audio portions can have the same sample sampling rate.
For example, when I started recording my main 20 question track into Audacity, I simply proceeded using Audacity’s default sampling rate which was set at the 44100 Hz level. In Audacity, one can set this sampling rate from a low of 8000 to a high of 96000 Hz. Obviously the quality of the recoding, together with the audio file size, increases as the corresponding Hz value increases. However, when I started acquiring my musical lyric replies, I failed to notice that most of these audio snippets had a slightly higher sampling rate of 48000 Hz. It was only when I was part way though blending these musical replies, that I noticed a particularly familiar snippet seemed to slow down and change in pitch when it was mixed with my primary 20 question track. It was then that I noticed the difference in the sampling rate between my question recording at 44100 Hz and the musical snippet at 48000 Hz. I explored all avenues and could not find a way to reduce the sampling rate on the individual musical replies without distorting the melody. So I continued blending my lowered sampled interview questions with the higher and more precise audio snippets. Once the final mixed interview track was completed at 44100 Hz, I simply re-saved the entire file at the higher 48000 Hz level which preserved the original melody speed and pitch. Unfortunately, this “tweak” sped up and slightly changed the pitch of my interview and any other components that were originally introduced to the mix at the lower 44100 Hz level. Once the remix interview was completed to my satisfaction, I used Audacity to export the project file as an .mp3 file which I uploaded to SoundCloud for sharing.
My recommendation is that you first open the song snippets or any other audio tracks in Audacity and determine the sampling rate that applies to most of the audio components. Once this value is established, start Audacity and change the default sampling rate so that this application will work without “hiccups” because now all your audio components will be utilizing a common sampling rate.
Lastly, but most important. In this musical mashup interview, I have used snippets from the following tunes listed below. In order that I might demonstrate the educational fair use of such music, I have purchased individual tracks for each of these songs on my iTunes card.
In the Mood – Glenn Miller
Magic – Olivia Newton John
You Really Got A Hold On Me – Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
I Heard It Through The Grapevine – Marvin Gaye
The Reverend Mr. Black – The Kingston Trio
Who Let The Dogs Out? – Baha Men
I’m So Excited – The Pointer Sisters
Just My Imagination – The Temptations
Makin’ It Work – Doug and the Slugs
Eight Days a Week – The Beatles
Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? – Chicago
Help – The Beatles
With A Little Help From My Friends – The Beatles
ABC – Glee
Let’s All Sing Like The Birdies Sing – Jay Wilbur & His Metropole Players
I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter – Nat King Cole
That’ll Be The Day – Buddy Holly
I’m Sorry – Brenda Lee
I’m A Believer – The Monkees
Taking Care Of Business – Bachman-Turner Overdrive
We Are The Champions – Queen
My Way – Frank Sinatra
Unfortunately, many of the songs containing the musical snippets may be more familiar to the “more experienced’ listener as opposed to our younger students. However, this fact should in no way diminish the power of using an audio interview to engage students in a powerful, new and exciting way.
