This mashup is for Assignment 771 and was a no-brainer because I’m a tremendous fan of the film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. Ever heard of it?? Of course, it had to come out in 1984, which is relevant as it plays off of George Orwell’s novel but in a weird, obtuse way. Ellen Barkin is just one of the many actors I could have picked for this Actor Transformation mashup from Buckaroo Bansai–there’s Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd and others. Look closely and you’ll see them in the two clips I chose. I picked the scenes from the movie to meet the terms of this assignment which is to watch the actor change roles and character–to see what they’re like in the beginning of their career compared to now. I also thought you could get some of the flavor of this quirky, cult film which as a sci-fi action cult film is as different as it can get from Barkin’s later film in 2011, Another Happy Day. Happy Day is a dark comedy drama and I found clips in different translations, the last one being in the original English. I hope that doesn’t through you off–just watch Barkin’s expressions, how she’s matured as an actor, and where she is in her life.

The process was relatively straightforward. I found the two movies as far apart in Barkin’s career and genre in her body of work then looked for clips that I could download. I decided on multiple clips even though it would make the end-product longer, just to give the viewer more of an understanding of how Barkin has evolved over time. I decided one 10-second clip per film wouldn’t do the assignment justice. After cutting each clip down as tightly as possible to focus on just her facial expressions from five total clips, then I created titles for each film in PowerPoint and added them to the OpenShot Video Editor project. I exported the final product to my hard drive, then uploaded it to Vimeo so I could embed the file in my blog. E voila! We have a finished product below.

I am using this assignment for my mashup. Instead of a character, I decided to to Taylor Swift album covers over the years. I didn’t include any of the extended edition album covers, but I think the 12 I put do a good job of showing how much she has changed and her album cover style over the years. I made this with Microsoft Powerpoint and used the transition effects and exported it as a video onto YouTube.

I chose to do the superhuman in everyday life mashup. For my mashup I put the Hulk in a photo with the Geography department in the Monroe Fountain on campus. I am a Geography major and I must admit I get in a hulk like mindset when I am hangry.

I chose a picture to set as the background and set the scene. I was able to find a photo from the Geography department and set it as my background. Then I found a photo of the Hulk that I wanted to use and saved it to my computer. I was able to clip the background out so that I was just left with him. Once I was able to get it to my liking, I set the Geog department photo as the background and inserted the Hulk over top so that I was left with this wonderful masterpiece.

The assignment was to mash up a movie scene with the best song of that movie but I decided to put my own spin on it. For the final project Cel and I are focusing on ocean conservation and I wanted to find a way to tie this assignment into the theme of our class and Bob Ross as well.

I chose “Only the Ocean” by Jack Johnson as the song to overlay over Bob Ross’s painting “Dark and Stormy”. Art can come in many forms as well. I chose to use Only the Ocean because I wanted to have something more lighthearted to show off the love people can have for the ocean. A lot of what we were focusing on in our final project is ocean degradation, which is not nearly as lighthearted or nice to talk about. In order to get people to care more about what is happening to the ocean, we have to showcase its beauty and its importance and I can’t think of a better way to show the beauty of the ocean in any way other than art. Since our theme of the class is Bob Ross and all his paintings are beautiful I had to chose one. I also chose a song by Jack Johnson because of his sustainability efforts he is a part of and promotes.

I found the sheet music for it and overlayed it on top of Bob Ross’s paintings. I made the sheet music more transparent to allow the painting to fully show.

“Mashup two (or more!) songs that are similar to each other, by either the same or different artist(s). Do your best to show the similarities—edit parts of the songs next to each other. If it’s possible to do this without making it sound terrible, try to overlay the songs at parts to highlight how much they sound alike.”

Similar Songs

Well, I did this assignment. I spent many many long hours recording different layers of these songs and trying to mix them together. Am I very proud of what I did? Yeah. Not cause I think it’s very good, a lot of the transitions could be better, and the whole thing could be better, but because there are some parts I like and I really tried my hardest.

To be fair, I did do a song mash-up a few years ago that turned out really well, and every other mash-up I do is compared to that high standard, but still.

To make this, I recorded different layers of both songs so I could pick apart the seams a little and put them back how I wanted. Youtube had most of them, but I had to find a program to isolate the lyrics of ‘filth’ myself.

I put it all in my editing method of choice, good old iMove, and played around until I got the thing you can hear now.

In the future, I probably would have chosen two songs that are more similar or at least have better transition points. Hey, maybe me in the future can come back and remix this assignment with new and improved editing skills. Until then, I think I’ll stick with the originals of these songs.

If you want to hear what might be my peak music editing skills, Take a Breezeblock is right here.

This assignment was relatively straightforward. I was asked to create a mashup of two video game art covers, and I decided to pick two contrasting genres as I intended to make something that is light-hearted into a darker tale.

For the two games, I chose the new Kirby game: Kirby and the Forgotten Land and one of my favorite games: The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. The original covers are shown below.

I still, unfortunately, have not gotten the hang of figuring out how to make background layers transparent… I think that’s the terminology. What I have gotten the hang of, however, is finding some user-intuitive program to solve the issue. This assignment was brought to you by Pixlr X, yes, that Photo Editor!

I found that if you used the cutting tool, you could alter the background, in this case, a plain white one, to become transparent. Making the final product was easy, but I would like to try to improve some of the touch-ups, and I think this would create an excellent assignment to try and perfect in the future.

I hope everyone is having a nice day. We’re in the home stretch of the semester!!! Summer is almost here!

“Make your own song using other lyrics. Complete this assignment by combining the lyrics from at least 5 different songs in order to make a song with flowing lyrics. This song should be at least 2 minutes long.”

Making a Song

I know, I know, this isn’t two minutes long. It’s about half that, but I have a good reason. This assignment says at least five songs, and I used clips from nearly fifteen different songs, which is an equitable amount of work I’d say.

So I started with the poem, obviously. This is actually a poem that I wrote years ago in high school as a mash-up of a bunch of different songs. I immediately thought of it when I saw this assignment and thought that using it was very much in the vein of remixes and mash-ups. Something old and something borrowed made into something new.

I recorded all of the bits of the songs and put them in iMove, cutting them all down to just the relevant line.

I used google docs to make the visuals, just changing the color of the text line by line. The assignment didn’t mention visuals, however, the poem is a little more abstract, the songs do not mesh super well and the words can be difficult to pick out, and I thought having the visual of the poem would help bring it all together. And I think it did just that.

The Assignment

For Mash Thyself, Before Ye Trash Thyself I had to combine three things I had made previously together. Since I would need the videos for my final project together I combined them. Think of this like the trailer for my final project. The point was it was supposed to be like an ASU requirement ad was playing but some strange interference was coming through. I don’t know if I did it well or not, but I think it was okay. It was worth 3.5 stars.

How I made it

Since I already had the videos I simply made it by cutting them apart and slicing them together in OpenShot. Other than that there wasn’t really much behind the making of this project.

Past Projects used: Recovered, The ASU Wants You, and Haunted.

The Assignment

For Mash Thyself, Before Ye Trash Thyself I had to combine three things I had made previously together. Since I would need the videos for my final project together I combined them. Think of this like the trailer for my final project. The point was it was supposed to be like an ASU requirement ad was playing but some strange interference was coming through. I don’t know if I did it well or not, but I think it was okay. It was worth 3.5 stars.

How I made it

Since I already had the videos I simply made it by cutting them apart and slicing them together in OpenShot. Other than that there wasn’t really much behind the making of this project.

Past Projects used: Recovered, The ASU Wants You, and Haunted.