I had a ton of fun with this. I knew it was an assignment I wanted to work on right away when I read the description, but I wasn’t sure what character to try and tackle. I quickly realized that finding uniform sound clips to fit into a coherent, specific message would be difficult for the circumstances, so I went a different route. After playing around with Audacity’s various tools and effects, I realized that a simple combination of lowered pitch and added echo creates a rather convincing Darth Vader effect. Naturally, I went the humor route and had fun doing so. It’s a silly sort of thing, but I think it’s at least worth a chuckle. The Imperial March theme music is just icing on the cake.
I thought this assignment was really funny, and I knew I wanted to do it, but it was hard for me to decide (1) what movie to do and (2) what the truthful title would be. I looked through some examples, but I couldn’t think of a movie where I could play with the title. However, every movie I thought of a movie I came up with, at least to me, funny tag lines. I decided to go down that route.
I used Planes because I always thought the original tagline (From the world above Cars) was funny, and I also really didn’t like the movie Cars and don’t understand why Pixar chose to make a sequel. So, I decided to play off those feelings and make a silly little tagline for this movie.
Authors Note: If anyone actually did like Cars, I apologize. However, I recommend you watch Ratatouille because it is the best Pixar movie and will make you forget about Cars completely.
Oh, wow, this project was easily the hardest of the assigned. Mozilla has some excellent tools to introduce novices to the world of coding and digital creation, but the platforms can be tricky and a bit buggy depending on the computer you’re using.
While I was re-mixing Alan’s vacation on the Mozilla Popcorn interface, the program would often freeze, and I couldn’t carry on editing (this happened to me in X-Ray Goggles, as well, in the above link when I was re-writing the app review). I’d have to re-load the media for the section I was working on into the platform, or–worse–I’d have to re-load the page and start all over (thankfully, this only happened once)! I also didn’t realize until halfway through the assignment that you could directly access Wikipedia and Google Maps through the side panel rather than having to constantly paste a link into the “Get Media!” search bar. This realization arriving sooner could have saved me a lot of needless, careful screen-capping and tinypic uploading for direct URLs!
All of this frustration elongated the whole ordeal about an hour, and I took a much needed break mid-assignment to watch The Giverwith my family. Side note: I’ve never read the book (horrible, I know, because so many people consider it a classic!), but the movie was quite well acted and emotionally moving! I recommend it!
Despite the less-than-smooth process, I had fun picking material to add into the video! Here’s a run-down of the most memorable additions and my reasoning behind their choices:
IMAGE ON COMPUTER SCREEN: CORGI HATES CABBAGE CLIP
You may have seen this .gif floating around the Internet, especially if you follow memes like I do. I picked up the habit in high school thanks to I Can Haz a Cheeseburger?, and as they say, old habits die hard. Though, I keep track of memes via Tumblr now more than other websites.
Poor thing.
Anyway, however I found this, and regardless of whether or not this is your first time seeing this, I do not know why that poor corgi hates cabbage so much. As soon as Alan said his student posted a “crazy” example, my mind immediately flashed to this .gif, because look at that unexplained fury. What did the cabbage do to the dog? What kind of monster does the dog think that cabbage is?!
This is what noobtheloser on Tumblr seems to think happened, but if you stumble upon the truth of this corgi’s fury in the vast expanse of the Internet, PLEASE let me know. I’m genuinely curious.
After perusing some of the YouTube comments and translating Japanese as best I can via Google, it seems that some dogs just act extremely possessive over food and get angry when pulled away from said food, so, basically, that dog seriously loves that vegetable.
“OLD SCHOOL” BACKGROUND MUSIC: “AFRO CIRCUS”
Is Madagascar3 (2012) old enough to qualify for “old school?” Oh well–I’m using it regardless! I didn’t want to choose a musical artist whose value and talent could be contested (The Police? The Ramones? SO MANY CHOICES AND DIFFERENT MUSIC TASTES TO CONSIDER), and I didn’t want to inadvertently insult Alan by implying he would have certain artists in his collection versus others, so I just chose another favorite meme of mine: “Polka Dot Afro Circus” from the movie Madagascar 3.
The song is silly, fun, annoying, and ridiculously catchy, and best of all, no one–hopefully–will argue about whether it’s good or not! They’ll just watch my remix of the video and either chuckle or go crazy as the SoundCloud club remix of the song plays in the background.
VACATION LOCATION: CAWKER CITY, KANSAS
Since Neverland (see the opening pop-up text!) isn’t a feasible vacation location option, I decided to go the total opposite of the mythical land: super simple and close to home. The U.S.A. is known for interesting Midwest spots claiming to have the largest/tallest/etc. of this-or-that, and I always remember one particular item I read about: the largest ball of twine. I remember being fascinated at the thought of what that must look like, so the thing has always stuck in my brain. Therefore, I did a quick Google search and discovered its location is Cawker City, Kansas, and its OFFICIAL title is “the largest community-rolled ball of twine.”
The video at the end of the remixed movie by Bill Cash on YouTube says the ball “smells funny,” but, hey, it’s still kinda cool looking, right?
VACATION FINANCING: NOVELTY R2D2 PHONE
I personally am more of a Star Trek fan rather than Star Wars, but I’m well aware of how intense the fans of Star Wars–heck, both Star franchises–are! The Darth Vader costume from the original film apparently grabbed more than 250,000 dollars at auction! If Alan found the right buyer and right Star Wars item, he could make some nice money to fund his trip to Cawker City.
I thought that I would first search novelty figurines, because those collectors are intense.
Largest Dr. Who Dalek collection. Whoa.
After searching through Star Wars novelty items, however, I stumbled upon this wonderful R2D2 phone. It seems to fetch a couple of hundred dollars, and that could buy at least a few tanks of gas for the trip to Kansas!
RANDOM THING ALAN PACKED: PERSONALIZED STAR TREK AUTOGRAPH BOOK AND BAG
I tried to think of something funny that a person could bring on vacation–especially vacationing to a sleepy, Midwestern town–and decided on an autograph book. After all, you never know who you might meet while traveling, right? Never mind the extra weight or space!
After looking through some Google Images of autograph books (most of them were more than a century old or Disney-fied), I was displeased with the variety of aesthetic choices. Then, after Googling something along the lines of “autograph book unique,” this gem popped up.
Apparently, it’s a Star Trek: Original Series personalized bag and autograph book for/from Comic-Con. Uhm, how awesome is that? Not only will Alan have the opportunity to grab celebrities’ signatures, but he will do so with Captain Kirk and Spock!
I’d rock these accessories.
To end, I found the aforementioned video of Bill visiting the Ball of Twine and used it to represent Alan’s experience. While not grand or exotic, Cawker City, Kansas could at least be relaxing, and that’s the point of a vacation, after all!
If you were following my blog during the month of October, you are familiar with my group’s radio show. Since the assignment was due shortly before Halloween (the show actually premiered the eve of Halloween, which was perfect!), us group members decided to have a spooky theme. We decided two of us would narrate scary stories and two or three would talk about haunted places in Virginia. Each of us also was required to create a commercial and bumper to include in the show.
I chose to narrate the Creepypasta story The Rake, and for my commercial, I created a parody of a PSA. In the parody, I urged those who are prone to mischief on Halloween and/or Devil’s Night to stay away from Ouija Boards. I recorded my voice narrating a super serious warning and underlaid it with piano loops from Garageband. The resulting effect was supposed to echo the old The More You Know PSAs (The included example is from the TV show Scrubs, because Scrubs is awesome).
When I was browsing for more video assignment options, I stumbled upon one that suggested you create a PSA. It could be “as serious…or as silly” as I wanted, so I decided this would be a perfect way to continue my Ouija Board PSA from the previous post! Oddly enough, however, I didn’t want to star in this video or get anyone to film the lines for me, so I decided not to go the More You Know route.
Instead, I planned the video to appear as a set of memories overlaid with flashback voices that narrate/hint at the story of a young adult messing around with Ouija Boards at peers’ urging and then suffering the consequences.
First things first: I had to find royalty free or creative commons footage. I looked around for stock footage, and GettyImages as well as Shutterstock offered quite a nice library, but everything cost money that I currently don’t have. I was seriously frustrated, because there were some genuinely creepy cemetery scenes offered by those sites!
I debated on taking my camera and exploring the nearby Confederate cemetery for material, but I was a bit too creeped out by that idea.
Out of curiosity, I decided to see if YouTube offered any royalty free stock footage, and lo’ and behold, I found several users that offered such resources! Of course, I gave them credit at the end of my video and linked to them at the end of this post.
I found some excellent overhead, cloud, time-lapse footage, various Halloween-themed footage, and several cemetery shots. After doing a mental happy dance at my good fortunate and the gift of technology that kept me from having to crawl around a probably-haunted-cemetery at night time, I started to edit the video together. I downloaded the clips after converting them to .mp4s thanks to this site.
It took a lot of work to cut out different areas of the original footage. I first broke apart the already-short narrative into shorter scenes: the urging of the protagonist to play with Ouija Boards and goof around in creepy areas, the actual act of using the Board by candlelight, and then the paranormal consequences.
I paid close attention to details such as lighting/angle to capture the dreamy, snapshot mood I was aiming for in my overall video, and I even added a few filters to different scenes to enhance the emotion I wanted emphasized for that particular shot (for example, the cemetery has a filter called “Old World” that echoes the concept of the dead and the past).
The only voice overs in this video would be the voices of the main character’s friends talking through their experience, so all other context was established via inserted title and transition slides. I carefully timed and chose the designs of each slide to be consistent with the straightforward, PSA shell but also effective with a spooky twist such as red lettering or jarring fade ins/fade outs.
Next, I added sound. I found a royalty free, free-to-download music site and searched their horror genre, which had some very nice material. I selected a piece called “Possession” to drive home the idea that a spirit can come forth from the Board and wreak havoc in a human’s life and mind. I then added it to the video.
I was at work when it came time to record the friends’ voices. Since I really wanted to accomplish this project on my own, I didn’t ask for any actors to help me record. Rather, in between appointments, I casually slipped into a consultation room and privately recorded myself reciting a simple script so that I didn’t look insane out in the reception area muttering to myself about Ouija Boards.
iMovie has a built-in recording option, so I went ahead and took advantage of that shortcut rather than messed around in Garageband, which took a few trials and errors but was quite simple once I figured out the controls.
I lowered my voice slightly to imitate male voices as well as kept my own tone to reflect females: a mixed group of Ouija Board participants. The script was interspersed with lots of “dudes” and “likes” to give it an authentic, irresponsible, young adult feel. I also allowed myself to do the voices in one take to again increase the conversational, off-the-cuff style.
To make sure the voice wasn’t too loud (I recorded it close to my microphone, so the track was automatically louder), I turned up the music a bit higher than originally intended and turned down the voice over’s volume. This took three or four watch-throughs and some tinkering, but the levels were finally acceptable.
Actually a LOT more fun than it looks…
I then stepped back out into the reception area of my work and discovered an appointment had been waiting for me while I recorded a track about Ouija Boards. Whoops. Thankfully, she was a few minutes early, anyway, and very understanding.
Lastly, I wanted a scream. After browsing freesounds.org, I found a digitally altered scream with some added effects that I actually liked more than a plain scream! I added in the screech right after the NOT ANYMORE frame and over the few seconds of suspenseful, terrifying blackness.
After adding on end credits, I uploaded the piece to Vimeo! The flickering light effect followed by the skull face is particularly effective, if I do say so myself! (I had to reverse the Reaper footage so that his skeleton face would be one of the first things you saw!)
The sponsoring organization and hashtag (trying to make this PSA for modern audiences, y’know!) are made up, by the way, and if either are currently in use, I had no idea and would be interested to see what people are saying about the trends!
Let me know if my PSA spooks you into not messing with Ouija Boards, or, let me know if you’ve ever had a noteworthy Ouija Board experience!
A video assignment that asks you were is somewhere you have always dreamed of going? Do a video montage of images/ and or video of a place that you would like to go, and add music that is native to that area or just something fun.
I have never traveled anywhere outside of the United States, and have dreamed of going so many places. I have two housemates who are both from Countries over in Europe, and to hear them talk about Europe and another country and how different it is amazes me. I have these images in my head of what all these countries look like, some based on images I have seen, and I think some I have just come up with on my own. When I think about another country it is so difficult to realize how real it is, because I have never even come close to seeing what it looks like, what the people are like, what the economy is based around.
Everything seems so far off, and untouchable. I love to listen to my housemates talk on the phone with family members and speak in a different language that sounds like gibberish to me. I just find it incredible that they can switch between languages like that and I often times find myself asking them silly questions like what language do you think in, dream in…? Or what is the landscape where you are from, the weather, what are the houses made out of. I am so desperate to experience what seems like another world to me.
Although I will continue to dream about all the places I wish to travel to, if I had to decide on one that I could actually go to and see for myself it would be Italy. I am amazed at how there roads are waterways, I have never even seen something like that, and the beauty of there architecture is breathtaking. The language that they speak sounds so beautiful and peaceful, I have so many images in my head about what Italy would be like. What the people are like, the pasta, the history of the Country. I have so many questions and so little answers, and until I get the chance to go all I have are pictures and Italian songs.
I created this video using iMovie, a program that comes with Mac’s. The program is very simple, all I had to do was save the images I wanted and then import them into iMovie. From there it could not be any simpler. I choose a theme that I wanted for my video and then started dragging the images into place. I then found a song called Caruso Italian Love Song, on Youtube, and using a Youtube to MP3 converter I downloaded it into my iTunes. My iTunes is already connected to iMovie, so once it was in iTunes, I just had to drag it down below the images, and then my video was complete.
The week in doggies! All thanks to a conversation on Twitter. An emergent DS106 assignment ‘Remix (in a dog appropriate manner) a Bond movie title and create a poster’. I learnt more about Photoshop from trying to do a good job of these ‘silly posters’ than I have in a long time.
Starring: Daphne as Miss Doggy Galore, Gifadog as Colin Bond, Spike as E. Cowfield, Abby as the Digital Diva and Chewy as the werewolf puppy
‘Children and Daphne’ by Jim Groom ’Bones are forever’ by Viv Rolfe ‘Reeborn’ and ‘Cop Pup’ by Ron L the other posters by the DS106 Shrink.
Yes, I know the last 2 do not fit the Bond theme. The translation machine (me!) from Twitter to Google Plus was faulty and the assignment got re-interpreted there but Chewy is too cute not to include here.
Who knows what else might get remixed. May be we can start #posterfight to complement #giffight ?
You have to crawl. My daughter is learning to crawl and her daddy is away on military leave so I’ve been trying my best to capture the moment when she really gets it. I’ve got tons of film of her almost crawling so I decided to put a little bit of it to good use for my DS 106 visual assignment, Play by Play.
Relative to the Foley assignment, this was a snap. I used iMovie again. I uploaded my video clip and removed the original audio (which included lots of “you can do it”s). I then used the in-program recording option to record my commentary. I tried to keep the commentary light, but with a jokingly serious tone so it would come across as silly. After all, learning to crawl is just sorta silly. Luckily my subject doesn’t move too fast so I was able to keep up with the footage and record the audio in one take. Then I went to the web to find some background audio that was light and fun to add to the clip. “Somewhere Sunny (ver 2)” fit the bill so I dragged it into my clip. I added an intro credit and an end credit using the in-program options. iMovie was really easy to use! I’d give more tips if I had them but I really just did a lot of dragging and dropping! The one key was, of course, to remove the original audio. I did that by separating, then deleting it. Here’s a shot of my work in progress:
So here you have it folks, never-before-seen footage of the 2014 Baby Crawl Championships.
We are designing a new #DS106 Assignment and wanted to experiment with the tool. Here was the brief we discussed on the twitter:
Play the PechaGif once only and record video Think of a topic for a presentation Improvise. Record and audio track of the ‘presentation’ Use the animated gifs you recorded as your slides to talk from! Have fun!
The worst part of it is that I have been plagues with techno glitches today. It has taken forever to get the video on YT. I tried to upload to Tumblr and failed. I recorded the voiceover and it did not record. Blah!
All that said it should not take long to do.
I set the delay in PechaGif to 5 seconds. Promised myself I would use the first take – no cheating. Used Quicktime Player to capture video. Imported to iMovie. Created the voiceover as an improvisation exercise – the idea was think of a topic and wing it using the animated gifs that appeared as your slides. Todd Conway made an awesome example. John Johnston kicked us off with this example, where he used the tool to explain the tool! Get him all meta meta :)
Awesome tool to engage our creative improvisational brain!
“Wake up! Use Pechagif the best tool there is for a DS106 assignment” says John. Thank you for making it, John. I do not think it is silly at all.
Those of us who understand the psychology of creativity know that the type of exercise this tool forces on us is a desirable difficulty if we want to keep our creative muscles toned. Improvisation is not joke, says CNN.
The secret to my beautiful hair? The dinglehopper. Seriously, it works so well!!
Don’t know what a dinglehopper is? Well here is an advertisement for it that you may see on a normal basis:
Tricked you! You thought it’d be a real advertisement. Nope, believe it or not I made this masterpiece by myself, with a headache on the side. For my final project (in which the story will be told in a blog post to come within the next 24 hours), we have to incorporate different pieces of media to tell a story and part of my story requires there to be an advertisement for a dinglehopper. If you haven’t been able to tell yet, the dinglehopper in the mermaid world is actually a fork in this world. However, they believe that it is used for hair instead of food. What silly cartoons they are!
Since this was not a video assignment, the first thing I did was create an assignment for it, which you can see here. I decided to make this one 4 stars. I know that is may seem like a lot, but you really have to find a bunch of different clips throughout a movie in order to create something. It takes a lot of planning and it also takes strong execution, which made me think that 4 stars was completely appropriate. Now that I had the guidelines in place it was time to start working on it.
There were a lot of different clips that I used in the creation of this ad because there are 3 aspects in the movie where the dinglehopper is used or mentioned. The first clip is interesting, because it actually is a video from this video, but the audio of this one. Yes that is right, the first video has talking in Thai. Now you may be asking yourself, Karissa why would you do something like that? Well I had the same video and audio, but for starters the video had subtitles which bothered me. But secondly when I was using Windows Movie Maker, everything was all fine and dandy. However, as soon as I went into mp4 the file would freeze for 3 seconds, the 3 seconds where the dinglehopper was mentioned. So, I ended up having to use a video, and then taking the audio and adding it into my Audacity file (which I will explain later).
Next 3 clips that I used were all from the same video, which made things nice for me in the editing world. I have scuttle announcing it, and Ariel anxiously wanting to know what it is, then followed by Scuttle’s explanation of how to use it. His explanation just makes me laugh every time because it is something that I feel like would actually be said in an infomercial. That part was just simple cutting the clips down to where I wanted them and putting them in the right order. Children’s play.
The final new clip that I used was this one of Ariel using it to brush her hair. It is a classic scene and is a great demonstration of people using the product, which is another common thing in infomercials.
But what is more common than a voice over? I’m not going to lie, I looked into Billy Mays videos to see what I could work with, but then I lost my Internet connection. While working in Windows Movie Maker, I have a bunch of imported media from other projects I have worked on including this one about a Snuggie informercial. I decided to listen to it and see what I could get, and I added in audio aspects from this video. The upbeat music that is playing throughout the commercial is the music featured at the end of this video (just copied and pasted) and I decided to add in Ariel calling it a dinglehopper instead of the narrator calling it a snuggie! That really was just basic Audacity stuff, which then allowed me to add in the audio from the first clip when the time came to it.
So I simply imported the audio in and I had a video! However, the ending seemed a bit anti-climatic. So I showed the details of all of the different things the dinglehopper features and what it can do for you! Typical infomercial ending antics. I made that in Power Point and saved the slide as a JPEG and was good to go!
I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you tune in later to see what my final project has in store!
One of the assignments I picked was Where are they now? Just ’cause I couldn’t resist picking one of my favorite casts and totally morphing them by picking their futures! For this, I used iMovie and Google images to my fullll advantage! I picked one of my favorite movies, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days but definitely got silly with it. I use the billboard theme to make it fun and the song Good Riddance to make it somewhat nostalgic. Basically, Andie (Kate Hudson) dumped Ben (Matthew McConaughey), and although she is still reallly hot, while getting her dream job, he lost a bunch of weight and became obsessive. He’s been arrested 4 times for stalking her, funny how he turned into the obsessive one! Jeannie (Annie Parisse) became a total fashion mogul, and now travels all over the world but she still keeps in really good touch with Andie, her BFF. Tony (Adam Goldberg) ended up owning the company that he, Ben and Thayer worked for, as well as coming out of the closet! His boyfriend’s name is Rodolfo; they own two houses and a poodle named Elenore. Michele (Kathryn Hanh) remains funny as ever! Except now she shares her humor with her husband, who never takes her for granted like the douches in the movie. Finally, Thayer!…Quit his job because it wasn’t the same to him with Benjamin and he became a rent-a-cop, mostly to help Ben stalk Andie but keep his cover about it.
This assignment was made possible by iMovie, which I used to add in all the pictures and create the entire show. This was a nice 2 ?’s!
