To complete this assignment, we were to use a photo editing software to mash up our top 3 holiday celebrations. I chose to mash up 4th of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. To do this, I used a picture of a Christmas tree, a turkey, and fireworks. I then brought the photos together using the Photoshop mix app. Once I inserted the pictures, I edited a few of them so that the fireworks would blend behind the Christmas tree. I then added a background color to tie all of the images together. I chose to use my character Deidra as inspiration in creating this assignment.
3 of Deidra’s favorite holidays to celebrate is 4th of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. These are her favorite holidays because her family and friends usually come together to celebrate with each other. 4th of July is the main event during the summer time where they all get together, play games, cook out, and enjoy each other’s company. As it gets darker, Deidra’s family gathers outside to watch the fireworks. This is her favorite part! Her uncle Bobby is always in charge of fireworks and he usually gets the huge ones and sets them off for her family.
For thanksgiving, Deidra’s family always goes to her grandmother’s house for dinner. While there, Deidra usually helps prepare the food in the kitchen along with her mother, aunts, and grandmother. One year, Deidra was “in charge” of making the turkey. When she went to grab the turkey out of the box, instead of finding one that was ready to be put in the oven, she found a live one that started chasing her around the house. Now every year, Deidra’s family brings up that memory and then they watch the video of her being chased around the house. After thanksgiving dinner, the family rests up and prepares for an evening of shopping.
The next day, after everyone has finished shopping and had leftovers for lunch, Deidra’s family goes out to pick a Christmas tree. Once they found the one that they like, they chop it down and take it back to her grandmother’s house to decorate. When decorating, they listen to Christmas music and hang ornaments, lights, and other decorations (some of which goes back to before Deidra was born). When they finish decorating, they sit back and watch Christmas movies. Later on Christmas Eve, the family returns to Deidra’s grandmother’s house for a gingerbread house competition. They end the night driving around looking at Christmas light displays.
For my tutorial this week, I’m choosing to create one for this mashup assignment, where you’re tasked to add an inappropriate laugh track to a movie scene to transform its tone. I did this assignment already today, which can be seen here.
Firstly, you need to think of which movie you’d like to use! I chose a horror movie and perhaps you wan’t to chose one like that, horror, drama, some other serious movie, as long as it isn’t a comedy movie itself. That way you can transform the media, be creative! Then you need to search for a scene of your movie on YouTube. Make sure you’ve downloaded the 4K video downloader. Then simply copy the url of the YouTube clip you’ve selected.
Then open the 4K video downloader app and click the ‘Paste Link’ button with the little green plus scene. Simply wait for the video to parse then select the quality, click ‘Download’ and your video will download as seen below!
Next you’ll need your laugh track audio! Here you need to visit freesound.org and search for a laugh track or laughing sound that you like. Here you need to make an account on the site or sign into your account and then click the yellow ‘Download’ button, the wait for your download to complete!
For the editing portion of this assignment, I used Adobe Premiere Elements 15. You can obtain easily a free trial version of this program (which will have a watermark on in when you upload a video, I believe, though I’m sure your professor would be understanding of that). Otherwise you can get a student discount and buy the program if you’re interested in video editing! I have a purchased copy of the program and its a powerful video editing tool, so this will be a short tutorial on the basics for it to get this assignment completed. Open your Premiere program and start a new project. Before you start, make sure you’re in ‘Expert’ mode to allow you full control of editing, by clicking the ‘Expert’ tab in the upper middle of the screen. Then you’ll want to import your video clip and your laugh track audio. To do this go to ‘Add Media’ and then ‘File and Folders’. Then you can select the file from your computer to add to the project. You can do this twice to add both of your media.
After adding the media, you should see both the audio and the video clip in the ‘Project Assets’ Section. Now you have both of those ready!
First, you’ll want to add an intro title to your project. Text and titles can be found in the right side of the menu with the little ‘T’ icon on the sidebar, under text that reads ‘ADD’. Clicking on the ‘T’ icon should bring you to a selection of titles you can chose from. Personally I like to chose a simple one as I find the complex ones somewhat cheesy.
Then, simply click the title you want to add and drag it into the timeline, in the ‘Video 1’ section. A menu should popup on the right that allows you to edit the text of the title in the ‘Text’ attribute, as shown here.
Next, you’ll want to add your movie clip. To add it simply click and drag it from the ‘Project Assets’ Section into the timeline below right after your title.
Now, you’ll want to figure out where you want your first laugh track to be located in the clip. Once you’ve chosen the location, simply drag your laugh track audio into the ‘Voice’ section (or really any audio section you’d like) in that location.
In my case, my laugh track was a bit too long for what I wanted to I trimmed it down. Here’s how you can trim something in Premiere Elements. Drag the little cursor bar to the portion of the video you want to cut. Then, make sure you’ve clicked on only the section of media you want to remove (audio, video, etc) so you don’t also cut the video along with the audio. Then click the little scissors icon on the red cursor bar. This will cut the clip, separating it at the cursors location.
Then you can right click the section of it you want to remove and click ‘Delete’ from the menu there. I used this to trim my laugh track audio to be as short as I wanted it to be.
Next you’ll want to duplicate this laugh track in other locations. To do this you’ll want to copy the part of it you’ve already placed in the timeline. This will copy the cuts and edits you’ve made to that audio portion as well. To copy the laugh track right click it and select ‘Copy’.
Then, find the next location in your movie clip you want to add the laugh track to and move your red cursor bar to that location. Press ctrl+v (or command+v on Mac) to paste the clip in the location of the cursor.
You’ll want to copy and paste your laugh track in every location you want a laugh effect, so repeat that step as many times as you need until you have all your laughs added. You can see all of mine are added below.
If you want to lower the volume on some of your laugh track you can do the following steps. First make sure the whole audio track is showing by clicking the little white down arrow next to ‘Voice’ or whatever audio channel you’re working on.
Now, do you see that little yellow bar in the middle of the audio clip? That represents your decibel level, now at the default for the clip. To lower the volume simply click that little yellow bar and gently drag it downwards a few decibels. You can drag it upwards to increase the volume, similarly.
Next, you’ll want to add closing credits to your video. These can be found in the same text/titles section as the intro title was found, by clicking on the ‘T’ icon on the right of the screen. I recommend the ‘Classic Titles’ > ‘General’ tab for this, to fine the ‘Default Roll’ title, because that one gives you simple scrolling credits.
Simply drag your selected credits text into the timeline after your movie clip.
In the Default Roll for example you can type your text directly into the main video screen in the center.
To move the text if it gets off center you need to look at the option under the Adjustments panel to see the ‘Mode’ selection. Here you can select the pointer tool that looks like a mouse, which allows you to move the text anywhere on the screen you want to move it to.
You can select the Mode ‘T’ for text to start editing text again. Note that on this Default Roll there’s a lot of ‘Add text here’s that are off screen so you’ll have to use arrow keys to move your cursor down there and backspace all of the ‘Add text here’s you don’t need. Now you can play your rolling credits!
Note: Be sure to credit the freesound.org user and the movie you used!
Personally, my rolling credits moved to fast to be read so I made them longer. You can do this by clicking on the edge of the credits in the timeline and dragging it further to the right, very simply.
Now you’re finished editing and ready to export your video! Simply go to ‘File’ then ‘Export and share’.
You can most likely use the settings from ‘Quick Export’, they should be fine! Just name your video and chose a download destination (it will default to saving your video as a .mp4 I believe). Click ‘Save’ to save the video to your computer.
Now all that’s left is uploading the video to YouTube, which I assume you know how to do at this point in the course! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and I hope it could help you in some way!
My three favorite holidays. For this assignment, we had to mash up our three favorite holidays in 1 pic and for me, it’s Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the 4th of July.
For this assignment, we had to take 2 actors and mash them together into one photo and try to make sure that they look like they belong in their setting. Well Mr. DiCaprio here and the actress to whom I don’t know her name but was the only actress that I could find after about 3 searches who fit the theme, definitely looked like they belong together. I spent about 45 min trying to edit this photo w/the Microsoft photo app and it just didn’t work so instead of posting the mess, I’m posting the version that doesn’t look horrible…maybe she’s the good voice, trying to talk him out of his next move…
For this assignment (4 stars), I decided to put my character, Kate, into a scene. I found a super hero character online and then used the “Photoshop Mix” website to cut her out. I thought that this character was a good representation of what Kate would like. I then found a picture of a raccoon stuck and scaling the side of the building. This was a previous story I worked on for Kate, so I decided to provide a visual image of it. I then placed ‘Kate’ in the image and positioned and adjusted her size to appear like she was flying to him. There was a woman in the background looking at the raccoon and I used Kate to cover her up. This image was definitely a representation of her everyday life, saving animals all over the world. I really like how the two pictures came together and I was able to use my character for this assignment.
For this assignment (2 stars), I decided to mashup the nike slogan and the under armor logo. These are two big competitors, so I wanted to put them together. I started by finding the Under Armor logo and then cut it out on the “Photoshop Mix” app. I then found the nike “just do it” slogan. I wanted to find it in black to match the logo so it would stand out against the white background. I kept the background white because that is how you often see the nike and under armor logos. I think the two really fit well together and it is odd to see the two “rivals” together.
I twisted the Mashing Friends and Emojis assignment for 4 stars to incorporate my character. I used the image of him that I had created back during design week & found two emojis that I thought looked like the face he was making. I used canva for this assignment & screenshotted the emojis off of my phone. Let me know which one you think matches his expression better!!
For this assignment I took a new music video by Little Mix, Woman Like Me, took away the audio and added the Clair De Lune piano piece. I though their music video, which had both modern outfits and an old-fashion/classical locations and scenes.
Originally the video would not play to copyright groups, then it did, and it might stop again. So I made another one with the same song but with Lucifer by SHINee:
For this assignment I had to take a song and trailer and combine them in a way that seemed fluent. I ended up picking a scene from the Walking Dead, keeping with the theme from my previous assignment. The song I selected was Let The Bodies Hit The Floor, by Drowning Pool. In the scene the community becomes over run by zombies and the main characters have to fight their way through the hundreds of zombies. The song fits perfectly with the scene as hundreds of zombie bodies are hitting the floor and I tried cutting it to fit with the scenes actions. I used OpenShot Video editor to edit the scene and song together and I think it turned out very well. I could actually see this song being played over this scene which is basically what this assignment was all about.
For the last star in my Audio Assignments I decided to complete Going Halfsies. I used Guile’s Theme from Street Fighter 2 as my song of choice. The first half of my mash up is the original song while the second half is Smooth McGroove’s acapella version. The spot where I joined the two songs sounds a little rough but I couldn’t find a way to fix it. I really love this song, it goes with pretty much any action scene in any movie!
