The assignment was Classical-Modern mashup. After searching for a video that won’t get blocked for copyright issues I landed on a music video by Justin Timberlake. I then chose the song Mozart Symphony #40 as the Classical piece. It was pretty tricky timing the song and video so that it could make some sort of sense, but I think it works pretty well. I give this assignment 2 stars Hopefully the video isn’t blocked!

classical modern mashup from Daniel Valdez on Vimeo.

I did this assignment for one of my assignments this week. We had to pick our favorite athlete and make a highlight reel for them. Last week I did the Sports Mashup assignment where I did a music mash up of different sports plays so this was very similar. I don’t really have a favorite athlete just a lot that I like, so I went with Aaron Rodgers. He’s Probably the best Quarterback in the NFL right now (sorry Pats fans). I used a few different videos I found on YouTube to make this one. There were a lot of good plays to choose from, but I cut it down to tn so the video wouldn’t be too long. I wanted to pick a song that went along with the plays so I picked Sabotage by The Beastie Boys. This is the staple song for people doing awesome and epic things so I thought it fit perfectly. I got the song from Amazon Prime using my handy dandy Prime subscription. I downloaded the file and used Windows Movie Maker to edit it and add the credits and intro.

I always enjoy the mashup video projects, so I decided to try the classical mashup assignment.  I chose Sia’s new music video The Greatest as my visual content.  Since the tone of the videos is more dire (as it is a tribute to the Orlando victims) I chose to use a more dramatic classical piece, Oh Fortuna (which also had a similar length of time).  I downloaded the entirety of the Sia video using File2HD.

I then removed the audio of the Sia video in iMovie and layered the audio from Oh Fortuna.  The result was surprisingly good.  Many of the musical hits match with visual elements in a very complimentary fashion.  I uploaded the video to YouTube, but I’m not certain if the video is playable in the United States (due to the automatic detection of Sia’s visual content), but it appears to be available in Australia if one uses the Hola chrome plugin.

The Why So Serious assignment asked me to take a serious part of a movie, and overlay it with comedy audio. So I did just that, mixing the Bobadook and Seinfeld.

For those who don’t know, The Bobadook is an Australian horror movie that got a lot of critical acclaim along with some attention in the United States. I took the trailer for that movie and put the Seinfeld theme song over top of it. I thought of what an iconic horror movie was (Bobadook), and what a iconic comedy was (Seinfeld), and mashed them together.

For this assignment I decided to record myself doing one of my favorite activities, hiking. We decided to hike Old Rag, a trail out West. For my video I wanted to show a little bit of everything, so I recorded video pretty often just to get a good amount of footage to pick from. I then used Windows Movie Maker to edit the video. It looked real choppy at first, but then I added some transition effects, which I think worked nicely. I think the transition effect I chose worked well with the changes in the video; it helped the video look smoother. I then chose this one song that’s been stuck in my head called Shoegaze by Alabama Shakes to play in the video. The reason I give this assignment four stars is because getting the actual footage was a real challenge (climbing wet boulders while holding a phone isn’t the best idea), and also editing the video to where the footage didn’t just look like a bunch of stuff mashed together. I mean, it still kind of does, but it was a lot worse before.

I loved the idea of making a serious movie funny, so I took this assignment and ran with it.  I began by selecting my two scenes to mashup.  For my serious scene I chose the reentry clip from Gravity (one of my favorite movies).  Then I chose the proton pack scene from Ghostbusters as my funny audio clip. I downloaded these clips from YouTube, entered them in CyberLink PowerDirector, muted the Gravity scene, and overlaid the audio from the Ghostbusters scene.  I edited the order of some of the shots from Gravity to make the audio mesh better, and the result was pretty solid.  It does a fair job of demonstrating how important audio is for creating tone, and how two jarringly different pieces can come together in a pretty hilarious manner.  The final product is available below for your viewing pleasure.