Mashups? Ummm, yes, please. As a hungry hungry pop culture consumer, I love seeing my favorites all smooshed up together. For this video assignment, I put together the Downton Abbey theme and Beyonce’s music video for 711.

I loved Downton Abbey when it was on, and I have to admit that just hearing the theme that plays during the opening credits pulls at my heartstrings. However, I think it’s important to remember that Downton was not without some serious flaws. Namely its lack of diversity. Sure, one could argue that the setting of the period piece saga necessitated an entirely white cast (Ok, so they had one black character. One time. Just the one). Still, in a whole seven seasons, the show never had the courage to even address the classism and racism that laid the foundation for the core characters to go about enjoying their oh-so-privileged lives. I’m not trying to dismiss the entertainment value of the show, but I do think it’s important to always keep these things in mind.

Anyways, what better excuse to watch more Beyonce videos than to overlay the Downton theme with the most prominent black female entertainer of our day? Lady Crawley would be turning in her grave.

Here’s the original Beyonce video:

In part, I selected the Downton theme because its tempo is relatively quick for the classical music that I’m familiar with. I thought that this would make it fit more seamlessly with a pop music video, and for the most part I was correct. 711 has a lot of tempo changes so it’s not a perfect fit, but there are moments where the two seem in sync. I’m happy with the result, and I hope you enjoy watching it!

The Process: 

If you have iMovie, then this assignment should be fairly straightforward. First, download the audio you want to use. I used a youtube to mp3 converter online. Enter in the URL for the video you’re using, and click ‘Convert.’ Then click ‘Download.’

Next, download the video you’re overlaying the audio with. I used QuickTime for this. Go to ‘File,’ and select ‘New Screen Recording.’ Drag the box to the section of the screen you want to record (around the video presumably) and begin. Turn off the annotations so you don’t get annoying pop-ups in your recording!

After you’ve finished recording, save the clip to your computer. Open iMovie, and select ‘Create’ from the top bar. Choose ‘No Theme.’

Next, select ‘Import’ from the same top menu bar. Find your video, select it, and click ‘Import Selected.’

Drag the orange sliders to the section of your video you want to use for the final project.

Click inside the orange box you just created, and drag it to your timeline.

Now, go back to ‘Import,’ and import your audio clip the same way as before. Mine was longer than the video, so I used the orange sliders to only add that amount of time to the video.

Just like before, drag down your audio to the timeline, on top of your video clip so that it starts at the same time. If you cut off your audio in the above step, you’re going to want to fade it out so that it sounds ok. See the tiny gray circle at the far right of the audio track? Slide over the icon in a few seconds, and it will fade out:

If you’re happy with your video and the sound, click ‘Share’ from the top menu and choose the platform you wish to share it with. I selected ‘YouTube,’ and followed the pop-up windows to log in to my YouTube account and upload.

This will take a while. Check its progress by clicking the clock icon in the top right:

Once you’re done, check out your video on YouTube!