The forth video assignment I did was called selfie story for 4.5 stars. The directions instructed you to

Narrate a story using selfies. It can be any story you’d like (crazy night out, movie night with friends, just the average day, etc). You can use a combination of selfie clips or pictures, it is all up to you. Create a 1-2 minute video montage of all the selfies to tell the story. Try adding music or effects to keep it interesting.

I decided to narrate my best friend Heather and I’s hiking trip. Which ended up being a lot more adventurous then an average hiking trip. As we had no cell service and therefore had no directions to get there. So along the way we stopped at apple stands, glass blowing shops, and little shops along the way to explore. Finally I had enough cell service to screen shot the directions to Old Rag and then off we went. However this was definitely a more strenuous hike then we were use to. It also was a lot later by now and by the time we came back down the sun had set and we were hiking in pitch black. I put the pictures together on my phone using Flipagram and then put All Star by Smash Mouth as the background music. Using the tools provided in the Flipagram app I added captions to some of the pictures in order to narrate the story a little better. To upload it to my blog I had to upload it onto WordPress from my phone. I tried emailing it but it wouldn’t let me and so I couldn’t get it to upload on Vimeo and Facebook wouldn’t let me upload it because of a possibility of not having rights to the content. Which I’m guessing is the song because the pictures are mine.

I’m not too sure of this assignment myself, but with four-and-a-half stars at stake as of press time, I really need to speed things up for the big finish this time next week. So, for today’s task, I have to “strip or mute the music out of the modern music video,” and “layer the classical music on top.” To make a long story short, it’s Music Appreciation Day at DS106! Again, I might be grasping for straws, depending on what can properly be described as “modern” and what can not. However, I’ve got one week to turn this grading period around for the better, so it’s time for me to show – and tell – exactly how I’m going to do just that.

This was a rather simplistic challenge, all things considered. For one thing, finding the necessary video and song to edit in time were both relatively easy, once you did a quick YouTube search of them. Specifically, I went with the music video for Fall Out Boy’s hit, “Uma Thurman,” and the finale of the “William Tell Overture,” which is also known as the theme to the Lone Ranger franchise. After that, I used a downloading site, SaveClipBro.com, to download one in WMV format, so I could edit it more effectively on Windows Live Movie Maker, and the other in MP3 format, so I could use Audacity to see what could be done to trim the fat, if it needed to be trimmed at all.

From there, it was all over but the credits sequences, referencing the traditional music video credits on the bottom-left corner of the screen for the opener, and using the same cinematic roll-up as before as my closer. As an added bonus, I decided to have the song start again, from the beginning, right as Fall Out Boy’s “assistant for a day” entered a tank to run over a truck.

The biggest problem of all, however, was which site I ultimately decided to upload to. While my use of the “William Tell Overture” finale was blocked in some countries – but not in the U.S. – according to YouTube, the fact that I used the entirety of one of the Universal Music Group’s videos in my entry was all it took to receive a copyright strike. My Vimeo account, on the other hand, was able to get my entry up and running, half an hour after I uploaded it onto their site.

While little effort was needed on my part, it was still one of the better experiences I’ve had at this point in the semester. I can only hope that things turn out just as well for me in the next seven days, as they have been in the last seven.

Animal Dance Off: Find any song and mash up a video of some animals dancing. Try to get the animals moving to the beat. (4 stars).

For this assignment, I was to find an animal dancing and add music to it. I used Justin Bieber’s Sorry song, and a video of a cute Chihuahau puppy dancing. I converted both of these into mp3 and mp4 using Fltvo, respectively, in order to put them into my iMovie. I inserted them both, and then turned down the volume in the puppy video so the song would be amplified. I tried to make it seem like the puppy was dancing to the music in my video. I inserted a title page and a credits page using iMovie. It really is a great editing software, and you can see I use it for all my assignments that involve video.

This was a fun assignment, but I had a hard time finding a video of an animal dancing. A lot of the videos on YouTube were compilations, meaning they had a lot of videos of animals dancing into one, but the individual ones were only a few seconds long! Once I was finished editing using iMovie, I then uploaded it to YouTube:

—SALTY SKINN