I had a lot of fun with this assignment! I looked up some videos on YouTube on how to do “picture in picture” in final cut pro. It was pretty straightforward from there.
The clips I used are linked here and here. I was looking at everyone’s posts so far this week, and I wanted to include what some of my work looked like while cutting up these two clips.
The final product is not perfect, I was unsure how to remove the Miley Cyrus audio, but surprisingly, it fits very well! I hope you have a laugh at this assignment!
Or, statements and plot lines that could only exist and be made possible in the whacky, wonderful world of ds106!
I already had a bit of a Star Trek fangirl moment this week while working on assignments, so as I was perusing the assignment bank for more options, I saw this description and figured–why not? Never enough Captain Kirk, Bones, and Spock, if you ask me!
Upon viewing the original piece, I got quite a laugh. Whether or not you enjoyed Miley Cyrus’s and Robin Thicke’s 2013 Video Music Awards performance, you have to acknowledge that it did generate a lot of media frenzy and controversy. The Enterprise‘s crew’s reactions seemed to perfectly fit the mixed emotions of the modern, American public: confused, shocked, horrified, and curious. Kirk’s flinching and Sulu’s “oh my” gawk were made even more hysterical as Miley’s hit single played softly in the background.
I let this assignment sit overnight, because I wanted to think of material fitting enough to replace that performance while still inciting such a reaction from Kirk, Spock, and friends. I initially wanted to use more celebrity fails or embarrassing moments, but Justin Bieber’s fails were too subtle or short to use in the video, and some people genuinely admire and enjoy Kanye West. I didn’t want to use any “singing fails,” either, because as a singer myself, I realize that no matter how experienced or talented the performer, there are just some off-days!
I was really struggling with what to use as a clip when it dawned on me: carry on my meme theme (see first link in this post for more meme fun!). One of my favorite, funny memes of the past few years is Troll 2, which has earned its place in the YouTube “Movies/Acting That’s So Bad It’s Good” Hall of (In)Fame(y). I remember watching this video with my guy friends (they seemed to enjoy Internet and meme culture more than my fellow females) in high school and constantly running around quoting that oh-so-dramatic ending: oh my gooooood! Heck, even as an adult in college, I still re-act to some situations quoting Troll 2 and rejoice when someone catches the reference!
Now, Alan/CogDog provided a very helpful mini-tutorial within his original assignment post on how to go about this project–Picture in/for Picture in iMovie. After a quick check into Apple’s Support page, I found a great, short video explaining how to complete the process and easily downloaded the YouTube videos before uploading them into iMovie.
That was about as easy as it got.
I spent the next two hours infuriatingly trying to clip enough of Troll 2 to cover Miley’s foam-finger-humping and twerking. The issue with the original video is that there are literal half-second shots of the screen, so I had to cut down clips to miniscule, ridiculous sizes to replace old footage. I even used some artistic liberty and cut out a few shots that seemed superfluous (this was not an easy task for me, mind you–I felt badly for cutting out my beloved Spock’s face) in order to reduce the amount of overlaying/inserting that I had to do.
Unfortunately, because iMovie isn’t advanced enough to give me the EXTREMELY precise, millisecond cuts I needed, the frame(s) of Troll 2 occasionally appear over Kirk or another crew member’s face before flashing to and fitting on the Enterprise screen. Alas, this is a price I’m willing to pay as the remix artist, because I’d rather see snippets of Troll 2 over actors’ faces than random milliseconds of Miley Cyrus’s tongue.
The most annoying part of this project, though, was the audio. The original video creator morphed together the original Star Trek sound and the VMA performance audio, which meant that even when I detached the audio from the clip, I couldn’t take apart the layers. I couldn’t separate Kirk’s commands from Miley’s catchy choruses.
Frustrated and wishing I had more advanced audio tools (Logic or ProTools, anyone?), I decided I would turn up Troll 2‘s audio and duck/reduce the volume of the underlying track. This meant it would be harder to hear the characters, but most of the time, their expressions spoke for themselves!
I also experimented with audio fade-ins and fade-outs, and at one point, when Cyrus’s song is turned up full blast in the original video, I had to mute the original track all together.
At the end, though, the sound is redeemed as I repeated/looped the “oh my gooood!” scream to last until the final moment. The effect the exclamation appears to have–driving the crew mad–is quite entertaining, and I laughed quite a bit once the impatience and frustration faded!
This is far from perfect and clean cut, which was an excellent practice for me to control and curb my perfectionism, but enjoy Cap’n Kirk Reacting to Troll 2.
In the original video you can see a weird performance on a screen watched by Captain Kirk and his crew. The idea is to displace the content of the screen with own content. I chose early pictures of myself, which I already have worked on for a different video assignment. I remember that I thought the video may be too dramatic, but it was still ok for me.
However, looking at my pictures with the eyes of Captain Kirk and his crew made them full of despair, what finally even gripped the crew and its spaceship.
On the screenshot you can see how I’ve managed to put my pictures on the Enterprise screen. I simply put clips above the screen scenes. In addition I had to fit them into the screen, which meant to make them smaller and move them. I also used parts of the sound of my former assignment, where you can hear me speaking a sad poem I found in the internet. I thought this goes fine with the fact that to the end the crew put their hands over their ears.
A deeper meaning of my mashup version may be that our intellect works very different from our emotions, which can cause extensive tension between them. It is also true that our senses can be cracked by our emotions.
“Internet: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship ds106. Its multi-year mission: to explore strange new remixes; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no digital story has gone before…”
But can the crew of the Enterprise survive something worse than the Klingons, Romulans, and Khan combined?
This is a new ds106 assignment, freshly minted just for this production, Captain Kirk Watches...
This came about in that wacky way when you are looking for YouTube videos and something curious pops up on the side. I have zero idea why I clicked to watch the remix of Captain Kirk watches Miley Cyrus performance especially since I had taken a vow never to know about Miley Cyrus. Alas, your principles may need to be cast off in the name of ds106 Art (damnit).
It’s well done as a remix, as the images of the spectacle pasted on the screen, but the expressions of the Enterprise crew blend well to the spectacle, but it gets a little tricky where the music is mixed in.
I wondered what could be more vile to put on the screen?
Importing into iMovie, it was a matter of using the PIcture in Picture insert method to place the clips over the screens of Miley Cyrus. There is a bit of a skewness from the tilt of the original, but I can live with it.
I set the view options (bottom slide) to stretch out the view the most so I could pin pint the in and out points (dragging the end clips of the Barney overlay). I used the audio inspector on the Barney clips to boost the sound (music equalizer), and sometime to add fade in / fade out points.
The longer sequence where Wheels in the Bus was playing took an extra twist- I imported the clip a the end of the star trek sequence, then used the Clip menu to detach the audio, and dragged that under the Star trek scene where I wanted to hear the music (then deleting the video part).
(click for full size)
When I dragged the clips in for Picture in Picture, I muted those clips since I had te audio track. There was some trickiness in trying to line up the video, and its not perfect, but who is?
This seemed to make for a great remix exercise- who might you put on the screen that would terrify and blow up the Enteprise? What could be worse than Barney?
Just when you thought the Enterprise has seen every bizarre creature of the universe– they encounter THIS! Will they have enough warp speed to escape the grips! Can Scotty add enough dilithium crystals to power up the phasers? Can Spock logically figure a way out? Can… Kirk… outsmart this race?
Download this scary remix of Star Trek watching Miley Cyrus and replace that twerking with something really awful. It will take some editing that allows you to insert video (in iMovie enable advanced features for Picture in Picture).
“Internet: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship ds106. Its multi-year mission: to explore strange new remixes; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no digital story has gone before…”
