It’s almost a law of nature that anyone who has a pet narrates their daily lives in funny voices, probably to the never ending annoyance of said pet. I do it with my cat and, at least in part to keep from missing her too much, I decide to make a compilation video from clips I’ve recorded of her over the last six years. (Is she really six?? Existential crisis incoming) Honestly, most of the clips are of her eating or grooming herself, but that’s fairly representative of how she spends her time, at least when she’s awake and not off catching a mouse.

I created the intro and outro for the video in Krita but did all the other editing and recording in DaVinci Resolve, which I’m starting to like more and more. While the audio editing capabilities are not quite as versatile as Audacity, it has a very simple and straightforward interface and is much easier to use than the OpenShot video editor. The background music is Twirly Tops by The Green Orbs from the YouTube Studio audio library, and DaVinci Resolve made it very easy to create changes in the dynamics of the audio tracks. The more familiar I get with tools like these the more I am able to focus on the joy of creating rather than the hassle of figuring out how.

For my second mashup assignment, I created a short talking animal segment. Specifically, I took footage of my cat Dinah me0wing and overdubbed various iterations of Marlon Brando’s “Stella!” from A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). More like A Streetcat Named Dinah, am I right?

Initially, I was only going to use Brando, but I ultimately thought it would be funnier and more intertextual if I also included Seinfeld’s homage to the original. In the final version, it sort of ended up as a conversation between the original and the parody.

I used Premiere Pro for this. I downloaded .mp3s from the scenes I needed and isolated the “Stella!”s that I wanted. Ultimately, because Dinah’s meows were short bursts of sound, I had to speed up some of the audio so that it would better fit the brevity of her ‘speech’.

Here’s the result:

You mean I can include my dog? Done. I’ll take any opportunity that allows me to video or take pictures of my pups, so when I saw the Talking Dog Mashup (4 stars), I knew I had to do it. My frenchie, Frankie, doesn’t really bark, so I had to figure out a way to … Continue reading “Did you just sneeze on me?”