Jason Segel is my all time favorite actor/celebrity crush so of course I had to choose him for this grow-up montage. I picked his audition tape for “Freaks and Geeks”, an interview with the cast of “How I Met Your Mother” where he sings with NPH, the Dracula Song from “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”, and one of his scenes from “Bad Teacher”
This assignment required me to show the growth of an actor/actress through their different movie roles. The actress I chose was Julia Roberts because she’s been in so many great movies so I thought it would be fun to reflect on the different roles she’s had over the years.
How I Did It:
I started by looking up a list of Julia Roberts’ films. I then found movie clips from a few of them and downloaded them using a YouTube to MP4 converter. After I had all the movie clips I opened them individually in Movie Maker and trimmed them down to capture the main point in each clip. After that I added a text caption to each telling the title of the movie and the year it was released. The final step was to export the file to my desktop so I could embed it in my blog post.
This week I did 4 assignments totaling 10 stars!
First up, Growing up with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (The assignment is called growing up with Drew Barrymore)
First I looked up all of the movies the twins have been in, already knowing I was going to introduce the video with Full House because it was my favorite show growing up! I found the order and year of all of them which was nice, therefore I chose to start with a clip from the Full House series (1987-1995), then from the show Two of a Kind (1998-1999), the third clip is from Switching Goals (1999), and Lastly I chose a scene from another favorite movie that they were in, New York Minute (2004)
Once I found all the clips, I downloaded them and edited the clips in IMovie on my mac, Mashed them together trying to blend them cohesively so it flowed better, added the title screen and the credit screen then finalized the project and here it is!
If you have been following the career of Will Smith, then you know the tremendous growth of acting chops throughout his career. I started watching him in his more childish comedic roles like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and to his more serious roles like in Seven Pounds. Now, we get to witness him as a father figure on and off screen in movies like Pursuit of Happiness and Earth Bound.
Here’s a link to the Growing Up With assignment.
I tried to keep this video as slim as possible without being too over two minutes. I put clips from most of my favorite Will Smith movies, but if you think I miss a pivotal Will Smith movie then let me know in the comment.
Thank you for stopping by,
Bowties & Skulls. Outro.
lol How suitable for last night’s events. I bet all the you TRUE Miami Heat fans are happy. I will stop sipping my hatorade and applaud Lebron James’ hard work to be a 2-time back to back Champ. He worked hard for his success. Ballin.
Natalie Portman
I didn’t really grow up with her. But audiences were able to watch her grow up in film! Natalie Portman has been acting since the mid/early 1990′s and is still appearing regularly in films today.
For the “Growing Up With” assignment, I was required to mash up clips or pictures from films an actor or actress has been in throughout their life, showing their development as actors. I chose Natalie Portman because she is a personal favorite and has been acting since she was very young. Finding clips of her was surprisingly difficult as there are apparently very man people making fan videos of love songs paired with images and clips of her romantic involvements in movies. I managed to find several though and made sure I was not using clips longer than 30 seconds (same for any audio clips I used, like part of the score for Thor).
This week we had to complete 6 stars worth of Mashup Assignments.
The first assignment I chose was “Growing up with Drew Barrymore.” It is a 4-star assignment and the purpose was to find a real actor/actress that has been in many movies over the course of their life time and to “mash” them together and show growth in the actor/actress over time and different movies. We had two use a minimum of 4 different clips and the video had to be at least 2 minutes long
For my movie, I chose Dakota Fanning. I looked at both IMBd and Wikipedia to find out what movies she had been in. Of course, I’d seen her in a couple movies and new who she was, but I didn’t know all that she was involved with. I found that here roles were very diverse and across the board. I’m not sure if they really show the “growth” that the assignment asks for. But I do think that it shows how talented Dakota is and how she is able to really express herself and fully commit to the character she is portraying.
Dakota has had a very successful career for such a young actress, she was on many TV shows, prior to the start of her movie career at 7 years old. She has also been nominated for any awards.
Here are the movies I chose to play in the mashup:
To make the mashup I downloaded all the clips from youtube using KeepVid and used MPEG StreamClip to cut a couple down. I then uploaded everything into iMovie, added a title and credit slide and added titles to each movie clip. I did some minor adjusting and added a transition slide at the end. I know the first clip from I Am Sam is a bit long. But this was Dakota’s very first movie and perhaps her best. Dakota is very skilled, as you will see in the mashup video. She goes from the daughter of a man who is mentally ill, to an upper east side “snob” to a southern preteen in the 1960s, to a vampire, and then a terminally ill patient. Clearly this girl nows how to be an actress.
Here are a few screenshots of my work in iMovie
I hope you like the film!
Firstly, this assignment can be found at here, and I certainly recommend it because it is a lot of fun.
For my assignment, I used Drew Barrymore, although afterwards I realized I could have chosen someone else, so I hope this doesn’t affect anything, but I had a good time making this project. I used clips from some of her major movies, including E.T., Scream, 50 First Dates, and Music and Lyrics.
Below I will include the clips that I used.
So again, I could have chosen any actor/actress who had been a child star or started their careers early, but I think Drew Barrymore is such a great example, as well as a great actress, with an interesting past. I started the assignment by going onto IMDB to get a fuller picture of the movies she has acted in, which was also very helpful for the timeline aspect of the project. So after I chose the movies that I wanted to use for my mashup, I went and found the clips on YouTube, which I assume I don’t need to explain how to do.
In order to download the videos from YouTube onto my desktop as MP4 files, I went to KeepVid, which is a pretty easy way to do this sort of thing.
As you can see in this photo here, I copied the youtube video link and pasted it in the bar. After this you want to click on the Download button beside the text bar.
After you click the download button, you will see a pop-up box that asks you if you want to run the application, so you need to click on “Run”. The next step, you will see a screen similar to this…
The best thing to do at this stage is to right-click on the Download as MP4 link, which is highlighted in blue, and click on Download Linked File As, and save to wherever, but it’s easiest to save to Desktop.
The next thing you want to do if you wanted to edit stuff out of the various clips, is open up the program MPEG Streamclip. Using this program you can Trim clips, copy them, cut pieces out of them, take out the audio or video from a clip, and all other sorts of fun things.
Abover you see a picture of MPEG Streamclip open on my computer, and I have highlighted the Open Files option under “Files”, which is one way to open up a clip into the program. Another easy way to do this is to just drag a file from your desktop right into the window where you see the five blue dots. From there you can edit the clip by going to edit, where you’ll find numerous options, such as “Trim, Cut, Copy, Select In, Select Out” and others. The ones that I used for my assignment were the Select In, which is how you select a point in the clip that you want to start from, and Select Out, which is how you end the selected clip. One you have a clip selected you can do a few things:
1) Cut the selection out of the clip that you are editing.
2)Trim the clip to include ONLY the selection.
3)Copy the selection.
So now that you have a pretty good idea of what goes on in MPEG streamclip, it will be useful to learn how to export the edited clip. 
Here you see a list of options (although some are grayed out because I am not actually editing anything). The option I used was Export to MPEG-4, which allowed me to export the new, edited clip to my Desktop, which I then imported into iMovie.
This photo above shows you how to import movies from your computer into iMovie. For my project, I did this 4 times since I used 4 clips for the Mashup. As you can see there are two levels, the one on bottom being where the clips import to, and the top representing where the clips for the project go. Once I had each clip imported I dragged them into their appropriate slots up top. One of the major editing things that I did in iMovie was add Fade-Ins and Fade-Outs for the audio to make it flow more smoothly. Below are a few pictures of how I did this..
As you can see next to each option (Fade-In or Fade-Out) there is a little box that says “Manual”. I clicked on this box which allowed me to edit the length of time the audio would either fade in or out, which was useful. It is best to use your own judgement for these types of things, so it really depends what the clip is and how you feel it should sound.
Overall I really enjoyed this assignment because I think that it had a cool idea behind it. In order to really show the progression of Drew Barrymore’s career, and her physical growth, it is necessary to include all of these clips from her movies as a way to illustrate this. I also enjoyed this assignment because it allowed me to experience more video editing, which is challenging but rewarding in of itself.
So after all of this time, it is probably time to show the actual final version of my mashup, so here it is and enjoy!!
Think of an actor who has been in many movies throughout their life. Make a mashup video of clips from some of their most popular movies in order of the correct timeline that they came out, and try to document the story of the growth of the actor with their changing roles. This video can be no less than 4 clips and must be at least 2 minutes long.
